Evil

Yesterday morning we went out for a walk and found that during the night a vehicle had swerved off the street onto the bottom of our driveway, slammed down its brakes -- leaving black tread marks on the cement -- and skidded along the front of the lawn taking out a long swath of grass. Instead of solid green grass there is now a curving, ugly rut -- along with other tracks showing that the driver turned again, drove up toward the house, backed away, and drove across again

Before paranoia took over, we discovered that we had not been singled out. Several other lawns along the same street had been vandalized in similar fashion. This morning we looked at half a dozen on other streets that had been conspicuously damaged.

Some person, late in the night, deliberately and repeatedly harmed property whose only purpose was to be beautiful.

I call that “evil”. I call it evil because it was not only done knowingly but was willed with desire that the damage be done.

I propose that the distinction between “bad”, and “evil” should be based on the state of the will of the perpetrator rather than the degree of harm done.

We English-speaking humans classify many actions as “bad”, but we reserve the word “evil” for actions that transcend badness. Many acts which are inconvenient to society, or disruptive of the social order, are labeled bad, or criminal, but “evil” has a cosmic dimension.

In criminal law class I once proposed, tongue-in-cheek, that all crimes should be punishable by death – whether shooting someone or just willfully speeding. My argument was that minor crimes, being fully under the control of the person committing them, would immediately cease when the population learned that execution would be the consequence. Speeding might be worth a $50 fine, but not the electric chair. Spinning tires in someone’s garden would not be worth a lethal injection.

My serious opinion is that the ill will of the criminal, and not the severity of the damage he does, should be judged and punished by appropriate penalties. I think that a person who shoplifts because she’s poor, or who steals cars to support himself, should be judged less harshly than a person whose only motive and only profit is the satisfaction of hurting other beings. I believe that a man who tortures a cat is guilty of a much greater crime than a person engaged in the criminal enterprise of stealing money from banks. Of course the shoplifter and the bank robber are criminals, but their crimes are lesser than those motivated by evil.

Reading Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” and some of his other works was one of the most pleasant experiences of my life. Kant is most known in the area of moral philosophy, of course, for his Categorical Imperative: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." But I also gleaned from Kant that in judging what was good or evil in human behavior, it was the ill will or good will of the actor which should be determinative. I’m probably oversimplifying and distorting Kant, but I don’t have time to reread one of his books before posting this, and that was the general impression I’ve carried around for years.

At any rate, that principle is the thrust of this post. We can classify degrees of evil if we like, but the starting point, the threshold of evil, is an act based on ill will, on a desire to do harm for the sake of doing harm.