Sans Fig Leaf
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"The Nature of Evil"
24 May, 2007
"I won't say that he's evil, because everything he did and said came from his firmly-held beliefs."
I was shocked when I saw that in a discussion recently. Did the person really believe that sincerity trumps intent or conesquences? I mean, as far as I know, every serial rapist who ever existed sincerely believed his victims had it coming. Surely no one thinks that such sincere belief makes the rapes themselves not-evil?
It was particularly disturbing since the person under question had, undeniably, done a great deal of harm to an incalculable number of people.
That reminded me of a news report I heard a while ago about a court battle over a ten commandments monument in a government building. One of the citizens of the locality interviewed said, "I don't know why people object. Right across the hall from where we mounted the ten commandments, we have a blank wall. So all those people who believe in nothin' are covered. That's fair, right?"
Leaving aside the debate about what the First Amendment's prohibition of the establishment of a state religion means, that response is so wrong-headed, it almost defies description. I've never really met a functional adult who believed in nothing. Many of the people who object to government endorsements of Christianity, happen to be active members of Christian churches. Some of them object to the ten commandment monuments on civil libertarian grounds. A few of them object because the monuments usually list a set of commentments that don't actually appear in the old testament (The old testament has three completely different (I mean, so different you wouldn't recognize two of them as being related to what most people think of as the ten) lists which each claim to be the list "on the stones which god gave to Moses"--but that's a tale for another day).
Most of the Christians I've known, heard from, or read about objecting to the government endorsement of their religion do so because they recognize that once they decide that it's all right to grant their own set of religious beliefs legal precedence over others, that sets the stage for a redefinition or narrowing of the set of officially endorsed beliefs later so that their own are no longer included. Which is the same reason that most Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Wiccans, agnostics and atheists object to these. The real issue isn't whether any perceived endorsement includes our beliefs--it's that the right to endorse (for any reason) implies the right to exclude (for any reason).
My two examples appear very different. In the first, the person seems to feel that nothing is as important as belief. Sincere faith trumps everything else. In the second, the person seems to believe that all beliefs unlike his own are unimportant. Either one believes his way, or one does not believe at all.
While they seem, at first glance, to be extreme opposites on a single spectrum, I've met a number of people who believe both things--and not in a contradictory way. That's because in one sense both are examples of the classic fallacy of the Excluded Middle, otherwise known as the False Dichotomy.
The Ten Commandments comment is the more obvious of the two: he's ignoring the existence of many belief systems--as well as discounting the possibility that one could believe in the commandments while not thinking they should be displayed in a courthouse.
The other example is a bit more convoluted. Sincerity is usually thought of as a good thing. Therefore acting on sincere beliefs must be good. Someone can't be both good and evil at the same time, therefore… But of course, it isn't always an either or proposition. Most people are a mixture of flaws and virtues. We have good intentions we don't always live up to, and we have bad intentions we refrain from acting upon.
In a completely different sense the two assumptions are examples of the Selective Observation fallacy. That's where we count the hits while ignoring the misses. I think what the first person was really saying was not that sincerity by itself negates evil consequences, but rather than because some of the beliefs espoused by the person under discussion matched some of his own beliefs, the fact that the person also caused great harm should be overlooked. Or maybe that's an ends justifies the means argument. It could go either way.
What bothers me most about both statements is that in order to believe either one, you have to ignore a lot of evidence. In the first case you have to overlook or discount all the people who were harmed by the things the person did as a result of his sincere beliefs. To believe the second you must overlook or dismiss all the people who cling to perfectly acceptable and admirable sets of morals--that just happen to be different in some ways from the dominant culture's.
In other words, you have to be willing to say that a large number of people simply are not important. More than that, you must decide that those people, their lives, their loves, and their beliefs, have no importance whatsoever.
If they really feel that way, they don't have to go far to find a definition of evil. The nearest mirror will do.
--Andre Gide
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