ABSTRACT The moral response to evil is, perhaps paradoxically, one of the greatest of ethical dilemmas. On the one hand, morality seeks to define good and evil; on the other hand, fighting evil demands actions that morality would otherwise deem evil. So, while killing is evil, killing a killer is – or at least can be – good. The moral paradox of killing is magnified exponentially when it comes to war. To address this issue, Just War Theory comes to provide a moral framework for war. But its efficacy largely assumes that the warring parties are moral, law-abiding peoples. What are the rules of engagement for fighting people who flout every rule in the book? It is my thesis that the category of war that describes fighting “Amalek” – the biblical paradigm of radical evil – provides the response. My suggestion is not that such a category of war departs from Just War Theory but actually conforms to it.

Abstract: Drawing on writings of Jacques Derrida and Hannah Arendt, this article examines the philosophy of forgiveness through an analysis of Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life . The discussion makes use of Arendt's reflections on radical evil to broach the issue of how fragmented memories of wartime crimes are woven into a confessional tale in which much of what is remembered is unforgivable. Thereafter, the article confronts the moral ambiguity of armed conflict and the horror of violent sexual exploitation, both historical and in the fictional account, and builds upon Derrida in suggesting that true forgiveness, in contrast to the theatrical politics of public apology, depends upon an aporetic moment that facilitates a radical confrontation between the living and the dead.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) Hannah Arendt will introduce a concept of radical evil as an historical appearance of something “we actually have nothing to fall back on in order to understand, a phenomenon that confronts us with its overpowering reality and breaks down all standards we know”. Arendt will not insist on her initial conception of radical evil and in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem a Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), the radical evil will be replaced by the banality of evil. According to this last view “evil is a surface phenomenon, and instead of being radical, it is merely extreme”, is “thought defying,” and that is its “banality.” Only the good has depth and can be radical. Arendt contrasts this banality with her own former conception of radical evil as also with Kant’s conception of radical evil (the latter wrongly in our opinion). In this paper, we will try to show the conceptual closeness between the banality of evil in Arendt and radical evil in Kant, as well as the radicality of good in Arendt as equal to the acquisition of good character in Kant’s Religion. Henry Allison claims that “Kant, by ‘radical evil’, does not mean a particular, especially perverse, form of evil but rather the root or ground of the very possibility of all moral evil.” In Kant, radical evil is deflationed from political and religious empirical elements. The term seems to be an olive branch which Kant offers to the church and the doctrine of original sin which he deconstructs in Religion as meaningless in time while he accepts its limited value in reason (morally). Evil for Kant is something that simply exists in the radix of our choices, as a propensity, the same as good does. Kantian radical evil acquires the banal aspect of evil character. For Kant, Eichmann has an evil heart the same way a thief has it. That’s why it is the Arendtian banality of evil that comes closer to Kantian radical evil. On the other hand, good heart for Kant demands our struggle to acquire it. That’s why the radicality of good in Arendt seems to be on a par with the acquisition of good heart in Kant.

Kant’s Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason has been a controversial text within Kant scholarship since its earliest reception. One of the main reasons for the critical reception relates to Kant’s theory of radical evil and the notion of propensity to evil connected therewith. It has become a commonplace in Kant literature to attribute these Kantian doctrines to a sort of late concession to Christian theology, as can be observed in the tenor of the reception by e.g. Goethe, Schiller and Michalson (1990), among others. Against this view, I aim to show in this article that the most striking and controversial claims contained in Kant’s doctrine of evil, namely the assumption of an intelligible deed, the universality of evil in humans as well as the inextirpability of the propensity to evil, can be accounted for by paying attention to the systematic relation between Kant’s notions of Anlage and Hang and the key trait distinguishing them, namely practical objectivity. By doing so, it shall become clear that Kant’s main contentious claims in Religion I can be sufficiently explained by systematic commitments of his own critical moral philosophy, thus rendering the references to Christian theology found in secondary literature superfluous.

Abstract The received view is that Kant denies all moral luck. But I show how Kant affirms constitutive moral luck in passages concerning radical evil from Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. First, I explicate Kant’s claims about radical evil. It is a morally evil disposition that all human beings have necessarily, at least for the first part of their lives, and for which they are blameworthy. Second, since these properties about radical evil appear to contradict Kant’s even more famous claims about imputation, ‘ought implies can’, and free will, I unpack Henry Allison’s proof of radical evil and show how it is consistent with interpretations of Kant’s broader views about morality. Third, I define and illustrate the category of constitutive moral luck and argue that Kant embraces the existence of constitutive moral luck given Allison-style interpretations of radical evil. This provides a reason for philosophers to reject the received view, and it creates an occasion for Kantians and Kant scholars to check their reasons if they deny moral luck.

In the article, the author uses a philosophical understanding of an oath to interpret an artwork, and then uses this interpretation to criticize modern polities as cursed empires. The narrative is presented in four steps. It begins with a short presentation of Mark Lilla's and John Gray's diagnosis of the Anglo-American ideological crisis, in which liberalism is modified by cultural politics which to both writers looks like a revivalist religion. Lilla and Gray metaphorically use the word "curse" to explain the new ideological constellation determined by the phenomenon called "woke". The second part presents Agamben's understanding of the relationship between an oath and a curse, which is used to interpret David Lynch's film Inland Empire in the third part. The author tries to show that the film deals with an original idea that a work of art can break a curse. In the fourth part, the author uses the idea of cursing and uncursing to criticize the West for failures in the war in former Yugoslavia, during the migrant crisis, and in the ongoing reappearance of "radical evil" in Gaza. The argument is constructed with a help of Greil Marcus' idea that polities can curse themselves if they fail to live up to their ideological promises. The author concludes that the EU and the USA failed to live up to their alleged founding principles and became cursed empires. The cultural war in which they find themselves seen from the perspective of magico-religious domain in which the oath and the curse originally appeared is not metaphorically a curse but literally the payment for the sin of omission.

In his practical philosophy, Kant reveals the principles of ethics that are based on pure reason and are therefore independent of both empirical anthropology and theology. Nevertheless, it can be argued that his reflections on the nature of morality are conditioned by the concept of humanity as it was shaped by Christian theology, especially in the Lutheran tradition. In this article, the author wants to show that this theological background is not only present in the work Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, which offers Kant’s rational interpretation of the basic Christian theologoumena, but that Kant also builds on it in the Critique of Practical Reason and in his practical philosophy in general. Consequently, neither the concept of radical evil, which represents Kant’s interpretation of the doctrine of original sin, nor the concept of a “revolution in the disposition of the human being,” which is an interpretation of the theological concept of grace, can be understood as a denial of the principles of Kant’s practical philosophy. On the contrary, by elaborating both concepts, Kant makes explicit the implicit theological background of these principles, which does not deprive them, nevertheless, of their philosophical persuasiveness.

The paper focuses on the motif of hope, which plays an important role in Immanuel Kant’s practical philosophy. Hope builds a bridge between ethics and the philosophy of religion, and it does so as part of the highest good. I examine the notion of hope in Kant’s thought in three steps, based on three texts: Critique of Pure Reason (Canon of Pure Reason), Critique of Practical Reason (Postulates of Pure Practical Reason; Ethico-Theology), and Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Theory of Radical Evil in Human Nature). I provide arguments to show that, for Kant, hope is a necessary motive. Hope is understood as an attitude of reason, rather than as an emotion. I further demonstrate that in the concept of hope, the desire for happiness intersects with the desire to live well morally. The function of hope, in the context of a lifetime of moral practice, is to help remove obstacles to leading a moral life. Hope is not needed to know what to do. Hope is necessary as a component of the meaningfulness of the whole. The impossibility or loss of hope for the ultimate meaning, as including the achievement of one’s own bliss, would make the lifelong pursuit of morality impossible. Finally, hope turns out to be necessary as a response to the thesis of radical evil in human nature.

Free will serves as the foundation of moral responsibility. However, when examining the topography of debates on free will within the history of Christian ethical thoughts, there is a tendency to regard divine grace as absolute while relatively neglecting free will. This paper provides an overview of the debate between Pelagius and Augustinus, which marks the starting point of the free will controversy in the history of Christian ethical thoughts, as well as the semi-Pelagian tradition that emerged in the medieval period. This paper further explores the opposition between Erasmus’s notion of free will and Luther’s concept of the bondage of the will during the Reformation, alongside Melanchthon’s synthesis of these views. Particular attention is given to Melanchthon’s perspectives on reason and revelation, philosophy and theology, and the compatibility of necessity and free will, highlighting their significance as a precursor to Kant’s moral rational faith. Based on this discussion, this paper seeks to elucidate the position of Kant’s moral rational faith within the free will debate. Kant interprets the Bible through the lens of morality within the limit of reason, viewing Jesus Christ as a teacher of the Gospel who adhered to moral law, and clarifies the issue of salvation as arising from the act of good deeds. Furthermore, despite recognizing the deeply ingrained propensity to radical evil within human nature, Kant affirms free will, positioning his moral rational faith between semi-Pelagianism and Pelagianism.

Our contemporary era, long dominated by an optimism linked to the progress of human rights and a happy globalisation, is witnessing a proliferation of wars, famines, terrorism, new technological totalitarianisms, pandemics, the climate crisis, etc., all of which arouse fear and anxiety everywhere. Can we speak of a return of the ‘tragic’ that would put an end to the myth of continuous progress in the history of the West? While the term may seem inappropriate in many respects, since it is linked to an antiquity that predates the monotheisms, what categories can we use to think about the present day?

Abstract Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason remains one of the most opaque of Kant's published writings. Though this opacity belongs, partly, to the text itself, a key claim of this article is that this opacity stems also from the narrow lenses through which his readers view this text. Often read as part of Kant's moral philosophy or his universal history, the literature has thus far neglected a different vantage point on the Religion, one that does not refute the utility of these lenses but complements them. This paper places the Religion alongside parts of Kant's corpus that it is less typically paired with, namely his natural history writings—in particular, his writings on the concept of race and the development of the human races. I argue that by doing so, we can shed much light on Kant's infamous claim that there is a radical evil in the human species. More precisely, we will come to appreciate that this evil is not, as it is usually understood, a static property or fixed characteristic of human beings. Instead, radical evil concerns a dynamic, changing defect in human nature that increasingly threatens our aspirations to collective moral perfection.

The paper is devoted to the ways in which philosophical and theological thinking tried to conceptualize the Holocaust without offense. Three terms or three codes have been singled out – radical evil, tremendum and Auschwitz – which are used by those interpreters who appreciate that the theory encounters an event that eludes conceptual capture and suspends almost all previous discursive operators. Despite this, they strive to think about both the incomprehensibility of the Holocaust and the reasons for it. Each of those three philos-ophems deserved a separate part of the article, while the conclusion suggests landmarks within which the naming of that unnameable and the thinking of that unthinkable could (further) continue productively.

Nazi evil makes the people of Eichmann, this is the whole context of the banality of evil. The destruction of Nazi evil is so unprecedented that it forms a whole new evil-Radical evil. Radical evil is not the change in the degree of evil, but the lack of traditional cognition or conception that suits it. Compared with the traditional evil, Radical evil cancels the concept of man itself. The banality of evil does not oppose Radical evil is a new evil, does not deny its destruction, it criticizes the understanding of this evil as the devil. Replacing Radical evil with Extreme evil highlights the feature of no thinking of this evil. The banality of evil goes against words and thought, and it cannot be understood in the way of exploring the roots. The banality of evil is about thinking rather than knowing, aiming to seek meaning rather than knowledge. Thinking is a political activity, which does not directly bring knowledge and directly guide behavior, but generates independent judgment, thus helping to deal with evil.

Banal evil is a central notion in Arendt’s thought, not without contradictory interpretations. Bernstein states in an early article that Arendt took such a notion from Jaspers and, in doing so, leads her readers to fall into the misunderstanding of making banal evil and radical evil interchangeable. Banal evil is usually understood as evil derived from the inability to think. However, it also designates a deformed conscience. The incapacity to think influences the deformation of conscience, which is caused by passion and vice, as saint Thomas points out.

The paper investigates the systematic connection between Kantian concept of radical evil and radical indeterministic idea of freedom. According to the presented thesis the systematically relevant interpretation of the radical evil concept requires considering not only philosophical ideas Kant`s but also the historic background in which they were formulated. Particularly the specific situation of German philosophic terminology in the 17th and early 18th Century will be acknowledged as one of the most significant factors influencing the development of the radical evil concept. For the sake of methodological precision of the presented analysis, the differentiation between thick and thin concept of evil will be introduced.

To analyze the representation of the Holodomor in Vasyl Barka’s novel “The Yellow Prince”, it is beneficial to draw upon the concepts of artistic universes and mythological studies. In particular, Franz Boas’s notion of mythological universes as source material for the creation of new universes can provide valuable insights. Based on this concept, the apocalyptic motifs of the novel “The Yellow Prince” might be considered a unique author’s attempt to interpret the traumatic experience of the Holodomor. In this case, the biblical eschatology serves as the key to understanding the entire scale of the tragedy and the essence of the crime against the Ukrainian people.
 After analyzing the structure of the novel, drawing parallels with biblical motifs and codes, and noting the most prominent biblical allusions, it becomes evident that the writer constructs his own apocalyptic model of the world, which shows no specific Comings of the Antichrist and Christ as they both are presented collectively. The writer’s dichotomy between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’ contrasts the harmonious, traditional Ukrainian village with the godless Bolshevik regime. The first mode, embodied by the Katrannyk family, functions around the church as a sacred center and a treasury of Christian values. Therefore the process of collectivization and the destruction of the temple disrupts its organic existence, leading to death. Those who strive to preserve their right for the sacred must be prepared to fight, even at the cost of their lives.
 Both the church Chalice-Grail and the martyred peasants represent the collective Christ. The source of evil, in its turn, lies within the hierarchical system of the Bolshevik forces of evil. This system ranges from the symbolic image of the Yellow Prince as a collective Antichrist to radical evil embodied by demonized and dehumanized representatives of the Soviet government and banal evil manifesting itself in unconscious peasants who, due to a lack of understanding, also become accomplices in the crimes. Thus, the evil appears in the novel as a series of negative and demonic images embodied in characters, symbols, and details existing at various hierarchical levels. All these elements serve as a comprehensive representation of the profane.

In his 1987 book Compassion and Solidarity , Gregory Baum recounts a story told by the German Roman Catholic theologian and priest Johann Baptist Metz, who, in response to the Holocaust, developed a guiding principle: ‘You cannot do theology with your back turned to Auschwitz’. Baum challenges scholars to ask the same question. What is the cost of doing scholarship with one’s back turned to Auschwitz and other forms of radical evil? Does not business-as-usual scholarship risk conforming to the dominant culture and practices of our time, no matter what? Does it not risk pushing scholars to acquiesce to the neo-liberal model of the depoliticized, neutralized scholar? Baum’s refusal to ‘do scholarship’ with his back to evil highlights the necessity and urgency of using scholarly expertise to participate in public debates. First, society needs the unique expertise of scholars of religion to address its many interconnected crises. Second, participation in public debates affords scholars the opportunity to develop a self-critical spirit and to look for signs of ideological taint and distorting messages in their work. Participating in public debates results in better scholarship, Baum argues, but only if one adopts a critical-humanistic approach rooted in an emancipatory commitment, a hermeneutics of suspicion, and the perspective of the victims, the marginalized and the excluded. In other words, socially engaged scholarship is only valid when it is critical – as well as self-critical – scholarship. Baum’s approach promotes a scholarly humility about truth claims that avoids inauthentic universalisms. David Seljak explores the necessity and urgency of participation in public debates by the religious studies scholar by examining Baum’s biography, public role and its impact on his scholarship.

Abstract According to Kant, men cannot do evil for the sake of evil. A satanic act of resistance against the moral law is impossible, and therefore the idea of ultimate evil is called a “mere idea”. However, it isn’t impossible to realize the idea of satanic evil, as is widely thought: the idea of ultimate evil can be fully realized by the everyday evil of men, as if they were ultimately evil. Kant exposes this structure within his Doctrine of Right (1797) as an extension of his philosophy of radical evil, presented in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793). This interpretation will be developed in a close reading of the crucial passage – where it is the revolutionizing people of France who are held responsible for having realized the idea of satanic evil.

This article argues that Kant’s famous theory of ‘radical evil’, according to which there is a natural propensity for evil as well as good in all human beings, has precedent in the medieval Franciscan intellectual tradition. In the early thirteenth century, members of this tradition, inspired by its founder Alexander of Hales, developed a novel account of free will, according to which the will is capable of choosing between equally legitimate options of good and evil. In affirming this, early Franciscans departed from the longstanding tradition of Augustine, for whom free will can only choose the good, since evil is merely a privation of the good that limits human freedom. By the same token, they anticipated the Kantian contention that freedom entails the ability to choose between good and evil maxims.

This article attempts to show that the doctrine of the impossibility of total error (DIET) is one of the main presuppositions of Kant's moral thought and not just of his theoretical thought. I will exhibit how the antinomy of reason is one of the most important motives of Kant's philosophical inquiry and then illustrate my interpretation of radical evil by advocating an interpretation of reason in Kant as a unitary faculty. ORCID