The Intentionality of Evil

A few thoughts after having let Nuremberg sink in for a little while. It's a great movie, not on the emotional level of One Life overall, but by God there are scenes in there which you'll need a stiff drink to try your very best to forget. Those, of course, are the clips of real footage from the concentration camps. We need not dwell on this. Nor am I going to review the movie as a movie. Rather I just want to draw attention to one particular theme on the nature of evil. 

Ordinary Men rightly explores the banality of evil, how normal people who don't hold especially strong views can, in the wrong circumstances, come to commit acts of wanton barbarity. Understanding how this happens is undeniably important. But a key component of this, the other side of the coin, is that such actions are highly unlikely to take place without a guiding mind. A mob can be violent but it's usually thoughtless and burns itself out after a riot; sustained atrocities require planning and organisation. 

Clearer Thinking had a closely related email-only post about this recently :

When evaluating a person's immorality based on an action they took, their intention is a very important factor, but when evaluating the badness of an action, it isn't.

Which I think is exactly right (though Existential Comics, as usual, expresses much the same thing in a far more amusing way). Actions and intentions are not the same thing. Even at the sharp end in the most extreme cases, the people committing the horrors are not, by and large, as evil as those telling them to do so, even if those behind it never so much as punch anyone. 

Why ? Because if circumstances were different, most normal people wouldn't necessarily repeat actions they knew to be wrong. The instigators would. For them, the repulsive outcome is precisely the point. They want to do this, they aren't trying to excuse it, and they would keep trying to make it happen even knowing the end result (which is brilliantly expressed by Goring's final admission in Nuremberg). Most ordinary people try and excuse their actions, and if they're easily manipulated, then at least if they're left to their own devices, they seldom resort to violence – at least not on a grand scale or to any great extremes. 

Of course, telling other people to go out and murder each other is itself an action. Merely having an intention or desire to harm other people is one thing, but to act on it in any way designed to bring this about is far worse. 

At this point I want to bring in a very interesting quote from Trevor Noah :

But I often wonder, with African atrocities like the Congo, how horrific were they? The thing Africans don't have that the Jewish people do have is documentation. The Nazis kept meticulous records, took pictures, made films. And that's really what it comes down to. Holocaust victims count because Hitler counted them. Six million people killed. We can all look at that number and rightly be horrified. 

But when you read through the history of atrocities against Africans, there are no numbers, only guesses. It's harder to be horrified by a guess. When Portugal and Belgium were plundering Angola and the Congo, they weren't counting the black people they slaughtered. How many black people died harvesting rubber in the Congo? In the gold and diamond mines of the Transvaal?

So in Europe and America, yes, Hitler is the Greatest Madman in History. In Africa he's just another strongman from the history books...

And yet I think we can say exactly why Hitler does have a genuine claim on being the Greatest Madman in History, or the most evil cunt who ever lived. Most strongmen, most dictators, don't care about how many people die under their rule so long as it benefits them in some way : if they were given another option whereby they'd be just as benefited but with fewer deaths, most would probably take it. Even Stalin might not have caused nearly as many casualties if he'd been given an alternative. 

In contrast, people like Hitler and Pol Pot most certainly would. For them the deaths are not a side-effect, but the whole point.

This is why my onetime go-to YouTuber Lindybeige is completely wrong when he says that Napoleon was more evil than Hitler because he (supposedly) killed a higher percentage of people. Napoleon didn't actually care very much. Running away from his army and leaving them to die horribly : of that he's guilty. Actually wanting them dead ? No. He'd have acted differently if he believed he could. He would not have ordered his own men to die out of any belief that they simply deserved it. He would not have acted like a Dalek :

The Doctor : What's the nearest town?
Van Statten : Salt Lake City.
The Doctor : Population?
Van Statten : One million.
The Doctor: All dead. If the Dalek gets out it'll murder every living creature. That's all it needs.
Van Statten : But why would it do that ?!
The Doctor: Because it honestly believes they should die.

The Nazis believed that. Their weapons were ordinary people, and those people were guilty of some of the most horrific crimes ever committed. But it was the leaders who made this happen. The responsibility is theirs. The ordinary people will always exist and always have this tendency to act as they do for good or ill; we can't change that and it's no use lamenting about fundamental human psychology. The leaders though, they're absolutely and wholly responsible for their own actions. They're the ones we should turn and point to and say "you're a evil bastard". They're the ones we can do something about. Normal people, by and large, are much more like a force of nature.

Two significant caveats. First, this is not to say that we can't change how people on the ground respond to directives from above at all : we can, but this requires huge systemic, societal change. My point is that going after the leaders is much easier and much, much more effective.

Second, none of this means, in any way, that those firing the guns or releasing the gas weren't also immoral – of course they were ! Far, far too many of them simply, like Napoleon, didn't care enough to rebel. But this is still not the same as actually initiating the Holocaust and ensuring that it was carried out to completion. Put the same people with the guns in another life and they'll generally be completely harmless (we know this because this is exactly what did happen after the war); put Nazi High Command in another situation and they'll try and do the whole thing all over again.

This holds for much smaller crimes than genocide or universal domination. Adultery is seldom committed out of a desire to harm anyone. A robber who kills you to steal your TV is obviously immoral, but not as immoral as someone who comes into your home, kills you, and just leaves – even though the former has committed more wrong actions than the latter. The point is that most robberies don't intend violence. The morality of the person is different from the moral status of the actions they commit : someone who tries to kill your for its own sake is a worse person than someone who kills through apathy.

A final caveat is that I'm deliberately not attempting to set forth how we respond to these cases; this exploration as been purely for its own sake. The apathetic villain may well be more dangerous than the abjectly evil, in that they're harder to spot and ignorance/incompetence as easier to excuse. Nevertheless, if we stand in judgement of people, I would always deem those deliberately trying to inflict harm for its own sake as worse than those who aren't.

Lastly, Plato and many ancient philosophers essentially defined malevolence out of existence when they said that no-one deliberately and knowingly does wrong (Davros, in the above clip, similarly defends his insane plot on the grounds that he himself thinks he's doing good). But in my view, this is simply not a sensible definition at all. Someone who does harm to another for its own sake – because they think this person simply must suffer, even/especially when they know they don't actually deserve it, or do so for the sake of their own pleasure, or just inexplicably want this to happen – this person is being malevolent. Only by confronting this dark nature of the soul, acknowledging that the worst of us enjoy causing suffering for its own sake, can we guard against it.