Getting to the Root of Evil

When UW-Madison Professor Claudia Card '62 says she plans to "take the concept of evil head-on," she may not mean quite what you think. She doesn't fight crime, she doesn't battle super-villains, and she doesn't spend her nights speeding through the streets of Madison in her super-charged, rocket-powered Cardmobile.

"I've written a book," she says, "called The Atrocity Paradigm. I'm a professor of ethics, and this is an attempt to form a philosophical definition of what evil is - to define evil as opposed to ordinary wrongdoing."

According to Card, philosophers have generally overlooked evil, allowing the term to be used loosely to describe a wide variety of bad actions or conditions. "Philosophers ought to pay attention" to the way the term evil is used, she contends, and she proposes this definition: "An evil is an intolerable harm that's produced by culpable wrongdoing." In other words, an evil is an action taken by one person or group that makes another person or group's life intolerable or death indecent.

"An evil need not be the result of sadism or wickedness but could come from negligence or selfishness," she says. "Many people who participate in evil aren't particularly malicious. My definition isn't based on intent, but on the harm that results."

She lists slavery, rape, and genocide as clear cases of evil, "as opposed to something like riding the subway without paying, which may violate society's rules but doesn't really hurt anyone. That would be an ordinary wrongdoing." Card's book is the result of decades of study and will be available from Oxford University Press in the spring.

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