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).

The basis of Card’s theory is that we cannot begin to understand evil by simply looking at perpetrators and evildoers, but we should be looking at the victims of evil as well.

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,

pg.4).

Firstly, the Atrocity Paradigm tells us “it makes both harm and wrongful willing essentials to evils, but finds neither all harms nor all wrongful uses of the will evil” (Card, pg.4). Therefore we can judge an evil act by the intention of evildoing; the consequences and damage is foreseeable, signifying the importance that the perpetrator could have logically predicted the significance and results of his or her actions. Using this characterisation of evil, we can quite assuredly say that it is evil for, for example, a surgeon to intentionally kill his patient due to a personal dislike of that particular patient. The surgeon committed an evil act because they intentionally caused harm that they could have foreseen, and it resulted in a death. You could even say that the surgeon’s evil was even more so due to the fact that they were a profession who took an oath not to do an evil act as such. We could also say that is not evil if, for example, a man driving a car accidently, and with no malice of forethought, ran over somebody’s leg and broke it. Card would not call that man evil or his actions evil, however unfortunate the result is and even though he did bring about harm, because the man could not foresee the damage he would cause, and he did not run over the victim’s leg on purpose. Therefore intent is a crucial part in differentiating wrongdoing and evildoing.

Secondly, Card tells us that, as mentioned before, that we must pay special attention to the victims and to what extent were they harmed. Perhaps the damage was irreversible or long-term, or possibly permanent (Card, pg.3). For something or someone to be evil, we must first judge if the damage caused by the action is intolerable or fixable. If we apply this logic to the previous surgeon example again, we can still say that the surgeon’s actions were indeed evil, in that their actions resulted in death, which is irreversible. The surgeon robbed a patient of living a (potentially) meaningful life and caused irreversible harm based on his or her own personal feelings or biases of the patient and victim. Applying this logic to the second example as well, the driver still remains a wrongdoer, however not an evildoer. The injury the driver caused was severe and caused quite a lot of pain and harm to the victim, however the leg would eventually heal over time. Therefore the magnitude or degree of suffering is also a huge factor in discovering evil and evildoing.

Lastly, the Atrocity Paradigm considers evil as culpable, which does not include natural evils such as natural disasters e.g. earthquakes, tsunamis, etc., or even death itself an evil (Card, pg.5). This is because none of these are “brought about by or preventable by [a] moral agency”, with the exception of bringing about death by a moral agent, whereas some might say that another being, namely God, might be responsible for these disasters (Card, pg.5). However the Atrocity Paradigm does not take this being into assumption. Card also believes that disease falls under the same category; it is unfortunate however not an evil (of course taking an omnipotent being out as a factor). It becomes an evil, however, when humans have the ability or opportunity to prevent disease but do not interfere (Card, pg.5).

It seems that by focusing on victims rather than perpetrators and concentrating on how much damage was caused, Card has proposed a possible approach to how we as people can judge wrong and evil.