James Sias

Emotions and Their Expressions

Introduction Expressions such as ‘I see the anger in his face’, ‘I can hear the disappointment in her voice’ and ‘[s]he felt him trembling with fear’ imply that the emotions of others are things that we can sometimes perceive – that is, things that we can see, hear and feel. However, one might think that, strictly speaking, the perceptual language here is misleading. One might, that is, think that when we say things like this, we do not really mean that the others state of mind is perceptible in the same way that ordinary objects in our visual field are perceptible. Rather, to say, ‘I see the anger in his face’, is to offer a kind of shorthand for something like this: I see him make a facial expression that people commonly make when angry, and so infer that he is angry. So, ordinary locutions such as ‘I see the anger in his face’ are misguided. They imply that emotions, like ordinary objects, are perceptible, and that behaviours that express our emotions enable non-inferential knowledge of them by others. But in fact there is no literal perception of emotions; at most what is perceived are behaviours that express the emotions, and our knowledge of others’ emotions is always mediated by our knowledge of other things, so that, even in paradigmatic cases where we take ourselves to recognize someones emotion in their behaviour directly , what we do is infer the presence and character of the emotion on the basis of behavioural evidence. Note, however, that if our ordinary language is misleading in this way, then it is also misleading with respect to the relationship between emotions and their expressions. We often describe faces as happy or relieved, voices as anxious, joyful or scared, bodily demeanours as embarrassed or confident and so on. (Indeed, as one author has observed, there really appear to be no independently characterizable kinds under which, for example, the facial expressions associated with sadness, or joy, fall, but that ‘can be described without reference to the emotions’ – Peacocke [2004]: 66.) Our descriptions of expressive behaviours suggest that we take the emotions to be embodied in the behaviours that express them – the relief is somehow right there in his face , the joy is somehow right there in her voice and so on.

Serial Murder, Psychopathy, and Objectification

Why are psychopathic serial murderers like Ted Bundy and Edmund Kemper so often cited as examples of evil people? Does it have something to do with serial murder? Does it have something to do with psychopathy? For that matter, what is psychopathy? And how can psychopaths be evil if they supposedly “lack a conscience”? The short-term aim of this chapter is just to address all of these questions. The long-term aim is to gather psychological data to be used later in the book, for purposes of evaluating various philosophical theories of evil, and then developing and defending my own.

Money, Greed, and Commodification

The ubiquity of expressions like “the love of money is the root of all evil” suggests that many people associate evil with the unscrupulous pursuit of wealth. This is interesting, though, since most philosophers who work on the nature of evil tend to overlook the category of money-related evils entirely. This chapter aims to rectify that by examining a range of such evils, including Bernie Madoff’s perpetration of the largest financial fraud in history, human trafficking, and even intensive animal farming, as well as a series of empirical psychological studies of the effects of money upon the mind. Much like Chaps. 2 and 3, the information gathered in this chapter will be useful later in the book, especially when the time comes to examine various philosophical theories of evil.

An Introduction to Evil

The purpose of the introductory chapter is to make as clear as possible what will (and, just as importantly, what will not) be the focus of the book. The central question of the book is this: what makes someone an evil person? A secondary question is this: what makes an action evil? In order to make decent sense of these questions, though, I have to contrast my own use of the term “evil” with a few other common ways in which the term is used. I also clarify the notion of an evil person by contrasting it with the notion of an evildoer. The end of the chapter is an outline of the rest of the book. Part I (Chaps. 2– 4) will focus on the psychology of evil, and Part II (Chaps. 5– 7) will focus on the philosophy of evil.

Theories of Evil Personhood

In this chapter, I describe and critique a number of prominent theories of evil proposed by philosophers in recent years. These theories are divided into roughly four categories: extremity theories, action-based theories, desire-based theories, and affect-based theories. For each type of theory, I describe an example or two of a theory of that type, and explain why it does not do an adequate job of accounting either for our intuitions about evil, or for some of the psychological data gathered in Part I of the book.

A New Theory of Evil

In the final chapter of the book, I develop and defend my own theory of evil. Since my view is very much inspired by some of the ideas of Hannah Arendt, I begin by discussing a few of her more noteworthy claims about evil. This leads me to conclude that evil is a matter of regarding others as morally superfluous. The next section aims to clarify what this means, so that I can then fully articulate the view and apply it not only to evil persons, but also to evil actions, institutions, policies, events, and so forth. Then I show how the view accommodates the psychological data gathered in Part I of the book, and also how it avoids some of the problems raised for other theories in the last chapter, before defending it against a number of potential objections.

Genocide, Ideology, and Dehumanization

Genocide, like serial murder, ranks high on most lists of paradigm instances of evil. But why? What makes genocide any more evil than other actions or events with similarly high death tolls, like wars? Focusing primarily on the Nazi Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide of 1994, this chapter examines the social-psychological circumstances that precipitate genocide, as well as the psychologies of notorious genocidal leaders, like Adolf Eichmann and Pauline Nyiramasuhuko. As with Chap. 2, this chapter has both short-term and long-term aims. In the short-term, it attempts to make as much sense as possible out of genocide and those who perpetrate it. In the long-term, it aims to gather important psychological data on which to base the book’s later philosophical discussions of evil.

Three Puzzles about Evil

Before we can focus our attention entirely on philosophical theories of evil, I need to address a few puzzles that often arise in this context, and that threaten to undermine theoretical work on the subject. The first puzzle has to do with the connection between evil and incomprehensibility. If evil is fundamentally incomprehensible, as many assume, then how could there ever be a satisfactory theory of evil, if the point of such a theory is to help us comprehend the subject matter? According to the second puzzle, if most plausible candidates for evil are likely to suffer from some sort of mental illness or disorder (like psychopathy), then how could it be fair or accurate to condider them evil? The third puzzle concerns skepticism about the reality of moral character in general, and of evil character in particular.