Evil Person Research Articles

Evil and moral detachment: further reflections on The Mirror Thesis

A commonly accepted claim by philosophers investigating the nature of evil is that the evil person is, in some way, the mirror image of the moral saint. In this paper I will defend a new version of this thesis. I will argue that both the moral saint and the morally evil person are characterized by a lack of conflict between moral and non-moral concerns. However, while the saint achieves this unity through a reconciliation of the two, the evil person does so by eliminating moral concerns from her character.

A Koasati Supernatural Being

A Koasati Supernatural Being Geoffrey Kimball 1. Introduction The Koasati,1 always a small group, have never attracted as much interest as the major peoples of the Southeast–the Creek, the Choctaw, and the Cherokee. Their traditional, pre-Christian ideas were never documented, and are now long-forgotten. However, some understanding of these ideas persisted among the oldest generation living in the 1980s. Before the Koasati adopted Christianity, they did not have what one would call a theistic religion, i.e., they did not have a pantheon of gods. Special honor was paid to the sun, to the moon, to corn, beans, and mulberries, and there were dances held regularly that were felt to have beneficent effects on the people, but there was no worship, per se, of any deity. There was a supernatural power, hollilá, which existed everywhere and was of itself morally neutral, i.e., it could occur both in good and evil forms. For example, there was little practical difference between a doctor (alikcí ) and a sorcerer (atholló ), except that the former used supernatural power to help people and the latter used it to harm them. In the mental map of the world held by Indians of long ago (athommacó:ba), there were a number of beings who were not part of the normal human or animal worlds, but rather belonged to the supernatural world. Because they were neither “gods” nor anything considered worthy of worship, knowledge of them survived the coming of Christianity in the way that traditional religious practices, such as the Green Corn Dance (cashókti bítka), one of the primary yearly rituals of the Koasati, did not. One of these supernatural beings was the Ilhoscobá. 2. The Ilhoscobá The Koasati do not give an English name to this being; however, the word can be translated easily. The word ilhó:si is the agentive noun of the verb ilhó:sin, ‘to be lost in the woods; to forget’.2 The word cobá means ‘great one; big one’, so the compound ilhos-coba (with regular vowel shortening before a consonant cluster) means ‘Great-One-Lost-in-the-Woods’. Martha John (1908–1996) dictated the following short text in 1982 describing this being: Ilhoscobák a:ti-ilhosí:citǫ.3 Great-One-Lost-in-the-Woods made people get lost in the woods. Ilanawíhlíhcok, yomáhlik ilhó:si:fo:kok, ilhoscobáp naksó:n haccá:lit. People used to hunt, and when people going about got lost in the woods Great-One-Lost-in-the-Woods was standing somewhere. Ilhó:si:k, má:lon haytanáhkat ołá:citǫ. 5 Whenever they got lost in the woods, they turned around and went back to the same place. Má á:ti kánkok haccá:litǫ. That evil person was standing [there]. Mó:tohok kammí:cáhpik fáyli:fó:kon, askáhkaton ittohayó. 10 Thereupon, when he had done this enough and he left off, they got out of the forest. Kámmi:p, imí:safa ilá:citǫ. This being so, they came [back] to their homes. One can draw certain conclusions from the style of the text itself. First, the text is in the style that I have called “plain narrative” (Kimball 1991:571–72), and called a:łihilká by the Koasati. The fact that it is not a literary narrative (cokfa:łihilká), a genre in which John was highly proficient (Kimball 2010:42), indicates that John did not consider the Ilhoscobá to be a literary character. This is unlike the similarly-named A:tipacobá ‘Great-One-Who-Eats-Human-Beings’ or ‘Elephant’, which only occurs in literary narrative. The content of the text offers certain clues as to what sort of entity the Koasati conceived the Ilhoscobá to be. In line 7, it is called má á:ti kánko ‘that evil person’. Thus, one can deduce that, when the Ilhoscobá was seen, it had the form of a human being. Other evil supernaturals could take human form, for example, the Clawed Witches (Kimball 2010:116–24), who would appear as human women before taking their true shapes as monsters with long hair, long claws, and long pendulous breasts which they threw over their shoulders...

MODEL KEPRIBADIAN ISLAMMELALUI PENDEKATAN PSIKOSUFISTIK

Through psycho-Sufi approach that emphasizes the taste (dzawqiyah) and purification processes (tazkiyah al-nafs), the Islamic personality leads to the formation of the human mind. Model of Personality in psychosufistic is more focused on self-cleaning (tazkiyah al-nafs) of sin, so that more clean from sin and evil person the better the personality. Certainly does not stop there, but until the filling themselves with good conduct and felt themselves to be spiritual majesty and love of God

Securities lending as part of responsible and risk-averse asset management

After reading the popular press it would seem crystal clear: securities lending is the personification of evil and should be eradicated at any cost. However, this does not do justice to this securities finance instrument which fulfils an important role in financial markets. In addition, beneficial owners sometimes have doubts whether the returns outweigh the risks and if the role of responsible investor can be reconciled with securities lending. This paper starts with a short introduction to securities lending and the risks associated with the activity. It provides some food for thought on securities lending and responsible equity ownership and the risks inherent in the product and ends with some lessons learned that are essential for a successful lending programme.

Capital Punishment as a Response to Evil

Some jurisdictions acknowledge, as a matter of positive law, the relevance of evil to capital punishment. At one point, the state of Florida counted that the fact that a murderer’s crime was “especially wicked, evil, atrocious or cruel” as an aggravating factor for purposes of capital sentencing. I submit that Florida may be onto something. I consider a thesis about capital punishment that strikes me as plausible on its face: if capital punishment is ever morally permissible, it is permissible as a response to evil. Call this the Punishment as a Response to Evil thesis, or PRE. If capital punishment is not morally permissible as a response to evil, then, according to PRE, it is not morally permissible, period. PRE admits of at least two different readings: on the first, if capital punishment is ever morally justified it is justified as a punishment for evil crimes; on the second, if capital punishment is ever morally justified it is justified as a punishment for evil people. While this first version of PRE has found advocates in both philosophy and forensic psychiatry, I argue against this first reading of PRE and for the second. To secure this conclusion I appeal to an account of evil and evil personhood that I have developed elsewhere.

Psychological and Religious Understanding of Wrong Doing in African Perspective

For an African the word sin does exist as wrong doing, shame, evil person, malice, sorcerer, witch, wizard, unkind person. Sin as understood in Christianity is different from African perspective. Traditionally adultery is different from Christian understanding of the same. A woman caught in bed with her brother in law in some African communities it is not regarded as wrong doing because traditionally that is her husband. The research has found out that, in our world, the appalling depth and extent of human suffering is evident and very much experienced. Evil and suffering are not just philosophical and theological aspects of human existence but is a personal problem that every human person experiences. There are occurrences in nature, for example, catastrophes, floods, earthquakes, which cause harm, misery and suffering to human persons. Human beings suffer from sickness, blindness, physical handicaps, which are very often accompanied by physical pain. The researcher has found out that every sensible human being questions why this should happen to humanity and individuals. The problem is even more crucial in Africa where we have rampart wars like in Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, Burundi, Congo and so many other places. We are left asking the question: Why all this suffering in the world? How did it all begin? How can we be free from it? In this research we have looked at the concept of evil, evil and community, evil and God, moral culpability, consequences of evil, evil and covenant, evil and salvation in African perspective. For Africans punishment for evil is here and now not like in Christianity where we postpone punishment to the next life. Africans belief evil recoils. What goes around comes around. If you do evil it comes back to you. Leaders whose leadership is characterized by dictatorship, Genocide, threats, dehumanization among others die miserably. Simply said evil recoils. You cannot do evil and get away with it.

San Petersburgo: la ciudad de los muertos vivientes en la literatura y las creencias populares rusas

The aim of the present study is to analyse the perception of St Petersburg from the Russian frame of mind. It also examines the literary activity which reflects an overview of the imperial capital seen as the apocalyptic city inhabited by lookalikes, ghosts and zombies. The aforementioned can be explained by the very history of the metropolis, founded by Czar Peter I who was considered the personification of Evil by most of his peers.

Aspects of Evil

Aspects of Evil Robert L. Arrington (bio) On Evil by Terry Eagleton (Yale University Press, 2011. 192 pages. $16 pb) Oddly dedicated to Henry Kissinger (an evil man, are we to assume, or, ironically, a good one?), Terry Eagleton's book is a dazzling collection of references to philosophers (medieval to modern), modern novels, psychological theories, and theological tracts. Eagleton certainly wears his erudition on his sleeve. Unfortunately his clarity of logical exposition is less evident. He offers us an ontological theory of evil, describing it in terms that he thinks apply to the human condition itself. As such it is inescapable. Not to be equated with simple wrongdoing, nor even wickedness, evil is not, in Heidegger's terms, an ontic condition, and hence variable and contingent; instead it is a part of human being qua human being. Eagleton, as is well known, is a Marxist. He is also in this book a psychoanalyst— or at least a follower of Freud. Evil is said to be an expression of the death wish, which operates in all of us and is in essence a desire for nonbeing, expressed inwardly toward ourselves and outwardly toward others. Eagleton thinks that evil and its companion, the death wish, have consequences that, while dire and inevitable, nevertheless are avoidable, at least on the social level. In his introduction Eagleton worries about the problem of determinism. If evil is something that "infects" some people and societies, then how can their evil actions be avoided? Such a "disease" would be a cause of the behavior and would be inevitable, given the laws of causation. In that case it would be improper to hold the perpetrators of the evil actions accountable and responsible. They could no more avoid this behavior than one could avoid the consequences of any medical condition that causes an evil act; they would need to be treated, not punished. In fact such actions would be completely intelligible according to the laws of causation, whereas many have argued that evil is fundamentally unintelligible and mysterious. Nor, Eagleton believes, can evil be said to be uncaused or a "cause in itself," as others have thought. "This," he tells us, "mistakenly implies that an action which has a cause cannot be freely undertaken." Unfortunately he provides us with no good argument for this claim. If causes are necessary and sufficient conditions for the occurrence of an event, and if these necessary and sufficient conditions for the occurrence of an act conspire, how could the act not take place? If Satan or adverse social conditions are what an evil person or society are up against, "then evil would seem to be unbeatable." If the young killers of toddlers, say, are born evil or under [End Page lxi] the control of demonic powers, then they are innocent. So, Eagleton concludes, "those who wish to punish others for their evil . . . need to claim that they are evil of their own free will." Eagleton sees no problem here; however, for, as he cavalierly remarks, "The truth . . . is that reason and freedom are bound closely together." The many philosophers today who think that reasons are in fact the causes of actions would beg to disagree. Eagleton owes us an explanation of how responsibility for evil actions and causation are compatible. At this point Eagleton states one of his conclusions: "Either human actions are explicable, in which they cannot be evil; or they are evil, in which case there is nothing more to be said about them. The argument of this book is that neither of these propositions is true." In other words either one can explain evil—as the result of possession by the devil, social conditions, or a simple matter of fact about some people and their character—or . . . what? Evil can be characterized, he thinks, and in some cases it can be dealt with, avoided, or rendered less likely to occur. We can hold people responsible for their evil actions, and we can legitimately punish them for such actions—this in spite of the fact that there are undeniable social conditions that often give rise to evil behavior, or character flaws that can be uncovered, or even possession by the...

Drawn and Quartered: Reflections on Violence in Youth’s Art Making

Two eleven-year-old boys face a bulletin board, arranging silver thumbtacks into shapes of fighter planes. They have arrived early for an after-school puppet workshop. Both boys are under five feet tall: the thin one sports a green terrycloth wristband and a big fro. “The girls like the poof,” he says. The other boy has a fuller body, a haircut similar to the Fab Four in the late sixties, and wears wide-leg jeans and a red t-shirt that brushes his kneecaps. The boys talk while puncturing the corkboard with tacks. I like this game. It’s Star Miner. There’s this thing. It’s a ship that looks like this. The other ships are too detailed. You try and blow up a jet thingy, it spirals and can catch on fire. The evil dude’s head has like big tire marks on it. The only difference between him and other villains is he has a sash thingy that are like badges. He used to be good but in his world if a good person kills an evil person that sash will clamp to his arm and infect him with an evil virus that will go through his veins. First it goes to his hand and makes his fingernails long and sharp. His arm is not com pletely infected. This part’s really scary: his eye is infected with it. His base on his planet is shaped like that symbol on the sash. There’s an X through the center where it intersects with a laser. This thing shoots it up into this laser and generates a big force field around it. It’s electri fied. Even if you get a foot from it, it will shoot a lightning bolt and zap you.

A case of serial nightmares and oneiroid state under paroxetine for senile depression

We report on rare side effects of paroxetine. A 67-year-old female patient who had been suffering from prolonged depression for over a year but had not received appropriate treatment was administered 20-mg paroxetine daily. However, the patient required hospital admission after 16 days because of behavioural disturbances and delusions that she was being chased by evil persons from a religious group. The delusions were ultimately confirmed to be serial nightmares and an oneiroid state. The nightmares gradually disappeared following discontinuation of paroxetine. The Adverse Drug Reaction Probability Scale showed a score of 6 (probable). Reports on paroxetine-induced nightmares are rare, and there is a possibility that, in this case, parexetine caused the nightmares in association with depression and assumed underlying brain dysfunction due to ageing.

The devil as muse: Blake, Byron, and the adversary

Fred Parker's Devil as Muse: Blake, Byron, and Adversary is based on a provocative observation. After noting that common association of devil as personification of evil is a post-biblical construct, and that scriptures more often refer to Satan in etymological sense of adversary or accuser, Parker then offers new interpretations of selected texts by Mann, Blake, Goethe, Byron and Bukgakov, in which he substitutes recuperated signification of devil as adversary for more conventional interpretation. Parker provides trenchant readings, and by juxtaposing text and context, he is able to infer impact of historical period on creative process, suggesting a correlation between ethics and aesthetics. Missing, however, is an analysis of implications of his observation. In other words, he never explicitly articulates what is achieved by substituting biblical Satan who, as Parker repeatedly stresses, is often viewed as some sort of adjunct of God, for entirely discrete Christian force of evil. Although, as indicated by subtitle, two central chapters focus on Blake and Byron, Parker introduces his study with a prologue, Kierkegaard, Don Giovanni, and Doctor Faustus: Artist as Faust, in which he estab lishes Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus: Life of German Composer Adrian Leverkiihn as Told by a Friend as a touchstone for this study. Itself a modern recension of Faust legend, Doctor Faustus is generally viewed as Mann's attempt, through novel, to come to terms with twentieth-century Ger man history culminating in second world war. Faustian bargain of novel consists of composer Leverkuhn's deliberate decision to expose himself to syphilis in an effort to enhance his creativity. In so doing, he enacts, as Parker's thesis puts it, the notion of a radical tension between ethical and aesthetic—the virtuous philosopher and chameleon poet—through idea of devil as Muse, whereby creative artist is seen as diabolically sponsored or inspired (2). second chapter, The Devil and Poet, establishes historical

In defense of the mirror thesis

In this journal, Luke Russell defends a sophisticated dispositional account of evil personhood according to which a person is evil just in case she is strongly and highly fixedly disposed to perform evil actions in conditions that favour her autonomy. While I am generally sympathetic with this account, I argue that Russell wrongly dismisses the mirror thesis—roughly, the thesis that evil people are the mirror images of the morally best sort of persons—which I have defended elsewhere. Russell’s rejection of the mirror thesis depends upon an independently implausible account of moral sainthood, one that is implausible for reasons that Russell himself suggests in another context. Indeed, an account of moral sainthood that parallels Russell’s account of evil personhood is plausible for the same reasons that his account of evil personhood is, and that suggests that Russell himself is actually committed to the mirror thesis.

Saving Strawson: Evil and Strawsonian Accounts of Moral Responsibility

Almost everyone allows that conditions can obtain that exempt agents from moral responsibility—that someone is not a morally responsible agent if certain conditions obtain. In his seminal “Freedom and Resentment,” Peter Strawson denies that the truth of determinism globally exempts agents from moral responsibility. As has been noted elsewhere, Strawson appears committed to the surprising thesis that being an evil person is an exempting condition. Less often noted is the fact that various Strawsonians—philosophers sympathetic with Strawson’s account of moral responsibility—at least appear to have difficulty incorporating evil persons into their accounts of moral responsibility. In what follows, I argue that Strawson is not committed to supposing that being evil is an exempting condition—at least, that he can allow that evil persons are morally responsible agents.

Extremity of Vice and the Character of Evil

It is plausible that being an evil person is a matter of having a particularly morally depraved character. I argue that suffering from extreme moral vices—and not consistently lacking moral vices, for example—suffices for being evil. Alternatively, I defend an extremity account concerning evil personhood against consistency accounts of evil personhood. After clarifying what it is for vices to be extreme, I note that the extremity thesis I defend allows that a person could suffer from both extremely vicious character traits while possessing some modest virtue as well. By contrast, consistency theses rule out this possibility by definition. This result does not suggest that extremity accounts are flawed, however, since, as I argue, the thesis that evil people must lack moral virtue altogether effectively defines evil people out of existence and prematurely privileges skepticism about evil personhood. Ultimately, I contend that an extremity account is most consistent with common intuitions about putative evil persons as well as plausible assumptions about aretaic evaluations of character quite generally.

The Integrity of Evil

Within all religious or philosophical schools of thought where order and moral goodness are the foundations and substance of existence, the concept of evil is problematic. If the ground of existence is ordered and good, then all that comes from the ground is good - there would seem to be no room in existence for a rebellion against good. The rebellion would simply be a part of the order and goodness of existence, and so also be good. One way of dealing with the problem of evil is to view it as coming from the limitations of human knowledge: what we call evil is really good, though we do not see it as good because of our limited perspective. Thus, evil does not truly exist. If one wants to take evil seriously, however, this answer is not convincing. Another approach has been taken throughout the history of Western Philosophy, beginning in Socrates, carried on in another form by Augustine, and also present in Kant's moral theory. This view conceives of evil as a privation: evil is not a substance, but a lack of substance. For Socrates, to know the Good is to do the Good, and so if a person is committing evil, this is due to a lack or privation of knowledge, the result of which is an enslavement to the less real world of appearances - the life in the cave. For Augustine, the movement toward evil is a deficiency of the will that has lost itself in the things of this world (more will be said on Augustine below). For Kant, moral evil is to act according to the incentives, rather than according to the rational good will; this is to lack the freedom and autonomy necessary for good moral action. In each of these renditions of evil as privation, the process of moving from the substance of life (whether the Good, God, or rational self-determination), leaves a person's life weakened and disordered. Thus, evil is a kind of disintegration - an evil person lacks integrity. The Danish philosopher S0ren Kierkegaard is critical of this view of evil. He finds this view to be an inadequate explanation of the power of moral evil that we experience in the world. The effects of evil we experience are not simply due to evil's destructive tendencies, according to Kierkegaard, but due to a powerful integrity within the nature of moral evil itself. No doubt there are forms of evil that move in the direction of privation and lack, but I will argue in this essay that Kierkegaard has provided an analysis of a more actualized from of evil, by giving positive content to the notion of moral evil. I will begin this analysis by briefly looking at the privation view of evil, specifically in terms of Augustine. This will give a picture of how human actualization and integrity are generally conceived within this view. This leads to an analysis of Kierkegaard's understanding of human self-actualization. In this analysis I look at the movement of the self through the well-known Kierkegaardian existence-stages: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. The analysis will center not around the nature of these stages, but on the tensions within each stage that lead to self-becoming or self-actualization. Thus, I emphasize how these stages confront despair - the limit or boundary each stage runs up against, and so founders upon. It is at these points of foundering that human actualization takes place. It will be important for us to see that for Kierkegaard human actualization takes place not as a matter of course, but in choices- selfactualization takes place in an interplay between self-consciousness and freedom. Therefore, human self-actualization, as well as the integrity of the self, consists of a growth in both self-consciousness and freedom. The Privation Approach to the Problem of Evil Ultimately the privation view of evil stems from a view that the ground of human existence is ordered (or order itself). All that exists arises out of and can be explained by this ground. Thus, that which remains closely related to the ground has the most actuality, and is the most ordered or rational (is well-integrated with what lies within and outside the self). …

Evil, Monsters and Dualism

In his book The Myth of Evil, Phillip Cole claims that the concept of evil divides normal people from inhuman, demonic and monstrous wrongdoers. Such monsters are found in fiction, Cole maintains, but not in reality. Thus, even if the concept of evil has the requisite form to be explanatorily useful, it will be of no explanatory use in the real world. My aims in this paper are to assess Cole’s arguments for the claim that there are no actual evil persons, and, in so doing, to develop a clearer framework in which to think about evil personhood. While Cole is right to claim that there are no actual evil monsters or supernatural demons, he underestimates the extent to which ascriptions of demonic monstrosity are figurative rather than literal. Hence, a lack of actual monsters does not imply a lack of actual evil persons. More plausibly, Cole suggests that the concept of evil implies an unrealistically dualistic worldview, with purely evil people on one side and ordinary people on the other. Since no one is purely bad, Cole claims, the concept of evil fails to refer to actual persons. Cole is wrong to think that the use of extreme moral concepts is incompatible with fine-grained moral evaluations across a broad spectrum between the extremes. Nor is Cole sufficiently careful in unpacking the various ways in which a person might be considered purely bad. I will argue that some actual persons are extremely bad, that it is very likely that some actual persons are fixedly bad, and that quite possibly no actual persons are thoroughly bad or innately bad. It is plausible that a person is evil only if he is extremely and fixedly bad, but Cole is wrong to suppose that a person is evil only if he is thoroughly and innately bad. Thus, even if we accept Cole’s claim that no actual person is thoroughly or innately bad, it still seems very likely that some actual persons are evil, and hence that evil can be an explanatorily useful concept.

Dispositional accounts of evil personhood

It is intuitively plausible that not every evildoer is an evil person. In order to make sense of this intuition we need to construct an account of evil personhood in addition to an account of evil action. Some philosophers have offered aggregative accounts of evil personhood, but these do not fit well with common intuitions about the explanatory power of evil personhood, the possibility of moral reform, and the relationship between evil and luck. In contrast, a dispositional account of evil personhood can allow that evil is explanatory, that an evil person can become good, and that luck might prevent evil persons from doing evil or cause non-evil persons to do evil. Yet the dispositional account of evil personhood implies that some evil persons are blameless, which seems to clash with the intuition that evil persons deserve our strongest moral condemnation. Moreover, since it is likely that a large proportion of us are disposed to perform evil actions in some environments, the dispositional account threatens to label a large proportion of people evil. In this paper I consider a range of possible modifications to the dispositional account that might bring it more closely into alignment with our intuitions about moral condemnation and the rarity of evil persons. According to the most plausible of these theories, S is an evil person if S is strongly disposed to perform evil actions when in conditions that favour S’s autonomy.

The patron

The patron

Atrocity, Banality, Self-Deception

Keywords evil, self-deception, banality, atrocity, motivation When talking about evil we must make a fundamental choice about how we are to use the term. We may use it as half of the contrast "good versus evil," in which case it covers everything that is not good. That includes moral incompetence, lack of imagination, willingness to follow orders, overreactions, and a host of other reasons why people who do not have personalities that we would call evil do things that are wrong, often very wrong. Call this the weak reading of evil: evil as wrongdoing. Or we may use it with the meaning suggested by "evil person," "really evil act," "the evil lurking in all of us," and other such idioms. If we do this, we focus on a particular class of actions, and the motives and people that produce them, that arouse a particular moral revulsion in us. Call this the strong reading of evil: evil as atrocity (for more on this contrast see Morton [2004] and Card [2002]). Kubarych, following Peck, thinks of evil in the strong way. Most of the time at any rate: Some of the philosophers, such as Kant, that he draws on are thinking of evil in the weak way, and some of his quotations are from the German, where good/bad/evil distinctions are not drawn in the same way as in English. He explores a general explanation of evil that seems to be targeted at the psychology of extremely abhorrent actions. But, I argue, his account is in danger of collapse in either of two directions. Depending on how we interpret Kubarych's account, it could turn out that it describes all wrongdoing as evil, or, making some different choices, it could turn out that there are no really evil people. The strong reading of evil is definitely the most interesting and potentially fruitful. After all, we have no shortage of satisfying explanations of why people lie to get out of unwelcome appointments, steal to support their children or their drug habits, or defraud investors to become rich. But we do feel deeply puzzled by those who commit torture, serial murder, or genocide. We ask of these people not so much "Why did he do it?" as "How could he do it?" We feel the need of a philosophical or psychological theory that can give us even a slight handle of these people and their deeds. There are two risks associated with the project of explaining atrocity, though. The first is the risk of accepting unsatisfactory accounts, just because they purport to explain what we desperately want to understand. The second is the risk of supposing that there is a single explanation when the causes of the phenomenon are in fact too varied. On other topics these two risks have often combined to make people believe what seem to us now to be evident falsehoods. Humans have often for example wanted to know the causes of disease, and as a result have accepted blanket explanations, in terms of [End Page 257] evil spirits or lack of faith, that seem ludicrous to us now that we have a better grasp of the variety of factors that can cause our bodies to misfunction. So before asking naively "Why and how can people do these awful things?" we should ask "Is there a deeper causal unity here, beyond the fact that we react to these acts with horror?" My suspicion is that there is not much unity, that it is asking too much to want a common profile to the psychology of serial killers, or of proponents of genocide, let alone a profile that applies across these and other categories. What we can do, I believe, is describe our concept of evil in such a way that we can leave some parameters to be filled in by a large variety of objective psychological factors. Even this runs the risk that the really relevant factors cannot be forced into the role that the philosophical account requires. In...

Mirabilis Deus in Sanctis Suis*:Social History and Medieval Miracles

Perhaps our most learned and knowledgeable informant concerning both the heretics and their persecutors is the great inquisitor, hagiographer and Dominican historian Bernard Gui (1261–1331), who has been immortalized as the personification of evil by Umberto Eco inThe Name of the Rose. In his manual for inquisitors, Gui issued the following caveat concerning the conduct of inquiries into heresy:It is worthwhile noting that if too many questions and answers are raised, the truth is distorted and destroyed as a result of the diversity of persons and events. Rather, it is suitable not to write down all the questions and answers, but only those which touch directly on the substance and character of the event and which more closely appear to express the truth. If in one deposition too many questions and answers are found, another deposition will appear thereby diminished since too little is recorded. When so many questions and answers are written down in a trial, agreement can scarcely be found in the depositions of the witnesses, which should be both considered and avoided.