Nicholas McBride (University of Cambridge - Faculty of Law) has posted The Nature of Evil on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This 30 page paper sets out the argument about the nature of evil that will comprise the first half of a book I hope to work on entitled 'Deliver Us From Evil: Essays on the Limits of Law'. It criticises existing definitions of evil and offers a (relatively) novel definition of evil that better fits the way we think about what is and is not evil, and also accounts for the repulsiveness of evil. After reflecting on how we can classify evildoers, and the characteristic targets of evil, it concludes by setting out the ways in which evil places limits on (a) what respect for the rule of law demands; (b) the validity of laws; and (c) how much law can do to eradicate evil.
And from the paper:
Φ is evil if someone who hated reality would want Φ to exist.
I must be misunderstanding the definition. If I hate reality because of pervasive injustice and therefore want justice to exist, then does it follow that justice is evil? Or is it the requirement that I hate all of reality and therefor want nothing to exist--does it follow that only the nonexistence of all reality is evil?
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