A Madness We Can Agree On: Is Evil Real?
Before we can ask any question about the nature of evil or existence of evil we have to settle the ancient question regarding realism and nominalism. Let’s do that. First off, for what I hope is clarity’s sake, I’m going to say “idealism” instead of realism. It seems to me that realism is a word that could to easily be confused with nominalism--as it apparently was for so-called “Realist” writers like W. D. Howells. We have to first solve the nominalism/idealism question because if we come down on the side of nominalism, then we’ve already in fact solved the question. Abstractions don’t exist, therefore evil does not exist. If all abstractions are just conceptual categories to help us organize and navigate infinite diversity, we may still have a problem, but it’s a different problem then the one we thought we had. This turns out to be a difficult problem to solve. My own impulse is all in favor of nominalism, to the point, almost, were I’d like to say that nominalism is just ...