Abstract
It is an honor and a pleasure to join in the celebration of Agassi’s 90th birthday. He is a philosopher who in the work of a lifetime has continued in the long, noble, and always unpopular tradition in which philosophers question the shibboleths of their age. Reading and conversing with him is a bracing experience that is never boring and always challenging. He goes to the core of whatever problem he discusses, articulates the assumptions on which it rests, considers the alternatives to them, and ever so innocently inquires why we should accept one of these assumptions rather than contrary ones. May he long continue his subversive work. I offer the discussion of evil that follows in the same spirit.
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Notes
- 1.
For further examples, see e.g. Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Stephanie Courteous, et. all. The Black Book of Communism, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust, (New York: Henry Holt, 1985), and my own The Roots of Evil, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).
- 2.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau , Discourses on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality Among Man , trans. Donald A. Cress, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988/1754), 89 and “Letter to Beaumont” in Oeuvres completes, 5 vols. (Paris: Galliard, 1959–95), 935; translated by Timothy O’Hagan in Rousseau, (London: Rutledge, 1999), 15.
- 3.
Immanuel Kant , Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson, (New York: Harper & Row, 1960/1794), 39, 31.
- 4.
John Stuart Mill , Utilitarianism, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1979/1861), 3, 31–2.
- 5.
John Rawls , A Theory of Justice, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 506, 561, 476, 245.
- 6.
Annette Bayer explicitly refers to it as such in her “Secular Faith” in Postures of the Mind, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
- 7.
Rawls , Theory of Justice, 311–12.
- 8.
This is one of the themes of Hannah Arendt’s work on evil. See especially Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report of the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1963), and also The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1941). Arendt would have avoided a great deal of controversy and vituperation directed at her if instead of the banality of evil, she talked about the banality of most evildoers.
- 9.
For the detailed study of this mentality, see Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium (London: Secker & Warburg, 1957), and Europe’s Inner Demons (London: Heinemann, 1975).
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Kekes, J. (2017). The Secular Problem of Evil. In: Bar-Am, N., Gattei, S. (eds) Encouraging Openness. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 325. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57669-5_29
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