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 common sense. There are acts that we name love, hate, good, evil, kind, mean (and on and one forever) because we need to live in a world that we can make useful sense of. The fact that I can fall in love is not evidence that love exists as such. And, despite what my Theology professor did to prove to me that evil exists (which is to show the most gruesome footage of Nazi concentration camps), and although there may be acts I disapprove of with all my righteous being, evil has no being in itself. Heat exists; cold doesn’t. This is of course a theological claim that goes back to Augustine, but now we’re proposing that there’s nothing special about the nonexistence of evil. If evil were the absence of good, then everything would be by default evil.

The burden of the question has to rest entirely on the side of idealism. We know that specific things, people, actions exist. But is there sufficient reason to believe abstractions exist? Is there some abstraction whose existence as such I have no choice but to believe in. There only needs to be one. It’s not obvious to me that there is. But if there is my first place to look is in number, or math. In the old debate about whether math is created or discovered, if I can line up behind discovered, I have my ontologically stable abstraction.

I find that this would work better if I were a mathematician.

The problem, it seems to me, for the Platonist of math is to get from the concept of number to anything beyond it. The fact that equations work, that they predict that certain things exist that we would never think to look for but that show up when we do the math and then look, seems to open the possibility that idealism is realism after all. But doesn’t that require that number exist? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

But why do we think number is not invented? It’s true that most cultures invent number in some way—not always the same way. And it’s possible to think that other intelligences on other planets, being made in this universe, would also come up with the concept of number. We can’t prove that. But it’s possible to believe that the universe is structured in such a way that it reasonable to believe that if we send out into space a list of prime numbers other intelligences would be able to figure out that that is what that list is—despite the fact that they would have to first have to decipher that fact that these numbers are in a base-ten system and that these symbols represent numbers and not words or something else. Given that we can’t on earth figure out Stonehenge, I’m skeptical that this would ever work, but I love the optimism.

Even if they couldn’t figure it out, if we could somehow explain it to them, we could perhaps get them to understand it and even to tell us that they had their own theory of prime numbers. Because prime numbers are real!

Or they are inevitable once you have invented number—and a numbering script like Arabic numerals that makes it possible to get there.

Prime numbers are inherent in the concept of number—whether you find or recognize them or not.

But is this anything more than an analogy that tell us that if idealism is in fact valid, if abstractions, good and evil, exist as such then this is a way of conceptualizing how? Prime numbers exist only within a system of mathematics. If you don’t have numbers, you don’t have prime numbers. They aren’t out there somewhere to be discovered any more than bows and arrows are out there to be discovered even though any number of cultures with no evidence of contact between them have invented the same, any more than saltpeter proves that guns exist.

I think my nominalism is winning. Evil does not exist as such. What exists are actions and people and animals and atoms and all materiality and energy. I call certain actions good because they serve my notion of the good (there’s no one way to define this) and certain actions evil because they impede my notion of good. My notion of good still has more presence to me than my notion of evil, which is still a lack of good, even though good doesn’t exist. Do I have a problem? Neither good nor evil exist but they don’t exist in different ways. Good is closer to being real than evil. My nominalism is not quite holding.

And it gets harder. I can try to define good as, for example, actions that increase my safety or my happiness. If my neighbor’s land would be useful to me and I can’t get him to give it to me, perhaps I can murder him and take it. All good is relative, in this case to me. I’ve got my land. True, I’m in the Hobbesian nightmare, but that’s not proof that I’ve done anything that was not good, given my definition, which is neither arbitrary nor absolute. If no one who has a conflicting notion of good comes by to declare my good evil, it remains good. This is an implication of my nominalism. But as other people exist and they have needs as urgent as my own, if they find out about my land acquisition, they will call it evil and I might be held accountable. There’s no justice—that’s just an abstraction. But there is order. The safety of the whole requires that no one be allowed to define good in terms of himself alone. It’s as inevitable as the discovery of prime numbers (prime numbers are not invented; numbers are invented and prime numbers emerge) that destructive actions will have consequences. The more one reduces the safety of the whole, the more ones actions are held accountable to the whole. If I kill a mosquito, no problem. If I kill a deer and there are plenty of deer, no problem. If I kill a person and the person is declared or assumed to be without value to the society, there still may be no problem. (White people rarely suffered consequences for lynchings in the nineteenth century. The Nazis would have suffered no consequences for Auschwitz if they’d won the war.)

A radical nominalism does not allow me to condemn slavery or genocide or any other particular action. The abstraction is needed to pass judgment. I want to say that if you are walking down the road and you see a neighbor who has fallen down and needs help getting up, you should help them. I don’t see any way to say that without faith in God.

We’re not finished.