Card: Bad does not necessarily equal evil

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is another story in an occasional series that gives a quick glimpse of some of the interesting ideas and insights of faculty around campus. To suggest a story: wisweek@news.wisc.edu.

Bad is not necessarily evil, says Claudia Card, professor of philosophy and women’s studies.

Card has proposed a theory that can answer many philosophical questions surrounding the idea of evil, such as the difference between ordinary wrongdoing and evil, and provide the age-old concept with a concrete definition. In a lecture this spring for the UW–Madison Literary and Philosophical Society, she laid out the tenets of her theory.

Card says that for an action to be considered evil, it must be a culpable wrongdoing and must cause one or more persons a reasonably foreseeable, intolerable harm.

“Wrongdoing can be negligent, reckless, unscrupulous or callous from indifference,” she says. “So the harm is what distinguishes ordinary wrongdoing from evil. An evil wrongdoing makes someone’s life intolerable.

“Harm becomes intolerable as it begins to make life impossible,” says Card. According to her theory, basic harms are denials of the necessities of life, such as uncontaminated food, water and air, as well as sleep, shelter and relationships with others.

For example, cheating can be simply ordinary wrongdoing because there is not necessarily a victim, and it does not make someone’s life intolerable. Conversely, a natural catastrophe is not evil because it is brought about indiscriminately by nature, not social agencies, and therefore has no culpability. But, says Card, a natural catastrophe could be considered evil if one believes it is perpetrated by a higher power.

“I don’t presuppose that there is a higher power, but the theory can be adapted for those who do,” she says.

In her forthcoming book, “The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil,” Card takes as paradigms of evil various atrocities, such as the Holocaust, the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the massacre at My Lai, American slavery and the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, as case studies for the various aspects of evil.

Card says she uses atrocities as her paradigms because they are indisputably evil, philosophers have previously neglected them, and their core elements of evil tend to be more obvious, making them easier to identify and analyze.

Card’s theory internalizes the concept. “We are not all potentially evil just because we are human,” says Card. “But any of us could acquire the potentialities of becoming evil under extreme circumstances.”