Hans Bernhard Schmid - Evil in Joint Action: The Ethics of Hate and the Sociology of Original Sin

Evil in Joint Action

Joining insights from social science and philosophy, this book offers a nuanced view on the discourse of evil, which has been on the rise in the West in recent years. Exploring the famous pear theft episode in St Augustines Confessions , it looks beyond the theological implications of the event to focus instead on the secular insights that it offers when the event is placed in the context of social thought. With attention to Augustines lengthy reflections on a seemingly marginal episode, the author contends that it is possible to discern the elements of a convincing account of intentional evil action, the pear theft representing a case of joint radical improvisation that lacks collective deliberation. As such, a new perspective emerges on familiar and more intuitive forms of evil in joint action that involve group identification and institutional action. Evil in Joint Action will appeal to scholars of sociology, social theory, and philosophy with interests in ethics, collective action, and concepts of evil.

Hans Bernhard Schmid is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Austria. He is author of Plural Action: Essays in Philosophy and Social Science , Moralische Integritt: Kritik eines Konstrukts , and Wir-Intentionalitt - Kritik des ontologischen Individualismus und Rekonstruktion der Gemeinschaft .

Evil in Joint Action

The Ethics of Hate and the Sociology of Original Sin

Hans Bernhard Schmid

First published 2021
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2021 Hans Bernhard Schmid

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Schmid, Hans Bernhard, author.
Title: Evil in joint action: the ethics of hate and the sociology of original sin/Hans Bernhard Schmid.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020009594 (print) | LCCN 2020009595 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367376246 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429355332 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Good and evil. | Good and evilSocial aspects | Augustine, of Hippo, Saint, 354-430. | Sin, Original.
Classification: LCC BJ1401 .S4155 2020 (print) | LCC BJ1401 (ebook) | DDC 170dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009594
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009595

ISBN: 978-0-367-37624-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-35533-2 (ebk)

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By myself I would not have done it I still recall how I felt about this then I could not have done it alone [] I would not have done it alone. []. Alone I would not have done it alone I could not have done it at all. My memory is vivid and plain []: alone, I could never have committed that theft.

(Augustine, Confessions, II, viii, 16)

This book is an offshoot of a larger research project on joint action (Schmid 2009, 2012, 2016, 2017). It departs rather awkwardly from the main branch. Joint action has usually tended to appear in a positive light from the earliest beginnings of this line of research up to the current discussion (see Roth 2017; Schweikard and Schmid 2013). Plato famously focuses his reflections on cooperation and collective agency on the idea of justice and the good : even bandits or thieves, he observes, need justice (and thus the idea of the good) to work together (R 351c) or else their joint activity falls apart . Aristotle, too, conceives of human living together as a joint activity under the guise of the good. Though most of the current literature on joint action does not openly share this preoccupation with justice and the good, it is still in the background of current research on human cooperativeness, and we find it clearly expressed by the most immediate predecessors of the contemporary debate. Robin George Collingwood (1942) developed some of the conceptual tools used in the current analysis of joint intention only as a means to clarify the structure of civilized, legitimate rule against the backdrop of Nazi barbarism. Collingwoods student Wilfrid Sellars (1980) who initiated the current debate on collective and shared intentionality took Collingwoods idea a step further: with his concept of we-intention, he aimed at elucidating no less than the moral point of view itself.

Although firmly rooted in this tradition, this book takes a turn away from the good toward the dark side. It looks at joint agency not in terms of a potential for better or worse realizations of the good, but as a potential for genuine evil . To be sure, the recent literature on joint agency is not completely blind to some of the ethically dubious aspects of the topic, such as the phenomenon of complicity (Kutz 2000) already identified by Plato. But the claim made in this book is more radical. It is not just the claim that cooperation can extend our agential capacities toward the bad as well as toward the good. Rather, it is the claim that some particular forms of cooperation can be evil than just bad action that is such that its being bad is not a form of failure, from a moral point of view, but rather a condition of its success.

If this claim is correct, it can hardly be entirely new. If we look close enough, we can find its roots in an apparently unlikely place. It is at the very origin of the Christian conception of original sin. This may not initially strike the reader as a particularly obvious point of departure for an inquiry into the dark side of joint action. The whole conception of original sin is somewhat dusty, and not obviously necessary for serious research into ethical issues. As one recent interpreter puts it, the Christian conception of original sin is counterintuitive to the sensibilities of contemporary Western societies (McFarland 2010, 11). The reasons for this are plain. Without a robust notion of Gods command, the doctrine of original sin seems to be a non-starter. Original sin thus appears to be thoroughly ill-suited for a secular understanding of moral issues. Moreover, the story to which the idea of original sin is connected Eve and Adams eating from the forbidden tree as related in Genesis 3 seems rather puny to be seriously considered as a paradigm for thinking about real evil. Already the author of the Quran seems to have thought so, and he modified the story accordingly. While Christian theology seems to connect everything that is wrong with mankind to this, including the need for a Savior to put things right again, the whole incident does not appear as a big a deal in the Quran. Adam eats, but he quickly repents, and his repentance is swiftly accepted by God (2:37) problem solved, no need to make a big fuss about it (for a comparative reading of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions see Kvam, Schearing, and Ziegler, 1999). The Quran also changes the story in that the eating is from the tree of life rather than from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and this might appear to be a good move, too: for why should eating from the latter be bad at all? After all, the human pursuit of knowledge is not obviously bad, and it is puzzling why a benevolent God should want to prevent it particularly where knowledge of good and evil is at stake. It is good to know good from evil because otherwise, there is no way of knowing how to be good and avoid evil. Of course, a similar point could be made with regard to the tree of life, too, but at least, this way of telling the story solves the problem of how Adam and Eve should have known not to eat from the tree if they had no knowledge of good and evil before doing so.