dispositional accounts of evil personhood

Dispositional accounts of evil personhoodAuthor(s): Luke RussellSource: Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the AnalyticTradition, Vol. 149, No. 2 (June 2010), pp. 231-250Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40606353 .

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Philos Stud (2010) 149:231-250 DOI 10.1007/s 11098-009-9344-3

Dispositional accounts of evil personhood

Luke Russell

Published online: 13 February 2009 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract It is intuitively plausible that not every evildoer is an evil person. In order to make sense of this intuition we need to construct an account of evil personhood in addition to an account of evil action. Some philosophers have offered aggregative accounts of evil personhood, but these do not fit well with common intuitions about the explanatory power of evil personhood, the possibility of moral reform, and the relationship between evil and luck. In contrast, a dispositional account of evil personhood can allow that evil is explanatory, that an evil person can become good, and that luck might prevent evil persons from doing evil or cause non-evil persons to do evil. Yet the dispositional account of evil personhood implies that some evil persons are blameless, which seems to clash with the intuition that evil persons deserve our strongest moral condemnation. Moreover, since it is likely that a large proportion of us are disposed to perform evil actions in some environments, the dispositional account threatens to label a large proportion of people evil. In this paper I consider a range of possible modifications to the dispositional account that might bring it more closely into alignment with our intuitions about moral condemnation and the rarity of evil persons. According to the most plausible of these theories, S is an evil person if S is strongly disposed to perform evil actions when in conditions that favour S's autonomy.

Keywords Evil · Vice · Moral character

1 Intuitions about evil persons

Evil is a concept that is used in everyday moral discourse, although its uses are varied and contentious. I advocate a conceptual pluralism about evil action, with the

L. Russell (El) Department of Philosophy, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia e-mail: [email protected]



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aim of respecting the various traditions of use (Russell 2006). According to the psychologically thin account of evil action, an action is evil if and only if it is a culpable wrong that is appropriately connected to an undeserved extreme harm. According to various psychologically thick conceptions of evil action, an action is evil if and only if it is a culpable wrong that is appropriately connected to an undeserved extreme harm and also meets some specified combination of psychological conditions, such as being performed in knowing defiance of morality, or being pleasurable to the wrongdoer, or being performed from malice. While some philosophers have suggested that we could derive an account of evil action from a prior account of evil personhood (Haybron 2002a, p. 280; Singer 2004, p. 190), it is more plausible that an account of evil personhood will depend on an account of evil action (cf. Card 2002, p. 21; Kekes 2005, p. 2; Morton 2004, p. 66). Thus, the thick and thin conceptions of evil action are logically prior to an account of evil personhood.

As Daniel Haybron correctly points out, the concept of evil has a life outside of philosophy, so our theory of evil should constrained to some degree by our pre- theoretical intuitions about evil (Haybron 2002a, p. 261). Perhaps we will discover that those intuitions are mutually inconsistent, or that the theoretical concept that best respects those intuitions fails to refer to any actual actions or persons. On either of these grounds we may decide to reject some of those intuitions and alter the folk concept of evil. Thus, our final account of evil personhood should be coherent and useful, but it should also respect as many as possible of our most deeply-held intuitions about evil actions and evil persons. The following eight intuitions about evil persons are particularly deserving of our attention.

(1) There are some actual evil persons (Kekes 2005, p. 128; Card 2002, pp. 21-22; Singer 2004, p. 190; pace Cole 2006, p. 173).

(2) Evil persons are rare (Haybron 2002a, p. 278; Kekes 1990, p. 5; Garrard 2002, p. 321).

(3) Evil persons deserve our strongest moral condemnation (Singer 2004, p. 190; Kekes 2005, p. 58).

(4) In some cases the fact that S is an evil person helps to explain why S performed a terribly wrong action (Cole 2006, pp. 124-127; McGinn 1997, pp. 77-87; Kekes 1990, p. 7).

(5) Not every evildoer is an evil person (Haybron 2002a, p. 279; Morton 2004, p. 65; Card 2002, p. 22; Garrard 2002, p. 321; Singer 2004, p. 190; Formosa 2008, p. 233; Russell (forthcoming)).

(6) It is possible to become an evil person by performing evil actions (cf. Wolfendale 2007, pp. 174-175; Morton 2004, p. 38).

(7) It is possible, though very difficult, for an evil person to become a good person. (Haybron 2002a, pp. 277-278; Card 2002, p. 21).

(8) Not every evil person performs, attempts or intends to perform evil actions.

Aggregative accounts of evil personhood suggest that S is an evil person if and only if S has performed more than a specified number of evil actions, or that S is an evil person if and only if S is morally responsible for more than a specified amount of undeserved harm. Such accounts deny the possibility that an evil person could

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Dispositional accounts of evil personhood 233

become a good person, thus conflicting with intuition (7).1 Aggregative accounts of evil personhood also fail to make sense of intuitions (4) and (8). People sometimes try to explain the performance of an evil action by saying 'he did it because he was evil', but such an explanation would be incoherent if evil personhood consists in an aggregate of evil acts or an aggregate of harms. Moreover, aggregative accounts cannot allow that, due to luck, an evil person might fail to perform or even intend to perform any evil actions. Yet an evil person might, by chance, live in a strictly policed society, and his fear of punishment might prevent him from ever forming the intention to perform a specific evil act. Similarly, we can imagine an evil creature in a horror story who was destroyed before he got the chance to inflict any harm.

2 The basic dispositional model

These problems that face the aggregative accounts of evil personhood appear to be avoided by a basic dispositional account according to which S is an evil person if and only if S is disposed to perform evil actions. If we adopt an account of dispositions that allows for dispositions to be causes of their manifestation (Armstrong 1968; Mackie 1977), or, at least causally relevant to their manifestation (McKitrick 2005), the basic dispositional model of evil personhood will make sense of the claim that 'he did it because he was evil'. Moreover, the basic dispositional account implies that there can be evil persons who, by chance, never intend or attempt to perform any evil actions, just as there can be fragile objects that, by chance, never break. The dispositional account is particularly appealing in relation to the possibility of moral conversions. While a balanced aggregative account allows that an evil Nazi war criminal could become a good person by heroically counterbalancing his evil actions with good deeds, the dispositional account suggests that an evil Nazi war criminal might become a good person simply by losing his disposition to perform evil actions and living a life of moderate virtue. If the moderately virtuous ex-Nazi is no longer the kind of person who would perform those horrible deeds, then it is quite possible that he no longer is an evil person.2

Thus, the basic dispositional account of evil personhood fits well with intuitions (1), (4), (7) and (8). Since some people are disposed to perform evil actions, this account implies that some people are evil. If being an evil person is equivalent to possessing a disposition to perform evil actions, it is possible that S's evil action is explained by the fact that S is an evil person. Since S's dispositions can change over time, the basic dispositional account implies that S can change from being an evil person to being a good person. Finally, since dispositions can fail to be manifested

1 In order to allow for that possibility we could endorse a balanced aggregative account, according to which S is an evil person if and only if S is an evildoer and the aggregate of the undeserved harms for which S is morally responsible, minus the not undeserved benefits for which S is morally responsible, exceeds a certain threshold. 2 In fact, it is plausible that a person who was evil and has become good must have done more than lose the disposition to perform evil actions. For instance, he must feel remorse and guilt for his past actions.

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in behaviour due to luck, this account implies that some evil persons might fail to perform, attempt or intend evil actions due to luck.

It might appear that the basic dispositional account clashes with intuition (5): that not every evildoer is an evil person. It could be argued that if S performs an action 0 then S must have been disposed to some degree to 0, even if 0ing is not the kind of thing that S does often, or the kind of thing that S is likely to do. Thus, it seems, every evildoer must have been disposed to some degree to perform evil actions, and every evildoer would count as an evil person on the basic dispositional model. Yet it is commonly claimed that S 0ed even though S is not disposed to 0. For instance, we might say that S cried when he heard that his team won the premiership even though S is a hard man who is not disposed to cry, or that S dropped the ball even though S is skilful player who is not disposed to drop the ball. In such cases the claim that S is disposed to 0 is taken to imply that S is strongly disposed to 0, or that S is markedly disposed to 0. Generally, philosophers who claim that a spécifie evildoer is not an evil person are thinking of a case in which the evildoer was not strongly disposed to perform evil actions but did so on this occasion. In order to allow that not every evildoer is an evil person the basic dispositional account of evil personhood should state that S is an evil person if and only if S is strongly disposed to perform evil actions.3

The basic dispositional model also fits neatly with intuition (6): that it is possible to become an evil person by performing evil actions. There are various processes by which S's performance of evil actions might change S's disposition to perform such actions. Firstly, if S's performance of extremely violent actions has some pay-off for S, such as the alleviation of a threat or the achievement of social power, then S's behaviour might be reinforced, and S might come to view himself as the kind of person who is feared and respected because he will fly off the handle at the slightest provocation (Morton 2004, pp. 35-38). Secondly, if S possesses a normal aversion to inflicting extreme harm but repeatedly inflicts such harm - say, when placed in a stressful and dangerous situation - then S might come to be desensitized to the suffering of others, and hence more strongly disposed to inflict harm in future (Morton 2004, pp. 42-43). For instance, some military personnel who are instructed to torture prisoners report that the work was incredibly distressing and difficult at first, but eventually became routine (Wolfendale 2007, p. 175). Thirdly, some people might develop a taste for the adrenaline rush that comes with violating moral norms, or for the sense of power than comes from breaking the will of another person (McGinn 1997, p. 77). Some military personnel who are instructed to torture eventually come to enjoy it, as was the case with the Argentinean officers who, having routinely tortured prisoners in the Dirty War, began betting amongst

There is room for disagreement over how strongly S must be disposed to 0 in order for us to say without qualification that S is disposed to 0. Moreover, the relevant strength varies depending on which kind of action we are considering. For instance, S could count as forgetful in spite of being disposed to remember the vast majority of what she knows, but S could count as honest only if S is disposed to tell the truth in almost all situations. Perhaps the rough rule is that S counts as being disposed to 0 if and only if S is markedly likely to 0, compared to some base level of likelihood that varies from one action type to the next.

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themselves on who could kidnap and torture the prettiest girl (Simpson and Bennett 1985, p. 109).

Finally, if S has performed evil actions uncharacteristically, subsequent reflection on the wrongness of those actions might threaten S's positive self-image. One way in which S could respond to this threat would be to explain the actions as having been chosen by someone else, rather than by S himself (Wolfendale 2007, p. 145), but another possible response is for S to abandon his judgment that the actions were wrong and instead see them as being justified (Zimbardo 2007, p. 220). If this post- hoc justification of S's specific wrong actions ushers in a change in S's general attitude to actions ofthat type, then S's disposition to perform such actions in future might be greatly strengthened, and S would have become an evil person via performing evil actions.

We have seen that the basic dispositional account of evil personhood accords with intuitions (1), (4), (5), (6), (7) and (8), and in many respects is more appealing than the aggregative models. Thus, it is no surprise that some philosophers have leaned towards a dispositional account of evil personhood. For instance, Morton points out that the "simplest slide from acts to people is to call someone evil when they produce a lot of evil acts", but he concludes that "it makes more sense to think of an evil person as one whose personality has as a central element some way of negotiating the barriers (to inflicting extreme harm)." (Morton 2004, p. 65) Garrard assumes that many evildoers fail to count as evil persons because they do not possess "settled dispositions" to do evil (Garrard 2002, p. 321), so it seems she holds that a disposition to perform evil actions is at least necessary for evil personhood. Haybron endorses an "affective-motivational" account of evil personhood which is dispositional rather than aggregative, but which includes extra conditions that are not present in the basic dispositional model (Haybron 2002a, p. 269).

3 Blamelessness and rarity

Despite its many strengths, the basic dispositional account appears to be vulnerable to two significant objections. The first objection concerns intuition (3): that evil persons deserve our strongest moral condemnation. Aggregative accounts fit comparatively neatly with this intuition because they imply that S is evil only if S has wrongfully attempted to inflict extreme harm. Granted, such evildoers may have grown up in violent homes, and may have done evil only when placed in difficult circumstances. In such cases, coming to know the evildoers' circumstances tends to undermine or weaken our moral condemnation of them (Watson 1987, pp. 272- 274). Yet even in such cases, these people have performed extreme culpable wrongs, and hence our moral indignation and our blame seems warranted. In contrast, the basic dispositional account implies that S might be an evil person even though S has performed no wrongs. Yet how can someone who has performed no wrongs be blameworthy for anything? And if such a person is not blameworthy, how can he be deserving of the strongest moral condemnation?

Advocates of the basic dispositional model could respond to this challenge by accepting that moral condemnation is tied to blameworthiness, but claiming that

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someone who is strongly disposed to perform evil actions is blameworthy for having acquired that disposition, regardless of whether the disposition manifests itself in action. For instance, if S's choices foreseeably led S to become evil, then we might blame S for being evil regardless of whether S actually performs an evil action. This response will not solve the problem, though, because it is possible for us to acquire behavioural dispositions through no choices of our own. That such unchosen acquisition is logically possible is demonstrated by the example of the Franken- steinian creature who is designed to be evil and then built from scratch. No actual people are built in this way, though, so we might think that every actual person who acquires a strong disposition to do evil does so through his own choices, and hence can be held responsible for his resultant character. Yet there are many actual cases in which morally normal people accidentally suffer head injuries that radically change their behavioural dispositions. For instance, some victims of frontal lobe injury report loss of affect related to moral situations, and some such people are markedly more likely to inflict harm on others as a result of this accidentally acquired mental deficit (Goldberg 2001, pp. 146-147).

It is not clear whether such brain injuries result in rational as well as emotional impairment (Fine and Kennett 2004; Maibom 2005, p. 242). If the injury produced a sufficient rational impairment we might judge that the injured person no longer has the rational capacity required for moral responsibility, and henceforth would be able to perform extremely harmful actions but not evil actions. It could also be argued that emotional impairment alone could remove the injured person from the domain of moral responsibility. Nonetheless, it seems possible in some cases at least that via an accidental injury a person blamelessly could acquire a strong disposition to perform evil actions while retaining some moral sensibility and the capacity for moral reasoning. In addition to such cases, it is plausible that a person blamelessly could acquire a strong disposition to perform evil actions by inheriting an unusual genetic mutation, or by being born into and raised in an extremely abusive family.

Every moral theory has some difficulty explaining how we can be aware of the extra-agential contributing causes of behaviour yet still hold people morally responsible for their actions. The relevant issue at this point is not merely that dispositional accounts of evil personhood face this problem too. Rather, it is that dispositional accounts, but not aggregative accounts, imply that S can be an evil person before S acts badly, while S remains conspicuously blameless. Advocates of the dispositional approach could simply deny intuition (3), and claim that until evil persons actually perform evil actions, they deserve non-moral resentment or disapproval but do not deserve moral condemnation. Yet it is plausible that by calling a person evil we are not merely expressing disapproval, but are morally condemning that person in the strongest terms. If evil persons deserve our strongest moral condemnation, then the dispositional account implies that some blameless people deserve our strongest moral condemnation. This result seems counterintuitive.

The second objection to the basic dispositional account of evil personhood concerns intuition (2): that evil persons are rare. This intuition is widely shared, but it needs to be explored in more detail. The claim that evil persons are rare could be read either as a modal claim expressing some kind of necessity, or as a merely material claim that applies to the actual world as it is. For instance, the claim that the

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intellectual elite are comparatively rare is a modal claim that remains true even if the general intelligence of the population increases dramatically, because the concept 'elite' marks the far end of the statistical distribution, and its reference shifts as the distribution of intelligence in the population shifts. In contrast, the claim that anorexic people are comparatively rare is a merely material claim that might be true now, but need not remain true. Arguably, when we say that evil persons are rare we are making a merely material claim analogous to the claim that anorexic people are comparatively rare. We can imagine a world in which no one is evil, just as we can imagine a world in which the vast majority of people are evil. The widely shared intuition is that only a small proportion of actual persons are evil. Thus, a theory that implied that a very large proportion of actual persons are evil would not thereby be incoherent, but such a result would be counter-intuitive.

Aggregative theories of evil personhood can easily account for the fact that the vast majority of actual persons are not evil, since the vast majority of actual persons have not wrongfully attempted to inflict extreme amounts of harm. At first glance it might appear that the basic dispositional model of evil personhood secures the same result. After all, we might take the fact that not many persons perform evil actions as evidence in support of the claim that not many persons are strongly disposed to perform evil actions. Yet we should not forget that the vast majority of us have not been placed in the kind of environments that are most likely to elicit extreme wrongdoing.

Some such environments are highly stressful, dangerous and demoralising. For instance, let us consider the Sonderkommando: prisoners in Nazi concentration camps who collaborated with the guards. Primo Levi notes that the Sonderkom- mando performed many extremely wrong actions, but, he claims:

I believe that no one is authorised to judge them.... I would invite anyone who dares pass judgment to carry out upon himself, with sincerity, a conceptual experiment: Let him imagine, if he can, that he has lived for months or years in a ghetto, tormented by chronic hunger, fatigue, promiscuity and humili- ation; that he has seen die around him, one by one, his beloved; that he is cut off from the world, unable to receive or transmit news; that, finally, he is loaded onto a train, eighty or a hundred persons to a boxcar; that he travels into the unknown, blindly, for sleepless days and nights; and that he is at last flung inside the walls of an indecipherable inferno (Levi 1988, p. 59).

It seems likely that quite a large proportion of people would wrongly inflict extreme harm when placed in such environments. However, it is not clear that such wrongdoers are culpable for their wrong actions. If the extremity of the conditions exculpates the Sonderkommando, then we should not judge that their actions are evil. In this case, the fact that a large proportion of us are disposed to perform extremely harmful actions when placed in similarly desperate circumstances would not imply that a large proportion of us are evil.

Yet there are other environments that do not seem sufficiently desperate or threatening to be exculpatory in which a surprisingly large proportion of people have performed extreme wrongs. For instance, a large number of Germans willingly participated in the persecution and execution of Jews in the Holocaust, but many of

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the perpetrators of those atrocities were not themselves in extremely dangerous and stressful conditions, and many were not compelled by orders and threats to act as they did (Goldhagen 1997, p. 379). Similarly, a surprisingly large number of people participated in the Rwandan genocide despite a lack of exculpatory conditions (Prunier 1995, pp. 243-248). In light of the widespread participation in these atrocities, it seems we must conclude that a surprisingly large proportion of the people of Germany in the 1930s and the people of Rwanda in the 1990s were disposed to perform evil actions. It is possible that the people of these nations were atypical, and that, while many of them were evil, it remains the case that evil persons are very rare in the human population as a whole. The worrying alternative possibility is that these populations were not atypical, and that a great many of us would have committed evil actions had we been unlucky enough to have been placed in those societies.

This possibility gains credence from Stanley Milgram' s obedience experiment, in which the experimental subjects were asked by an authority figure to give an increasingly painful and dangerous series of electric shocks to a so-called learner when that learner made mistakes in answering questions. Deliberately giving apparently painful and life-threatening electric shocks to an innocent person is a culpably wrong action that is sufficiently extreme to count as evil, at least according to psychologically thin conceptions of evil action.4 The surprising result of the Milgram experiment was that 65% of experimental subjects were willing to administer shocks right up to the final voltage, at which point the, subjects had been given reason to believe that they were not only hurting but clearly endangering the life of the learner. Milgram himself claimed:

If a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town. (Milgram, quoted in Blass 2000, pp. 35-36)

The Milgram experiment has been widely replicated at other times and in other cultures, and, while rates of compliance do vary, the clear finding is that a surprisingly large portion of experimental subjects will inflict extreme undeserved suffering on another human being when instructed to do so by a lone authority figure (Blass 2004, pp. 301-305). The best explanation for this result is that a surprisingly large portion of humans are disposed to perform actions of this type. If these actions count as evil, and if we accept the basic dispositional account of evil personhood, then we must say that surprisingly large portions of the human population are evil persons.

Thus, it seems that the basic dispositional model of evil personhood leads us to say that there can be blameless evil persons who have done nothing wrong, and that

4 It is unlikely that advocates of some psychologically thick accounts of evil action would claim that the subjects in the Milgram experiment performed evil actions, because the subjects in the Milgram experiments did not act out of malice, nor did they take pleasure in their wrongdoing or inflict harm for its own sake. However, it is plausible that most of those subjects performed wrong actions that they themselves knew to be wrong. Thus, if we stipulated that an action is evil if and only if it is a defiant extreme culpable wrong, then the subjects of the Milgram experiment did perform evil actions.

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a very large portion of humans are evil. In contrast, if we employ an aggregative model of evil personhood then we would be able to say that only some of the comparatively rare persons who actually perform evil actions count as evil, and all evil persons are blameworthy in that they have performed evil actions. In so far as we share intuitions (2) and (3), then, it seems that we have a reason to prefer aggregative to dispositional models of evil personhood.

There are various ways in which we could respond to this problem. Firstly, we could simply switch back to an aggregative model. Yet, as we have seen, even the more sophisticated aggregative accounts clash with other deeply held intuitions concerning the explanatory power of evil personhood, the possibility of moral conversions, and the relation between evil and luck. In order to avoid these costs we might take a second option: a hybrid account according to which an aggregate and a disposition each are necessary and jointly are sufficient for evil personhood. By setting a double hurdle for evil personhood, a hybrid account would secure the result that evil persons are rare, and since one of the necessary conditions for evil personhood is a disposition, this model allows that an evil person could become a good person by losing that disposition. A hybrid account also comes closer to making sense of the claim 'he did it because he was evil'. There is much that is attractive about a hybrid theory, but it fails to allow for the possibility of reliably deterred evil persons who, due to fear of punishment, never attempt to inflict extreme harm. If luck can prevent an evil person from ever doing evil, then we have a good reason to reject any hybrid account that includes an aggregate as a necessary condition for evil personhood.

A third possible response to the problem is to stick with the basic dispositional model and bite the bullet. In this case we would have to accept both that a blameless person can be evil and that a large proportion of us are evil, even though, for most of us, our evil characters are never manifested in our actions. Granted, it is counterintuitive to claim that a great many seemingly ordinary people who perform no extreme wrongs are evil nonetheless. Yet such a claim is not incoherent, and the historical and experimental facts that prompt that claim are themselves genuinely surprising. Some philosophers have argued that social psychologists have discov- ered that, contrary to expectation, no one is morally virtuous (Doris 2002). Has the twentieth century also revealed that, contrary to expectation, a large proportion of human beings are evil?

Many of us will baulk at this conclusion, partly because it requires that we take seriously the possibility that we ourselves are evil. It is tempting to dismiss our reaction as mere moral vanity. Yet it is not clear that moral vanity could wholly account for our reaction. Many of the subjects in the Milgram experiment do not strike us as evil persons even after we have seen them administer the shocks. While these people clearly are disposed to perform extreme culpable wrongs and have done so, it still seems that they fall short of being morally the worst sort of people. Thus, it is worth asking whether there are ways in which we could modify the basic dispositional account so as to bring it more closely into alignment with our intuitions concerning the rarity of evil persons, without sacrificing its advantages over its aggregative rivals.

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4 Thoroughness of the disposition

One such modification can be extracted from Daniel Haybron's affective- motivational account of evil personhood, according to which evil persons not only are disposed to perform evil actions, but are "not aligned with the good to a morally significant extent" (Haybron 2002a, p. 269). In other words, Haybron takes evil persons necessarily to be so thoroughly disposed to wrongdoing that they "have no good side, but are consistently vicious." (Haybron 2002a, p. 269)5 This view is echoed in comments made by Phillip Cole, who suggests that extreme wrongdoers such as Hitler and Mengele were not evil because even they had a morally good side (Cole 2006, pp. 196-198).

Haybron and Cole are suggesting that evil persons must be thoroughly bad; that is, morally bad in every respect. When Haybron and Cole add this condition to their respective accounts of evil personhood they do not do so with an eye to defending dispositional accounts against aggregative rivals, yet it is obvious that such a thoroughness condition could be put to this use. Nonetheless, it is not easy to see exactly which modification of the basic dispositional account will produce the desired result. Given that evil actions must be extreme rather than trivial wrongs, it is not plausible that S is an evil person if and only if S is disposed never to do anything morally virtuous or admirable, because such a person might also be disposed never to do anything extremely vicious or deplorable. It would also be too demanding to claim that S is evil only if S is strongly disposed to perform evil actions in every situation and at every opportunity. An evil person who has no good side might well take a rest from evildoing and watch television without ceasing to be evil. Thus, it seems that the most plausible version of a thorough dispositional account of evil personhood must include a connection to extreme wrongdoing and include a thoroughness condition that is just strong enough to exclude the possibility of the evil person having a good side. Let us say, then, that the thorough dispositional account of evil personhood is the view that S is an evil person if and only if S is strongly disposed to perform evil actions and is strongly disposed not to perform morally virtuous actions, where virtuous actions are morally right actions performed from morally admirable motives.

The thorough dispositional model of evil personhood appears to hold all of the advantages of the basic dispositional model, with the additional benefit of securing the result that evil persons are rare. According to this model, the vast majority of the subjects in the Milgram experiment are not evil because, while they are disposed to perform evil actions (in the psychologically thin sense of evil action), they have a good side nonetheless. For instance, they live normal family and social lives in which they perform many admirable and morally upright actions.

The problem with the thorough dispositional model, though, is that it suggests that evil persons are too rare. Haybron is aware that the addition of a thoroughness condition strikes many people as too demanding, "because most of those whom we

5 Haybron also claims that an evil person must be thoroughly bad not just in their dispositions to act, but

also in their moral affect; that is, that an evil person must not feel the pull of morality and must not feel appropriate guilt or shame about his own moral failings (Haybron 1999, pp. 134-136). For current purposes, we shall focus merely on thoroughness of dispositions to act.

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tend to call evil-war criminals, torturers, mass murderers, etc. - would surely be excluded by the account." (Haybron 2002a, p. 270). According to Haybron, the fictional Mafioso Tony Soprano is not an evil person, because, despite his many acts of extreme violence, Soprano is a devoted and in some ways admirable family man (Haybron 2002b, pp. 65-66). While Haybron leaves open the possibility that actual evil persons exist, he is unsure whether even Hitler was an evil person, because it is quite possible that Hitler had a good side (Haybron 2002a, p. 270). While Haybron finds this thought "distressing" (Haybron 2002b, p. 74), Cole seems comparatively happy to accept that, since no actual person is thoroughly bad, no actual person is evil (Cole 2006, p. 173).

For many people the implication that even Hitler possibly was not an evil person would count as sufficient grounds for rejecting the thorough dispositional account of evil personhood.6 It simply is not plausible that we revise our assessment that Hitler was evil when we see that he had respectful relationships with some of his staff, or that he was kind towards dogs.7 Nor do we revise our judgment that the BTK killer Denis Rader was evil when we discover that he was a church and cub scout leader. Thus, it is worth asking why the thorough dispositional account of evil personhood has attracted advocates. We shall consider three assumptions that might lead people to accept the thorough dispositional account: the mirror thesis, the end point thesis, and the qualitative difference thesis.

We might be led to the thorough dispositional account via the assumption of the mirror thesis; namely, that the morally worst sort of person must be a mirror-image of the morally best sort of person (McNaughton 1988, p. 135; Steiner 2002, p. 185). It is true that an extremely virtuous person must be morally admirable in all respects, and could be counted on to do the right thing in all situations, and a mirror- image of that person would be bad in all respects and could be counted on to do the wrong thing in all situations. Even so, we have no reason to believe that every extremely immoral person must be morally bad in all respects.

By way of analogy, let us consider what it takes to be a good or bad tennis player. An extremely good tennis player must possess a mastery of the many different activities that are part of the game: serving, returning, and running around the court hitting forehand and backhand ground strokes, volleys, lobs, smashes. Yet it is not the case that someone can be a really bad tennis player only if she is bad at every one of these activities. Since each activity is required regularly in every game, a player who is very good at some but very bad at others could count as a very bad tennis player who is easily beaten. The skills and activities that are required by moral virtue are more varied and complex than those required when playing tennis, 6 Advocates of psychologically thick account of evil action that includes defiance of morality as a necessary condition for evil action might claim that, since Hitler mistakenly believed that what he was doing was morally right, he did not perform evil actions. Most accounts of evil personhood built on this foundation would imply that Hitler was not an evil person. Again, many people will take this as a reductio of accounts that include defiance as a necessary condition for evil action. 7 In order to support the claim that Hitler was evil and hence thoroughly bad, Haybron suggests that all of Hitler's superficially admirable actions were motivated by selfishness or habit rather than a genuine valuing of other people (Haybron 2002b, pp. 74-75). This is possible, but highly speculative. The problem for Haybron is that it also seems quite possible that Hitler did value some people, and that he would still count as an evil person even if he had a good side.

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and range over a far broader domain. For this reason, full virtue is an exacting ideal that requires an integrated unity of good character traits (Aristotle 1985, pp. 1144b32-1145al; Hursthouse 1999, p. 156). But, as with tennis, someone can be morally a very bad person without being bad at every activity required in the game of virtue.

This analogy, while imperfect, is borne out by actual examples of prima facie evil persons. Many brutal and sadistic war criminals were comparatively virtuous in their dealings with people within their own culture but violently hostile towards members of some other cultures. Indeed, it is plausible that many of the morally worst kind of people in the actual world are better able to achieve their immoral goals because they possess some morally admirable character traits. For instance, people who play important organisational roles in carefully coordinated atrocities are better able to spread death and destruction if they are courageous, committed and loyal. Similarly, people with psychopathic or sociopathic tendencies who are better able to blend in with society by 'having good sides' are thereby more likely to inflict great suffering on the people who, having come to trust them, have let down their guard. If we assumed that evil persons must be mirror-images of fully virtuous persons, then the chillingly successful and reliable real-life evildoers would not count as evil persons simply because they are not bad in every respect. The implausibility of this result suggests instead that we should reject the mirror thesis.

Another route to the thorough dispositional account is via the assumption that S is an evil person only if there could not be a morally worse person than S. This is the assumption that evil marks an end point on a moral spectrum, rather than an extended zone at the bad end of the spectrum. Yet even if we grant that for every vicious person who has a morally good side there is a worse possible person who is thoroughly bad, it is not plausible that the concept evil applies only to the worst possible person. Acceptance of the end point thesis would imply that necessarily no actual person is evil, because for any actual bad person we could always imagine a slightly worse person who took one more innocent life, or who felt slightly more pleasure while inflicting torture. Moral concepts that are guaranteed to lack any actual referent might be useful in allowing us to mark out positive ideals at which we can aim, but it is not clear that the negative counterpart of such concepts could serve any such practical purpose. Even if there were such a possible purpose, there is no evidence that our everyday uses of the concepts of evil and evil person fit with the endpoint hypothesis. For instance, people who believe that Ted Bundy was evil are not at all moved to revise that judgment if they encounter another serial killer who took more lives than Bundy.

A final route to the thorough dispositional account of evil personhood is via the assumption that evil persons are qualitatively rather than quantitatively distinct from ordinary bad persons. Several philosophers have made a similar claim with respect to the distinction between evil action and ordinary wrong action (Steiner 2002, p. 184; Garrard 2002, p. 321; de Wijze 2002, p. 21 1). This general claim about evil action sounds appealing at first, but none of its more specific elaborations are defensible. The basic problem is that any seemingly distinctive motives or psychological states in an agent who performs evil actions are only quantitatively distinct from motives present in an agent who performs only minor wrongs. While it

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is true that there is a significant difference between evil actions and ordinary wrongs, we should conclude that this difference is quantitative rather than qualitative (Russell 2007).

The failure of these attempts should make us wary of similar attempts to show that an evil person must be qualitatively rather than quantitatively distinct from a merely bad person. Haybron makes one such attempt, claiming that evil does not come in degrees, and that there must be a sharp, qualitative difference between evil and non-evil persons, because otherwise the distinction between evil and bad would not matter (Haybron 2002a, p. 262). A person who is strongly disposed to perform evil actions is merely quantitatively distinct from a person who is less strongly disposed to perform evil actions, so Haybron would reject the basic dispositional model of evil personhood. Arguably, it is Haybron' s desire to locate a quantitative difference between bad and evil persons that leads him to claim that evil persons must be bad in every respect. A merely bad or vicious person does not have that quality of 'thorough badness' to any degree, and thus could be said to be qualitatively distinct from any person who has a good side.

Haybron' s account might have been persuasive if it fitted fairly well with ordinary usage of the concept of evil person. Yet it is clear, even to Haybron himself, that by adding a thoroughness condition to our account of evil we would depart "from ordinary ascriptive practice" (Haybron 2002a, p. 271). We might have had a reason to revise popular usage if Haybron's account offered significant benefits that could not be provided by rival accounts, but this is not the case. We ought to reject Haybron's suggestion that the distinction between bad and evil persons could matter only if it marked a sharp, qualitative difference between the two. The distinction between heavy and light is practically important, but it is merely quantitative and admits of vague cases on the boundary. Similarly, the distinction between being highly resistant to temptation and being easily tempted is merely quantitative and admits of vague cases on the boundary, but it is a deeply significant moral distinction nonetheless. There is no obstacle to claiming that the distinction between evil and bad persons matters a great deal, even though it marks a merely quantitative difference.

We have seen that there are three assumptions - the mirror thesis, the end point thesis, and the qualitative difference thesis - that might be used to support the thorough dispositional account of evil personhood, but that none of those assumptions are warranted. Moreover, the thorough dispositional account appears to clash with intuition (1); namely, that there are some actual evil persons. Thus, even though the thorough dispositional account would fit well with intuition (3) that evil persons are rare, we should consider alternative methods of strengthening the basic dispositional account.

5 Fixity of the disposition

Another way in which we could modify the basic dispositional account so as to accord with the intuition that evil persons are rare is to maintain that all and only evil persons have an especially highly fixed and strong disposition to perform evil

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actions. The strength of S's disposition to 0 in conditions C is, roughly speaking, a measure of the likelihood that S will 0 when in C, or the frequency with which S will 0 when in C. In contrast, the flexibility or fixity of a disposition is a measure of how easy it is, over time, to change the strength of that disposition. For instance, S might be strongly disposed to mispronounce French words, but if we could quite easily teach S the correct pronunciations, then we would say that this strong disposition highly flexible. In contrast, S might be strongly disposed to get drunk, and if we could not easily change the strength of this disposition via rational persuasion, training, the promise of rewards or the threat of punishment, or other available means, then this disposition would be not only strong but highly fixed.

Claims about the fixity of character are common in ethics. For instance, virtue ethicists maintain that a person is genuinely virtuous not only if she can be counted on to do the right thing here and now, but is firmly committed to correct moral values and cannot easily be corrupted (Aristotle 1985, pp. 1100bl2-1100bl5; Hursthouse 1999, p. 28). It is easy to see why a genuinely virtuous person must have a strong and highly fixed disposition to act appropriately. A firm commitment to correct moral values is not only more admirable than a flexible commitment, but more useful. We count on other people to do the morally right thing in planning and coordinating our lives. If we assumed that the evil person is simply a mirror-image of the extremely virtuous person, then we would conclude that S is evil only if S has a highly fixed disposition to do the morally wrong thing. However, we have seen that the mirror thesis is not warranted. A person could be extremely morally bad without being the psychological mirror-image of an extremely morally good person. Thus, we would need independent grounds to justify the claim that S is evil only if S has a highly fixed disposition to perform evil actions.

Such grounds are provided by another common intuition about evil persons: that an evil person is a moral write-off. Although it is widely held that it is possible for an evil person to become a good person it would be jarring to say that S is an evil person but just needs a good talking to, or that S is an evil person right now but perhaps next week could be trusted with the care of your children. Cole assumes that an evil person would be beyond "communication and negotiation, reform and redemption" (Cole 2006, p. 236). Haybron similarly suggests that "regarding individuals as evil amounts to treating them as moral write-offs" (Haybron 2002a, p. 278). This implication underlies the common application of the concept of evil to the enemy in political and military settings. If the enemy are evil, then the only way to remove the threat from that enemy is to destroy them, scare them off or constrain them; rational persuasion and diplomacy are out of the question. Similarly, when we call a serial killer an evil person we indicate that he should be removed from society, because it is overwhelmingly likely that he will keep doing evil regardless of our attempts at reform.

In light of this intuition we might propose the fixed dispositional account of evil personhood, according to which S is an evil person if and only if S is strongly and highly fixedly disposed to perform evil actions. According to this account it could be the case that a very large proportion of us are strongly disposed to perform evil actions, for instance, in a Milgram scenario, but that only a very small proportion of us are evil, because the vast majority of us could be reformed or redeemed and lose

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our disposition to do evil. If this is the case, then it looks like the fixed dispositional account will hold all of the advantages of basic dispositional model while securing the result that evil persons are rare.

While it is true that a dispositional account of evil personhood requires a fixity condition in order to accord with common intuitions, it is not clear that our dispositions to commit extreme wrongs when placed in Milgram scenarios or in volatile and threatening political situations could easily be changed. There does seem to be strong evidence that people who perform extreme wrongs when in such situations can change their patterns of behaviour. For instance, many people who administered torture in military settings subsequently go on to lead morally normal lives in which they perform no major wrongs (Wolfendale 2007, p. 162; Zimbardo 2007, p. 287). Unfortunately, though, this absence of extreme wrongdoing in later life does not show that the ex-torturers have lost the disposition to perform evil actions when placed in those unusual scenarios. Perhaps they retain the disposition and merely are morally lucky enough not to find themselves again in the conditions that elicit its manifestation. We have no good evidence that this is not the case. Thus, if we accept the fixed dispositional account of evil personhood, we should conclude that, given what we know, it is quite possible that a large proportion of us are evil.

6 Dispositions indexed to conditions

There is an extra modification of the dispositional model, though, that promises to deliver the result that evil persons are rare. Let us approach this modification by considering the more basic disposition of flammability. Roughly speaking, X is flammable if and only if X will burn by itself, once lit. However, whether or not X will burn by itself is highly dependent on other factors, including the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere around X. Thus, it might be the case that wool will not burn by itself in normal conditions, but will burn by itself when in very highly oxygenated conditions. Would this imply that wool is flammable after all? Arguably, we would say that wool is not flammable because the disposition of flammability is indexed in some way to certain background environmental conditions. X is flammable if and only if X would burn by itself, once lit, when in conditions C. If a large proportion of us are disposed to do evil in some conditions, but only a small proportion of us are disposed to do evil in a specified set of conditions C, then we might claim that evil persons are those who are strongly and highly fixedly disposed to do evil in conditions C, and hence that only a small proportion of us are evil persons.

What are the relevant conditions to which a disposition is indexed? We might be tempted to say that the relevant conditions are the normal or typical conditions. X is flammable if and only if X would burn by itself when in normal conditions, and S is an evil person if and only if S is strongly and highly fixedly disposed to perform evil actions in normal conditions. Let us call this the fixed and normally-indexed dispositional account of evil personhood. Since the Milgram scenarios and extreme political conditions are unusual rather than normal, this account seems to imply that evil persons are comparatively rare.

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It is important to note that if we index dispositions to normal conditions and there is a change in which conditions are normal, then there will be corresponding changes in the dispositions of objects. This might be an acceptable consequence with respect to some dispositions. For instance, if flammability is indexed to normal conditions then we might say that a piece of wood is flammable on Earth but not flammable on the moon, where the normal conditions include no oxygen, even though the intrinsic properties of that piece of wood do not change if it is taken to the moon. Would we similarly be happy to say that a person S who is strongly and highly fixedly disposed to perform evil actions only in Milgram scenarios could become an evil person simply by being placed in an environment in which Milgram scenarios are common, despite there having been no change in S's intrinsic properties? For instance, could we turn S into an evil person simply by placing him in a society in which coercion by immoral authorities was common?

It is certainly true that such a person becomes much more likely to inflict extreme harm when placed in this new oppressive environment. Yet there is something implausible about the claim that, if two persons are identical in their intrinsic and historical properties, one could be an evil person and the other not. It is not clear exactly why this seems implausible. Perhaps it is because we think it would be unfair to judge that a person has become evil simply by being moved into a different environment. As we have seen already, though, dispositional accounts seem committed to the claim that someone could blamelessly become an evil person, so intuitions about the fairness of evil attributions might not be defensible. Perhaps, instead, we are intuitively committed to the general view that significant changes in a person's moral status require changes to the intrinsic properties of that person.

In any case, we could avoid claiming that S could become evil merely due to a change in S's normal background conditions by fixedly indexing the relevant disposition to the conditions that were normal or typical at the time and place in which the concept of evil person was developed. A similar kind of historically- indexed disposition might underlie the property of being red, such that X is red if and only if S looks red to normal observers in conditions that were normal in the time and place in which the concept of red was developed. In this case, if there were a radical change in normal light conditions on Earth, we might coherently say that my old red shirt is still red even though it now looks blue to ordinary observers in the conditions that now are normal, and that the shirt could cease to be red only if it changed its intrinsic properties.

Similarly, we might offer a fixed and historically-indexed dispositional account of evil personhood, according to which S is evil if and only if S is strongly and highly fixedly disposed to perform evil actions in the conditions that were normal when the concept of evil was developed. Thus, if Milgram scenarios were very rare in these original conditions, and if only a small proportion of us are strongly and highly fixedly disposed to perform evil actions when outside of Milgram scenarios, then evil persons would be rare and would remain rare even if Milgram scenarios became much more common. By fixing the reference on these historical conditions, we guarantee that S could become evil only by changing his intrinsic properties.

This fixed and historically-indexed dispositional account of evil personhood probably secures the result that evil persons are rare, and seems attractive in many

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other respects. Nonetheless, this account is vulnerable to two related objections. Firstly, it might seem that advocates of this account are making an ad hoc modification to the dispositional model merely to secure the result that evil persons are rare. Secondly, it is not clear exactly which features of the original normal conditions are relevant to the question of whether S's actions will reveal whether S is an evil person or not.

It is plausible that now we are still in those original normal conditions, and thus that the strength of S's dispositions to perform evil actions in our current environment is a clear indicator of whether S is evil. Yet conditions have changed greatly in many respects over the last 50 years with the invention of computers, mobile phones, the internet, and so on. Why should we say that, despite these changes, we are still in the original conditions with respect to the disposition that is necessary for evil personhood? Arguably, it is because those changes in computing technology strike us as irrelevant to the questions of whether an evil person is more or less likely to perform evil actions, and whether a non-evil person is more or less likely to perform evil actions. In contrast, a dramatic change in the level of political coercion in our society might lead us to say that the strength of S disposition to do evil in these new conditions does not indicate whether S is an evil person, because these new conditions are not relevantly similar to the original conditions to which the dispositional concept of evil person is indexed. In order to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant changes to background conditions, we must be relying on some deeper conception of which background conditions are relevant to the disposition in question.

How are we to specify the conditions that are relevant to the disposition that is sufficient for evil personhood? Perhaps we should note that there are some conditions, including Milgram scenarios and coercive political environments, in which people who perform extremely wrong actions tend to describe themselves as being alienated from those actions in some way. They might claim to have been forced to perform the actions, to have had no choice, to have been tricked into acting in that way, to have not been able to do what they really wanted to do. This suggests that there are an identifiable set of conditions in which our autonomy is limited, and in which our actions might not reflect our true selves.8 Of course, what S is disposed to do under such difficult conditions is part of S's character, but we might claim that whether S is an evil person depends on what S is disposed to do when S is not under the kinds of pressure that typically would alienate him from his actions; that is, when S is in what we shall call autonomy-favouring conditions. Let us call this the fixed and autonomy-favouring dispositional account of evil personhood, according to which S is an evil person if and only if S is strongly and highly fixedly disposed to perform evil actions when in autonomy-favouring conditions.

Even if it is true that a very large proportion of people are disposed to perform evil actions under some conditions, it is likely that only a small proportion of people are disposed to perform evil actions when they are able to do what they really want to do.

8 To say that S's autonomy is limited in such circumstances is not to say that S cannot perform any free actions when in such circumstances, nor that S is not morally responsible for the actions that she performs in these circumstances.

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Thus, the fixed and autonomy-favouring account of evil personhood seems to imply that, given what we know, evil persons are comparatively rare. Moreover, indexing the disposition to autonomy-favouring conditions does not seem to be an ad hoc move designed simply to secure the result that evil persons are rare. It is plausible that there is a morally significant difference between what S is disposed to do when she is not deceived, threatened, coerced or pressed, and what S is disposed to do when her autonomy is limited. Granted, it is not the case that all of S's dispositions and actions under these limiting conditions are morally irrelevant. These dispositions could count against S in some kinds of moral evaluation. So long as they are culpable wrongs, actions performed under these conditions can count as evil, and it is proper to hold people responsible for the evil actions that they perform whether they are evil people or not. But S is morally the worst kind of person only if S is strongly disposed to do evil even when he is not pushed in that direction by circumstance.

Another reason for believing that it is not ad hoc to index the disposition to autonomy-favouring conditions is that the resulting account allows for the possibility that, if we made certain empirical discoveries, we should conclude that evil persons are actually more common than we had supposed. For instance, if the threat of punishment for extreme wrongdoing in our society were removed and there were a sudden and dramatic increase in the proportion of people who perform evil actions, then we would have reason to believe that a large proportion of those people had been evil all along. Once they were placed in an autonomy-favouring environment in which they were not being restricted by threats of punishment they were able to do what they really wanted to do, which was to perform evil actions. Conversely, if the threat of punishment for extreme wrongdoing were suddenly imposed on a comparatively corrupt society and the proportion of the population who do evil decreased dramatically, we would not necessarily have reason to believe that we had decreased the proportion of evil people in that society. Rather, in such a case we would have prevented some people from doing what they really wanted to do. As we have seen, it is possible for there to be perpetually frustrated evil persons who are not evildoers. Thus, it is plausible that whether S is evil is determined by whether S is strongly and highly fixedly disposed to perform evil actions when in those conditions in which S is able to do what he really wants to do.

The fixed and autonomy-favouring dispositional account of evil persons fits well with intuition (1): that there are some evil persons. It allows that most serial killers and many war criminals are evil because they are disposed to perform extreme wrongs even when they are not being instructed to do so by authority figures, and even when they are not living in intense and difficult social conditions. The fixed autonomy-favouring dispositional account also fits with intuition (2): that evil persons are rare. Given what we know, the vast majority of people are not strongly disposed to perform extreme wrongs when allowed to do what they really want to do. By indexing the disposition to autonomy-favouring conditions we also go some way towards accommodating intuition (3): that evil persons deserve our strongest moral condemnation. Although this account still allows that a person blamelessly can become evil, it suggests that many people who are disposed to perform evil actions only when in autonomy-limiting circumstances are not as deplorable as evil people, who are disposed to do evil even when not being threatened or pushed.

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As with all of the other dispositional accounts of evil personhood, the fixed autonomy-favouring account fits with intuitions (4)-(8). It makes sense of the claim that 'he did it because he was evil', it allows that not every evildoer is an evil person, that it is possible to become an evil person by performing evil actions, that it is possible, though difficult, for an evil person to become a good person, and that not every evil person intends or attempts to perform evil actions. As with the other dispositional accounts, the fixed autonomy-favouring account allows that an evil person could be blameless, but this is the price of accommodating the intuition that there can be perpetually frustrated evil persons. It might appear that the fixed autonomy-favouring account is too narrow in that it removes military torturers and war criminals from the category of evil persons if they are not disposed to perform extreme wrongs when in autonomy-favouring conditions. We should remember, though, that even if these are not evil persons, they remain evildoers, and are blameworthy and deserving of condemnation for their actions.

Thus, the fixed autonomy-favouring account of evil personhood is more appealing than any of its aggregative or dispositional competitors. It is not clear whether this account correctly identities the necessary and sufficient conditions for evil personhood, or points to merely sufficient conditions for evil personhood. Arguably, there might be persons who are evil in virtue of their affective states even though those persons are not strongly and highly fixedly disposed to perform evil actions when in autonomy-favouring conditions. However, the question of whether evil feelings can ever be sufficient for evil personhood must be dealt with elsewhere. For now, it is clear that a certain kind of behavioural disposition, rather than a aggregate of harms or wrongs, is sufficient for evil personhood.

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