Dispositional Accounts of Evil Personhood

Abstract

Dispositional accounts of evil personhood are vulnerable to two objections. First, they allow for the possibility of blameless evil persons who have done nothing wrong. Second, in light of the Milgram experiments, they threaten to imply that a large proportion of us are evil. This chapter explores a variety of more sophisticated versions of the dispositional account that might avoid these problems. One such account is offered by Haybron, who claims that evil persons are bad in every respect. This is implausible. Instead we should conclude that evil persons are strongly and highly-fixedly disposed to perform evil actions when in conditions that favour their autonomy. An evil person is someone who is markedly likely to do evil when he is allowed to do what he wants to do, and whom we cannot easily change into a good person by using everyday techniques such as moral reasoning.