Theme
Evil
13 philosophers, 5 traditions
What is evil, where does it come from, and how should we respond to it? Neoplatonists, Christian, Islamic and Buddhist thinkers, and modern Europeans gave very different answers.
What is evil, and where does it come from? For the Neoplatonist Plotinus, evil arose from matter, which lacks all form and so all goodness. His successors disagreed. Proclus gave evil only a parasitic existence, as the unintended by-product of actions aimed at some good. Augustine, who had once accepted the Manichaean belief in an evil substance, came to hold that everything that exists is good in its degree, and that evil is only the lack or corruption of good. Boethius drew a consolation from this: the wicked are powerless and punish themselves.
Islamic philosophers also treated evil as a privation. Avicenna held that God wills evil only accidentally, as the unavoidable consequence of the good he wills, and Mulla Sadra made existence the ground of all value and evil its absence. In India Śāntideva asked how to meet those who harm us, and argued that, since they are driven by passions they cannot control, anger at them rests on a mistake.
Leibniz argued that a good, all-powerful and all-knowing God must have created the best of all possible worlds, a claim Voltaire mocked in Candide. After the Nazi crimes, Hannah Arendt found in Adolf Eichmann not a monster but a thoughtless functionary, and called his evil “banal”. Philosophers still debate whether the evil in the world makes it unreasonable to believe in God, and whether we would do better to give up the concept of evil altogether and describe terrible acts in plainer moral terms.
Through time
3rd century CE
Plotinus
Matter is the primary cause of evil in the world, because it is a complete privation of form and so wholly without good. Being non-being, it cannot act by itself; it is the precondition for evil, which appears above all as wickedness in the soul.
4th century CE
Augustine
There is no evil substance, as the Manichaeans claimed: everything that exists is good in its degree, and evil is a privation or corruption of good. Against Plotinus, even formless matter is not evil. Moral evil is an evil will, and the question of what causes an evil will has no answer.
Drew on Plotinus
5th century CE
Proclus
Evil has no existence of its own, only a parasitic one. Like a failure that no agent intends, it arises as an incidental by-product of actions aimed at some good, and so is in a way uncaused. He rejected Plotinus’ identification of evil with matter.
Drew on and argued against Plotinus
6th century CE
Boethius
Evil is no thing at all, only a lack of existence. So the wicked do not really prosper but are powerless, and their wickedness is its own punishment: in doing evil they stop being fully human and sink to the level of lower animals.
Drew on Proclus
8th century CE
Śāntideva
Those who harm us are not in control of themselves: emotional reactions overpower them and drive them to acts that damage others and themselves. So anger at wrongdoers rests on a mistake, and the fitting response is the wish to free them from that reactivity and confusion.
11th century
Avicenna
Evil is non-existence or privation. God does not will it for its own sake, but he does will it accidentally, as the necessary consequence of the good that he wills.
Drew on Plotinus
Omar Khayyam
God, the Necessary Existent, creates contingent beings essentially and the contrary relations among them only accidentally, so the evil that follows from those relations is not His intent. The good of creating such beings vastly outweighs that evil; withholding it would be far worse.
Drew on Avicenna
About 500 years later
17th century
Mulla Sadra
Existence is pure goodness and the ground of all value, and evil is its absence. Deficiencies and privations are secondary, attaching to existence at its lower degrees, while God, who is pure existence and pure goodness, spreads that goodness through the cosmos.
Drew on Avicenna
Anne Conway
Evil is a falling away from God’s perfection, and no creature can lose its goodness entirely. The pain that sin brings is purgative, not merely punitive, restoring creatures towards godlikeness, so hell cannot be eternal and all will in the end be saved.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Despite its horrors, this is the best of all possible worlds. If God is all-powerful, all-knowing and good, and freely chose this world from among other possible ones, a better world would imply some failing in God, which is impossible.
18th century
Ottobah Cugoano
Slavery is theft of liberty, and its guilt is not confined to those who trade or own slaves: a whole nation that tolerates it by doing nothing shares responsibility for it.
20th century
Margarete Susman
After the Shoah, suffering cannot be justified by fitting it into a larger plan. Like the Book of Job, Susman refused that kind of explanation of human loss.
Hannah Arendt
At Adolf Eichmann’s trial she saw not a monster but a man of extraordinary shallowness, whose deeds came from thoughtlessness: an inability to see anything from another’s point of view. This “banality of evil” described the doer’s character and motives, and did not lessen his responsibility.
Drew on Augustine
Sources
- Todd Calder, The Concept of Evil, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Michael Tooley, The Problem of Evil, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy