Zachary J. Goldberg - Evil Matters: A Philosophical Inquiry

This book explores the nature, normativity, and aftermath of evil action. It combines philosophical conceptual analysis with empirical studies in psychology and discussions of historical events to provide an innovative analysis of evil action.

The book considers the metaethical, normative, and practical characteristics belonging to evil action. It begins by identifying the features of evil action that distinguish it from mundane wrongdoing, thereby placing it as a proper category of philosophical inquiry. Next, the author demonstrates how evil acts affect moral relationships and challenge Strawsonian accounts of moral responsibility. He then draws conceptual and empirical connections between evil acts and collective agency by discussing collective acts of evil such as genocide, torture, and slavery. Finally, the author scrutinizes both the possibility and propriety of forgiveness and vengeance in the aftermath of evil and discusses how individuals ought to cope with the pervasiveness of evil in human interaction.

Evil Matters will be of interest to advanced students and researchers in philosophy working on the concept of evil, moral responsibility, collective agency, vengeance, and forgiveness.

Zachary J. Goldberg is Senior Researcher at Trilateral Research and formerly Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitt Munich, Germany. In addition to his authored articles and book chapters focusing mainly on issues concerning the philosophy of evil and moral responsibility, he is the editor of Reflections on Ethics and Responsibility: Essays in Honor of Peter A. French (2017), and co-editor of The Routledge International Handbook of Perpetrator Studies (2020).

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Evil Matters

A Philosophical Inquiry

Zachary J. Goldberg

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For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Ethics-and-Moral-Theory/book-series/SE0423

First published 2022

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• A Version Appeared as Can Kants Theory of Evil Be Saved?' Kantian Review (): 395419, 2017.
• Portions of Chapters Appear as A Relational Approach to Evil Action: Vulnerability and Its Exploitation. Journal of Value Inquiry (): 3353, 2019.
• Portions of Appear in Evil's Diachronic Elements. In Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evil, edited by Thomas Nys and Stephen de Wijze. London: Routledge, 2019.
• Portions of the Appendix Appear in Evil, Evil and Taking Responsibility. In Wozu ist das Bse gut?, edited by Birgit Recki, 1736. Mnster: Mentis.

This book is the outcome of the research project Components of Evil: An Analysis of Secular Moral Evil and its Normative and Societal Implications financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and carried out at the Chair for Practical Philosophy and Ethics held by Prof. Monika Betzler, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitt in Munich from 20162019. I am extremely grateful to Monika for her comments on the entire manuscript, frequent discussions about its content, and ample opportunities to present and discuss my work with her students. I would also like to thank Prof. Julian Nida-Rmelin and Prof. Beate Sodian for comments on the text as well as Prof. Alex Hutter and Prof. Peter Adamson for discussions about evil in the history of philosophy. Finally, I would like to thank my father, Prof. Harold Goldberg, who proofread and edited each chapter, sometimes multiple times, and was always ready to provide me with historical examples of evil action.

This book seeks to advance the understanding of critical ethical, social, and philosophical aspects of evil action. In explaining what this book is about, I think it is helpful to start with what it is not about and what it does not aim to accomplish. It is worth noting right at the outset that this book is not a systematic theory of evil. Such works already exist, and much of the present book emerges out of these previous discussions and analyses. As the reader will notice, my thinking about the concept of evil has benefited immensely from the extant philosophical literature on evil. I have found that most of the authors who have written about the philosophy of evil have provided insightful and often correct assessments of the nature and normativity of evil. I consider these authors to be my teachers, and this book is a product of my learning.

As any good teacher will tell you, they hope their students will ask questions. Through asking questions, the teacher recognizes that the student has reflected upon the lesson. Especially in philosophy, asking questions is essential to the advancement of our understanding, not only because we learn new things but because we also identify further complexities and additional questions that compel us to continue our investigation.

This book is a collection of the questions that inspired me to engage more closely with the philosophical analysis of evil and corresponding discussions that accompany these questions. As reflected by the title, this book is truly an inquiry, which raises enduring or under-explored questions about particular matters concerning the nature, normativity, and aftermath of evil action. Indeed, in thinking about evil action as a concept and phenomenon, a multitude of questions immediately come to mind: what makes an action evil and not simply bad or wrong, how can so many seemingly ordinary people perpetrate acts of extreme evil, should perpetrators of evil acts be forgiven?