The Nature of Evil

Topic:
The Nature of Evil

Chairperson:
Mary Kennedy

Moderator:
Spencer Sinclare

Meetup Date:
Wednesday, November 5th 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., with a 15 minute break at 8:00 p.m.

Meetup Location:
Upstairs at The Bent Mast, 512 Simcoe St. Victoria, BC, V8V 1L8

Members:
If you plan to attend, please take a moment and RSVP. If your plans change and you cannot attend, to the right of your name there are three dots. Please click on them and move yourself to "Not Going."
Thank you :)

Quotes:
“Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires.”
~ William Shakespeare

“The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.”
~ Albert Einstein

Synopsis:
Evil is the most severe condemnation our moral vocabulary allows. Murder, torture, enslavement and prolonged humiliation are some examples of it. Evil must involve harm, and it must be serious enough to damage its victims’ capacity to function normally. Furthermore, the harm must be unjustified, since not even serious harm is in itself necessarily evil, as it may be just punishment for crimes committed or the only means of preventing even greater harm. What harm is justified is one of the fundamental questions of moral philosophy. The competing answers to it, however, share the key idea of a moral equilibrium. In general terms, harms that tend to maintain the moral equilibrium are justified, while those that tend to produce a disequilibrium are unjustified. The generality of this explanation allows for disagreements about what count specifically as harms, and about how the moral equilibrium can be best maintained.

Evil may be the product of human or nonhuman agency. Inclement weather that causes crop failure and widespread starvation is an example of the latter, and it is usually described as natural evil. Evil caused by human beings, such as torturing an innocent person, is moral. This traditional distinction between natural and moral evil is useful, but it should not be drawn too sharply because human beings may be natural agents, as carriers of a disease, for instance, and evil caused by natural agency may warrant moral opprobrium, if it was preventable and those responsible for doing so failed. Moral thinking nevertheless tends to focus on moral evil, since it is much more likely to be within human control than natural evil

Watch:
“The Nature Of Evil | Philosophical Analysis”
on YouTube.
https://youtu.be/_dQ3jLppqqU?si=nfDPgIpnDlp-ab6f