Political Evil: A Response to Alford

Abstract

Fred Alford has written an important essay addressing the problem of evil or the organization of For too long, empirical psychologists and social scientists had shunned this problem as value-laden and unscientific and hence outside the purview of objective research. The calamities of our century should have disabused social scientists of this preconception; as it happened, however, their impact tended to be limited to the moral sensibilities of some researchers, that is, to a private sphere of sentiments segregated from professional pursuits. In the meantime, positivist empiricism has come under siege from a number of quarters-including a postempiricist philosophy of science which insists on the need for frameworks of inquiry which cannot neatly be screened from moral and existential judgments. As a result, moral or ethical questions of human life have again entered the human sciences on a broad front, restoring to these disciplines their native richness and complexity of texture. Accordingly, instead of being restricted to private antechambers, the agonies and debacles of our age have returned as legitimate topics of inquiry and discussion thereby bringing into focus again the age-old problem of evil. I want to applaud Alford for recognizing the centrality of the topic and for centerstaging it in his essay although I cannot entirely endorse his manner of doing so. Basically, my disagreement with him revolves around the difference between a psychological or psychologizing approach and a more strongly political or polis-centered perspective (where the latter does not simply mean an exclusion of psychological considerations). Alford starts his essay by distinguishing between two approaches in political psychology to the problem of evil: One approach which he terms the