We Will Have Our Moral Meaning

A friend recently sent me an article by Amanda Knox in The Atlantic called “What is Evil?” She’s reflecting on Bryan Kohlberger, the man who stabbed four University of Idaho students to death three years ago. This week, Kohlberger was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. He has shown no hint of remorse, hasn’t offered even one clue as to a motive. He seems like a genuine sociopath, a monster simply bent on violence and destruction come hell or high water. If ever the word “evil” seemed appropriate, it would be here.

In the article, Amanda Knox (who has her own harrowing tale of being caught up in a horrific act of violence, of even being accused of perpetrating it) probes our usage of this word “evil.” Is this just an antiquated word that we instinctively reach for in really terrible situations (like, the baddest of the bad)? When people commit deeds so foul that our heads want to explode and our categories crumble? People do awful things everywhere everyday—we know this. We humans hurt each other in all kinds of tedious and predictable and painful ways that we wouldn’t necessarily call “evil.” But when something truly appalling happens? Well, then we rummage around in our vocabularies for a tool that seems appropriate for the task.

Knox wonders if “evil” is still a word we can responsibly use? Does it do what we imagine it does? Or does it just consign people to a category and give us permission to stop trying to understand how they could have done what they did. As Knox puts it:

[T]he word evil feels like a cop-out. It is an excuse to stop thinking, to ignore the evidence, to hate and punish someone law enforcement didn’t, or wouldn’t, understand… I worry that when people use terms like evil to define those who are demonstrably guilty of violent crimes, they are doing so not merely to convey the unfathomability of those crimes, but to wish harm upon the guilty, not as a means to rehabilitation or deterrence, but merely for harm’s sake.

Knox is undoubtedly right that we often use the word “evil” for precisely these reasons. To affix the worst label we can come up with. To separate ourselves from the perpetrators of horrendous deeds. To harm. This is without question true. And it’s also true that the word can be used to avoid trying to understand what might lead a person to do what they did. Often, we don’t want to understand. To understand feels like a betrayal of our deepest moral impulses. There is, we think, no explanation that could do justice to the effects of these deeds upon victims and those close to them.

In making her case, Knox appeals to popular author and podcaster, student of neuroscience, and devoutly (I use the word intentionally) atheist philosopher Sam Harris. What if, Harris wonders, we truly understood the complexities of the human brain? If we understood, in exhaustive detail, all the genetic, physical, and social causes behind every human behaviour? What if, for example, a mass murderer was discovered to have a brain tumour in precisely the region of the brain that helps regulate emotions such as fear, anxiety, and aggression? Would that change how we think about “evil?” Here’s what Harris said recently:

A brain tumor is just a special case of our having insight into the fact that physical events give rise to thoughts and actions. If we fully understood the neurophysiology of any murderer’s brain, it would seem just as exculpatory as finding a tumor in it. If we could see how the wrong genes were being relentlessly transcribed, and how this person’s experiences in life had sculpted the microstructure of his brain in just such a way to produce states of mind which were guaranteed to make him violent, if we could see this causality clearly, the basis for placing blame on him in any deep sense would disappear.

Of course, this is simply a restatement of philosophical determinism—the idea that all human behaviour is determined by the causal forces that precede it. And it is equally obvious that consistent determinism is difficult (impossible?) to square with holding people accountable for their behaviour. My genes made me do it. My socialization made me do it. My parents are to blame for how they raised me. The society I came of age in made my behaviour inevitable. Etc., etc. Every single human behaviour is the product of some unique cocktail of biology and environmental factors after all. Where, amid all this, would we find moral accountability on a consistently deterministic view? How could we call someone “evil” if they could not have done other than what they did?

Most of us recoil from the moral implications of a consistent determinism if for no other reason than the crudely pragmatic. A world where no one was held accountable for their deeds would be pure anarchy and chaos. We will not relinquish our moral categories so easily. Yet most thoughtful people will also recognize that it is undoubtedly true that some people are formed in conditions so horrendous that their deeds require contextualization. I see this every week when I serve as a chaplain at the jail. There are indeed cases where it is difficult to imagine any other outcome for some of these men and women than prison.

It’s a very complicated question (as all important ones are). But I’m not willing to get rid of the word evil. My reasons for this are theological and anthropological. To say that a human being can act in “evil” ways is a kind of perverse honouring of our exceptionalism. Only we are capable of this. Animals can be vicious and violent—the hunter will have its prey—but we would never describe these actions as evil. They are operating on pure instinct. We even describe humans who appear to be doing the same as following “animalistic” impulses or drives. The implication is that we are deviating from the higher plane that we (rightly) ought to expect of ourselves and one another.

If we want to say that human beings are capable of genuine virtue (and I do) then we must also retain language to say that we are capable of extreme vice. Christian theology has always insisted that human beings alone are capable of good and evil. We can pursue the light or give in to the darkness. Not always to the same degree, not always with the same constraints on our behaviour. God alone knows the conditions that each one of us are formed and in and face, and where accountability fits in that matrix. But to be human is to have the possibility of actual evil ever before us.

Christian theology has also insisted that we alone cannot live without a story of moral meaning. And this is where I return to Harris’s statement above:

If we fully understood the neurophysiology of any murderer’s brain, it would seem just as exculpatory as finding a tumor in it.

I don’t think this is actually true. The best analogy I have come across here is that of examining a book on a table. We could come up with an exhaustive explanation of the physical object in front of us. We could describe the materials that were used to compose the covers, analyze the chemistry of the ink on the page, describe the patterns of the markings on the page. We could recite a detailed causal story about all the events that led to the creation of the artifact before us. We could do all of this and more and we would not be a single step closer to the more important question of what the words on the page mean. Every human behaviour has a purely physical story that could be told about it, after all, not just the bad ones. The question we cannot stop asking is what these behaviours mean.

Like all analogies, the one above is partial. It’s not precisely apples to apples. But for me it at least highlights the vital truth that human beings are irreducible meaning-makers. We cannot live without it. We will not live without it. We cannot interpret our lives in any other way than through moral categories. Harris himself betrays this in his often quite strident moral critiques of religious belief (could not religious believers be analyzed in deterministic ways? Could not their brains be described in terms that would absolve them of their odious beliefs and behaviours? Harris clearly doesn’t want to go down that road..). We will have our meaning and we will have our moral convictions, even if we increasingly have no idea how we arrived at either.

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The image above is called Cain slaying Abel, by Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1600. Sin has ever been crouching at our door and its desire has ever been for us. But we must master it.