Claudia Card Essay

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Most contemporary moral philosophy is secular. As a result, many ethicists do not use the term “evil” in their work. Instead, they label actions as good, bad or neither good nor bad. Recently, the use of the term “evil” has become increasingly common in the literature. In my paper I argue against an aspect of a particular theory of evil.
The most complete contemporary theory of evil is Claudia Card’s The Atrocity Paradigm. In her book of the same name, Card defines evils as “Foreseeable intolerable harms produced by culpable wrongdoing.” (3) Card defines evils as events; intuitively, moral weight should be placed on actions, not events. Card emphasizes events because she feels it is important to focus on the victims, not the evildoers. Although her intent is admirable, I believe it is problematic. An example can clarify why this is so. If a person falls asleep at the wheel and hits and kills a pedestrian, the driver is culpable but the result is a tragedy, not an evil. If a person who is driving intentionally hits and kills a pedestrian, the person is not only culpable but also guilty of committing an evil act. Using Card’s definition, both events would be considered evils. I argue that this line of reasoning is confused. A person’s intention should play a role in whether or not her action is evil. In the first example, the driver does not intend to fall asleep at the wheel and as a result the action is merely bad (more specifically, driving while sleep deprived is bad: falling asleep is neither good nor bad). In the second example, the driver decides to murder the pedestrian: the action is evil. I believe emphasizing the actions that lead to the event is the correct way to understand evil How do evils differ from other forms of wrongdoing, and what should we do about them? In The Atrocity Paradigm, Claudia Card offers a rich, impassioned

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