False Light: Moral Worldbuilding and the Virtues of Evil

Abstract

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• False Light:Moral Worldbuilding and the Virtues of Evil
• Brandon Taylor (bio)

In 2018, a young nurse living in England, Lucy Letby, was charged with seven counts of murder and ten counts of attempted murder. Many of these acts were alleged to have taken place over a period of time running from 2015 to 2016, a period during which Letby did not operate without detection. The yearlong police investigation that resulted in her eventual arrest revealed that there had been suspicions of a possible connection between Letby and an unusual increase in deaths on the wards where she worked, at least once resulting in a hospital inquiry that went nowhere. Letby was eventually moved to an admin position, but after a hospital investigation turned up tenuous evidence, the reporting doctor was forced to apologize to Letby, who was put back on duty in the intensive care ward, where she went on to allegedly attack more patients. [End Page 536]

I listened to a podcast about the Letby case hosted by two journalists who walked their audience through the legal proceedings. The prosecution laid out their evidence. We heard testimony from former colleagues of Letby and also heard transcripts of Letby's text message conversations with her fellow nurses as read out by actors. This was paired with court reporting on the mood and tenor of the room as the trial unfolded. Next, detail by brutal detail, we heard about the crimes themselves. How Letby was alleged to have injected air into the veins and feeding tubes of her patients. How she created air emboli in their stomachs or gave them insulin which sent them into hypoglycemic shock. We heard about the horrible rashes running across their backs and abdomens. We heard about and from the families too, all of whom were fundamentally transformed by the events described in the case and likely by the case itself. Because how could they not be?

When Letby was found guilty—I actually have some doubts as to the strength of the evidence itself and the case put on by the prosecution—I kept turning over in my mind the question that most people probably come to when they hear about something this awful: What would make a person do this?

Until this point, I have not told you about the specific nature of Lucy Letby's crime, which I believe push her actions beyond the realm of mere crime and into the realm of evil. True, murder is usually evil. A person who serially attacked thirteen people, resulting in seven deaths and six incapacitations, is likely evil. But there is something about this set of crimes that qualifies it as a special variety of evil. Lucy Letby's victims were all neonates. The smallest, weakest, frailest of new humans. The most innocent of creatures on earth.

I realized that in my trying to figure out a reason for her actions, by trying to follow the act back through her history and psychology to its exact origin, I was thinking like a novelist. But I kept coming up against the fact that I could not actually imagine why a person [End Page 537] would do something like that. I can imagine reasons for a great many things. I can begin to understand how certain factors in a person's life might make them prone to fall into a set of actions that end in something horrible. That is not difficult. But that moral configuration posits that every person is fundamentally a victim of the universe and that when we do evil acts, we have merely strayed from an innocence that is the default position of every person. This is a naïve and limited worldview, but one that is utterly indispensable in writing the kind of fiction that we write today. Because a belief in the fundamental innocence of our fellow man is what allows us to imagine ourselves into their position enough to tell a kind of individualist story about them. Otherwise, they would make a pretty poor protagonist.

But how is one to enter into the mind of someone whose acts, by any definition, are evil? How are they to portray people...