Claudia Card's Theory Of Evil Analysis

EXPLAIN CLAUDIA CARD’S THEORY OF EVIL

Claudia Card begins by questioning the difference between wrong and evil. How do we know when something crosses the line between being just wrong, to being an evil act? How does hatred and motive play a part in this? How can people psychologically maintain a sense of who they are when they have been the victims of evil? Card attempts to explain these fundamental questions using her theory of evil; the Atrocity Paradigm (Card, pg.3).

Claudia Card sees evil as “foreseeable intolerable harms produced by culpable wrong doing”, thus she builds her theory and views around this definition (Card, pg.3). She distinguishes wrongdoing and evil acts by the consequences and results of those actions, and to what extent they harmed the victim. She sees evils as actions that ruin people’s lives that achieve significant harm that causes permanent or difficult to recover from damage (Card, pg.3). However, she does make a point of differentiating evildoers from evil people, as they do not always have the purposeful intention to do the evil that they cause (Card, pg.4).

She points out that in some cases we identify evils as done by the perpetrator and sometimes evils by the harm that they have caused, which can create a false sense or skewed view of culpability (Card, pg.4). Her Atrocity Paradigm discards the utilitarian view of evil, where evil is simply evil no matter the source, and also stoic concept of evil, which focuses primarily on the will of the perpetrator (Card, pg.4). Instead, the Atrocity Paradigm combines the two; both the resulted harm and the evil agent are taken into account (Card, pg.4). Card rejected the utilitarian viewpoint that wrong actions are defined by the damage they cause, and also the stoic viewpoint that damage is unintentional (Card,