Three Views on the Character of those who do Evil:
3 Categories of Evil-doers
I. Monsters
II. The Vicious
III. Ordinary People: The Banality of Evil Thesis
I. Monsters
They
are missing something that is characteristically human. They have some defect
such as:
Lack of empathy
Lack of moral
inhibitions
Extreme
sadism
& love of cruelty or
power
They
are internally driven to do evil. They will seek out occasions for it.
Example:
sociopaths
II. The Vicious
"It is implausible to attribute the great preponderance of evil actions to uncharacteristic episodes in otherwise blameless lives…it is implausible to suppose that when people cause evil, they usually act out of character, as implausible as it is to attribute most evil actions to the conscious malignant designs of moral monsters. . . Much of the evil that jeopardizes human aspirations to lead good lives is caused by characteristic but unchosen actions of human beings. These actions are the results of various vices. And people cause evil when they act naturally and spontaneously, without much thought or effort, in accordance with the vices that have achieved dominance in their characters."
Conditions of unintentionally vicious character
1. The Weak-willed: In some situations we find agents who intend to act in accordance with what they rightly recognize as the requirements of rationality and morality, but the execution of their intentions is flawed or blocked because of their understandable vices.
2. The occasionally-malevolent: In other situations we find people who do have evil intentions but who are not normally driven by these intentions: they arise in moments of stress or temptation.
What people are evil? What character traits would we call evil?
Settled dispositions to act in certain ways in certain situations [such as] selfishness, cruelty, envy, malice, jealousy cowardice, and self-deception are some example of evil-producing dispositions. . .These character traits are moral vices
We don’t usually call traits vices unless they result in harming someone else and the harm has to be either heinous or large scale e.g. greed may be a vice but it’s not evil to be greedy unless one’s greed leads one to refuse to feed a starving child.
We can divide these into:
1. Character or moral vices
2. Intellectual vices
Both kinds lead to evil behavior, but we can locate them in different places in our psyches.
1. Character or moral vices
Traditional Moral Vices: The Seven Deadly Sins:
Greed and Gluttony (and other forms of selfishness)
(and other forms of selfishness—see Ego Problems below)
conformity & obedience; cowardice
Others:
o
Too much ego: selfishness, arrogance, a sense of entitlemento Too little ego:
§ The need to do evil to draw attention to oneself, to prove that one exists.
§ The need to show that one has power over another
vengefulness
v callousness, indifference, hardheartedness
v dehumanizing
v
distancing
Intellectual vices
uncritical acceptance of the idea that ends justify means
III. Ordinary People: the banality of evil
Wrongdoers are not moral monsters nor are they necessarily have tragically vicious character. They are ordinary good people like us who got unlucky enough to be in situations that overcame or suppressed their goodness in some fashion.On this thesis, there is nothing remarkable about the character of wrong-doers. A psychological screening (if accurate ones existed that could show vices) would not show anything that would lead us to believe that such people were predisposed to do wrong: no character flaws such as moral monsters and the vicious wrong-doers possess.
This does not mean that their characters do not play a role in doing wrong: of course they do. It just means that there is nothing different about the characters of wrong-doers that would allow us to predict who is likely to do wrong and who isn't.
Whether one does wrong or not is then almost entirely a matter of the circumstances in which one finds oneself.
We too might have put Jews into ovens had we had the miserable ill-luck to be born in Nazi Germany
“We can imagine that frequently the inner difference will be very small, a tiny tilting of the balance of thought and feeling. And in some cases, this difference may be made not so much by some extra degree of moral strength at all, but by some feature of the circumstances over which the agent does not have full control: the absence of a supremely-tempting object, the presence of some unusual pressure or temptation. Aristotle does urge us, in assessing such cases, to consider how the agent’s disposition stands to the usual case. If she yields to a pressure that most good people would withstand, we judge her harshly. If she yields to extreme circumstantial pressures, we are asked for forgiveness and some indulgence of judgment. But Aristotle does not as us to simply forget what the person has in fact done. The action is there and it makes things morally different. Many of us would do something shameful if pressed hard enough; and yet the few who have the bad luck to be so pressed will be judged for their acts, while the rest of us will not. On the other hand, a person who forms bad thoughts and wishes but never carries them into action for want of an occasion will be judged harshly, to be sure, but not nearly as harshly as the person who actually does these acts.
Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire p. 364