Whether philosophy has anything to teach is a post-modern dilemma: When it tries to assert a truth that is universal, creeping skepticism takes aim. Yet the skeptic's tart attack on universals contains its own universal truth. One can know that nothing can be known? How can this be?
The point is life requires commitments and commitments yield struggle. Philosophy can aid in illuminating the shape and form of our conflicts, and in providing insights into how we may cope in some principled fashion with the many things that go bump in the night. That includes sociopathy and downright evil in the people we represent.
Mary Midgley's Wickedness, first published in 1984, now republished as a Routledge Classic, 2001, is a refreshing read. She is an analytic philosopher, but no mere word-dicer. Her contention is that there are genuinely evil, or wicked, things in human nature. Evil cannot be explained away in reductionistic terms as the product of evironment. Neither is evil some romantic lark, or the ambrosia of overlords and strong-spirited men and women breaking with the herd.
In matters large and small, in things world-historicial to mundane, there is a capacity for wickedness, and evil, everpresent. We need to recognize that, not make excuses for it, and contend with it judgment by judgment, choice by choice.
I was struck by this simple thesis as I considered some of the literature on sociopathy. Sociopaths are manipulative, they lack conscience, they possess the uncanny ability to make their failings appear to us to be our faults. And we are inclined often to give the sociopath the benefit of the doubt because we want to believe the best of those around us, including our clients. The ability to recognize wickedness on its own terms is a gift.
Oh, I can hear sniggering in some corners. In a world seemingly bounded by cause and effect, can we not explain the appearance of evil in terms of privation, want, need, and all the other nostrums of the reformer? We can try. But these excuses for poor behavior are often disproven by the everyday exceptions in our midst. Evil a result of poor education? Recall that Nazi Germany arose in a cutlure that produced the gymnasium and superb scholarhsip. Evil a result of poverty? Most poor persons aren't monsters. You can name the other exceptions.
Midgely provides an unflinching look at our capacity to be wicked. I heartily recommend the work as abounding in good sense, good scholarship, and a solid grasp on recent trends and tendencies in philosophy and intellectual history that have made the discussion of evil appear to be trite. There is nothing trite about it. Indeed, evil is what makes most of our professional life possible. Would there be a need for law if we were something other than flawed?
