Political Evil—Warping the Moral Landscape

Abstract

This paper examines a neglected issue within recent philosophical discussions of a secular concept of evil. The notion of ‘political evil’ seeks to explain the profound normative social influence that malevolent ideologies have on the behaviour of individuals and the development of their characters. The recent scholarship on secular evil focuses on either evil acts and/or evil persons/characters largely ignoring the social dimension or context in which large scale evils such as genocide occur. A concept of political evil better explains the warping of the moral landscape that takes place, providing the normative framework within which genocide, wide spread torture and mass murder occur. The paper argues that a notion of political evil is an important part of our moral vocabulary without which we cannot adequately understand or describe horrific events such as the Holocaust from a normative perspective.