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The Reflexivity of Evil*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

John Kekes
John Kekes
Affiliation:
Philosophy, State University of New York at Albany
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Extract

The aim of this essay is to argue for the following claims: evil is prevalent; its prevalence is mainly the result of habitual and predictable patterns of action; these actions follow from the vices of their agents; in many cases, neither the evil actions nor the vices from which they follow are autonomous; it is nevertheless justified to hold the agents who perform these actions morally responsible for them; the widespread denial of this claim rests on the principle “ought implies can”; two versions of this principle must be distinguished; neither version can be used to exempt agents from moral responsibility for their nonautonomous actions and vices; this has fundamental implications for how morality and responsibility should be conceived.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , Winter 1998 , pp. 216 - 232
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1998

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References

1 For more complete accounts, see Benn, Stanley I., “Wickedness,” Ethics, vol. 95, no. 4 (07 1985), pp. 795–810CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kekes, John, Facing Evil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and Milo, Ronald D., Immorality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 For an account of the difficult concept of autonomy and a bibliography of the large literature on this subject, see Dworkin, Gerald, The Theory and Practice of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Autonomy,” in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, ed. Goodin, Robert E. and Pettit, Philip (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 359–65.Google Scholar

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