As well as the Stanford Prison Experiment, the famous experiments in obedience conducted by Stanley Milgram seem particularly appropriate as background to the Abu Ghraib torture: Milgram showed that ordinary subjects were amazingly willing to give increasingly painful electric shocks (as they thought) to another person, if told to do so by an authority figure.

Since Nuremburg, the “just following orders” defence has a bad reputation. But is it, in fact, a pretty good defence? I don’t know, but it’s a question that has to be asked seriously.

Zimbardo, as you cite him, cites “evil” as “intentionally behaving in ways that harm, abuse, demean, dehumanize, or destroy innocent others”. Is this, do you think, a deliberately wide definition? Who among us can claim not to have committed evil on this definition, at least according to the first few verbs? His redefinition, prompted by you, is as wide: “to intentionally harm (psychologically)” is, I fear, something we have all done in moments of anger. Is that his point?

The “just following orders” defence, by Zimbardo’s analysis, is indeed quite a good defence in the sense that the culpability of Frederick (according to Zimbardo) is reduced to the extent that his military and civilian commanders were also to blame for his crimes. Reduced, that is, but not eliminated.

The point of the wide definition may, as you hint, be deliberately to implicate all of us in arguably “evil’ acts - to stress the moral continuum connecting decent folk to monsters, as opposed to the more traditional demarcation of “evil” people as dispositionally distinct from the rest of us. The definition effectively redefines evil as an operational rather than constitutional term, which while unsettling (since it denies that war criminals are fundamentally different creatures than you or I), successfully circumvents the confounding variables of metaphysics, culture, and clinical etiology. Google’s unofficial corporate slogan is: “Don’t Be Evil,” but this instruction may be impossible to observe for all but the most saintly the entire time. “I am human, nothing is alien to me,” as Terence wrote…

But how to perform that extrication? The Third Geneva Convention sets strict rules on the treatment of prisoners-of-war. By this standard, Frederick was transparently a war criminal. Ah, but in January 2002, President Bush had announced his government’s intention to ignore that international ruling in its prosecution of the “War on Terror” – preferring to term his adversaries as “enemy combatants.” Frederick presumably knew this; did he thus act accordingly, not knowing thereafter of any countermanding judicial restrictions? Sure, by 2003, Iraqi prisons apparently contained a mix of “enemy combatants,” civilian security detainees and official POWs - with differing levels of legal protection afforded to each category – but, as you rightly indicate in your imagined Frederick defense, how was the average soldier really expected to know this, and to appropriately temper the treatment of every single prisoner according to varying legal parameters? Frederick says his superior officers ordered his brutality; Zimbardo clearly agrees that consideration of this institutional pressure ought to outweighs Frederick’s own alleged personal culpability — was it fair for a military court to find otherwise?

I think it was unfair. The mitigating circumstances are, in my opinion, compelling. I’d love to believe that, forced into Frederick’s shoes, I’d definitely behave differently – that my internal moral compass would direct me more powerfully than external forces (or that I’d be smart enough to know which particular international protocol applied to my actions at any particular time.) But it seems to me naïve and presumptuous to assume this. So I’m basically agreeing with you.

Why would he “presumably” know this? Having served in the military, I know from first hand experience that you are often uninformed about such details unless you are actively seeking out such information.

What to make of the psychopath and his/her theory of mind, and this paucity of mirror neurons? Let me turn it around. Perhaps there is some mindblindness in our own definitions of evil, which are no more than gossamer projections into the psyche of those whom we consider evil: we assume that the blank we come up with is in them and not in us. Oh, we say, they have no empathy and no concept of what it is to be another person . . .

By the word “intentionality” in relation to “situational pressures,” are you basically addressing the quandary Steve and I discussed in comments 3 and 4 and that I summarize as:

…the extent of Frederick’s assumed ethical responsibilities as a rational individual versus the extent of those duties imposed upon him by virtue of his professional circumstances.

If so, I think the two factors are close to inextricable when we consider extreme situations such as Frederick’s, where (to answer your question, as I understand it), surely a person’s “intention” is subordinated to forces beyond his or her control? For instance, if I fall off a cliff, will my intentions as I fall influence my landing? You may say that Frederick’s situational determinants were intense but by comparison nowhere near this absolute, which would be fair, but — to throw the question back at you — what might then constitute an objective criterion for judging when situation subsumes intention, or the reverse?

Re the broadness of Zimbardo’s definition of “evil,” I sense the broadness springs from his goal of defining the object of his investigation in terms that circumvent the variables of culture, metaphysics and etiology: that is, rather than getting into a complex defense or critique of any existing ethical code, spiritual belief system or biopsychosocial pathology, he attempts to base his study on an idea with the widest potential application. At this expanded width, however (as you suggest), I agree the definition does lose specificity and heuristic muscle. One way out of this, is strikes me, is to dispense altogether with longstanding folk-psychological ideas of “good” and “evil” – not in the Nietzschean sense of asserting the “will-to-power,” but in the Buddhist sense of disavowing metaphysics in favor of examining the consequences of our actions. This move brings us away from psychopathic absolutes (to address your other question) and into the everyday reality of our own thoughts and behaviors, the outcomes of which range from those which decrease suffering for ourselves or others, and those which increase suffering. Clearly, insulting someone on the Internet (to quote your hypothetical) causes less suffering than, say, genocide. But perhaps considering the meaning of “evil” in either the trivial or grievous case is ultimately a philosophical dead-end.

To elaborate on this point, there’s a famous parable in the Middle-length Discourses of Buddhist scripture about a man who comes to the Buddha vexed by various metaphysical questions, such as whether the universe lasts forever and what happens after death. The Buddha replies:

[Your questions are] just as if a man were wounded with an arrow thickly smeared with poison. His friends & companions, kinsmen & relatives would provide him with a surgeon, and the man would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know whether the man who wounded me was a noble warrior, a priest, a merchant, or a worker.’ He would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know the given name & clan name of the man who wounded me… until I know whether he was tall, medium, or short… until I know whether he was dark, ruddy-brown, or golden-colored… until I know his home village, town, or city… until I know whether the bow with which I was wounded was a long bow or a crossbow… until I know whether the bowstring with which I was wounded was fiber, bamboo threads, sinew, hemp, or bark… until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was wild or cultivated… until I know whether the feathers of the shaft with which I was wounded were those of a vulture, a stork, a hawk, a peacock, or another bird… until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was bound with the sinew of an ox, a water buffalo, a langur, or a monkey.’ He would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was that of a common arrow, a curved arrow, a barbed, a calf-toothed, or an oleander arrow.’ The man would die and those things would still remain unknown to him.

The Buddha goes on to answer the man’s questions by saying that the universe is neither eternal nor limited, and that life neither ends nor continues after death, which is a cryptic way of insisting that metaphysical questions will not lead to enlightenment; that only the outcomes of our actions in the present moment matter. Scrutinizing the metaphysically-laden ethical systems that include “evil” for clues as to its nature in this sense far less important than learning to cultivate harm-reducing thoughts and actions (plucking out the arrow); I suppose this might be one way of understanding why Zimbardo’s research interests have evolved from monsters to heroes….

Re our “mindblindness” to the “blank” in the psychopathic mind, I guess it’s theoretically possible to imagine a presence where the Theorists of Mind suppose an absence (and thus a lack or deficit in mirror neurons). But why do I find myself instinctively recoiling from this possibility - purely out of deference to conventional thinking, or because I can’t bear to dwell too long in that headspace, or because to consider the psychopath’s empathic vacuum is to momentarily deprive my own empathic capacities? It might be interesting (if gruesome) to look at what literature exists on the thoughts which occur to psychopaths both in the act of causing suffering and before/after, to find out what type of mental states correlate with, for instance, acts of murder: dissociation, euphoria, or some strange mix of both?

I agree with Jason (and I think s was hinting at this already) in that I don’t think the word “evil” is much help defined either way. Often, it can even be a handy way to ignore structural and social (and sure, why not, biochemical) causes. (As Zimbado does not, but I think his use of “evil” as described here works against him for this reason.)

You may say that Frederick’s situational determinants were intense but by comparison nowhere near this absolute, which would be fair, but — to throw the question back at you — what might then constitute an objective criterion for judging when situation subsumes intention, or the reverse?

This is exactly the problem I was groping towards. I am suggesting that the perspectives we are comfortable with and enjoy thinking about tend not to be ones that permit an “objective criterion”. To quite an extent, we are approaching this from a “free will”/”determinism” perspective - but so heavily shaded with psychological and sociological colours that we are quite comfortable with the nonexistence of either black and white extreme (and so are rejecting absolutes, and with them, “objective criterion” for judging a situation). Is this perspective compatible with evil? I don’t have the answer to that question. And, one is left wondering whether to understand is to forgive . . . Or, less horrifyingly, it may bring us to the Buddha:

Scrutinizing the metaphysically-laden ethical systems that include “evil” for clues as to its nature in this sense far less important than learning to cultivate harm-reducing thoughts and actions (plucking out the arrow)

It sounds almost bureaucratic. Cue Zimbardo’s definitions.

I sense the broadness springs from his goal of defining the object of his investigation in terms that circumvent the variables of culture, metaphysics and etiology:

Right, that’s exactly what he did. And so you have evil without evil. In your essay, I think, you addressed this hollowness by turning - refreshingly and naturally - to Philip K. Dick and Milton, who most certainly did not resist

getting into a complex defense or critique of any existing ethical code, spiritual belief system or biopsychosocial pathology

And then do not Buddha and Zimbardo seem to support the banalization of evil?

I’m so glad you mentioned Through a Scanner Darkly - am I alone amongst fans of Philip K. Dick in also thoroughly enjoying that film?

While I don’t doubt the reality of the Lucifer effect, and my experiences with the psychiatric system have taught me the inadequacy of the ‘bad apple’ theory of misbehaviour, my question is how might this theory influence the personal ethics of individuals. A rule of thumb might be to reverse the usual self-serving cognitive bias and tell yourself that while others who behave badly might be in bad barrels, but if you behave badly, you’re a bad apple…

The work of Zimbardo and Milgram, while compelling and necessary, is not without its detractors. Experimentation in social psychology is fraught with paradox, since the central assumption of social psychology is that behaviour should be understood as arising from specific situations, rather than individual personality traits. (Although this is not something that Milgrim fully accepted - following in the footsteps of his mentor Solomon Asch, he attempted to find common, and possibly causal, traits among the men who shocked his “learner” to the maximum extent.) The experimental set-up is, of course, a specific, highly artificial situation, which theoretically makes it hard to make generalisations based on its findings. The use of Milgram’s results to shed light on the behaviour of Nazi soldiers is a particularly good illustration of sloppy reasoning in this regard - the Nazis had ample opportunities to stop and consider their actions, while Milgrim’s subjects were placed in a pressure-cooker situation that provided little time for reflection.

In that sense, it has been suggested by Ian Parker, Lauren Slater and others that such experiments are more absurdist theatre than scientific enquiry. Certainly, the most salutary effect the Milgram experiment had was on some of its subjects who did shock the learner until he was ostensibly unconscious. Once the purpose of the experiment was explained to them, they took the opportunity to radically reassess their personal ethics. One of Milgram’s 65% became a conscientious objector and another came out of the closet as a result of their participation in the experiment.

On a more humorous note, Bush and Rummy have also performed a valuable service in producing a modicum of moral enlightenment in many people of the Chip Frederick mold. 40, 50, 60 years of pressing their trousers and worrying about being a good boy or girl has been leavened by the late-in-life realisation that some of the most powerful people around are stupid and/or corrupt and that Father Doesn’t Always Know Best.

Looking forward to reading your next post.

For deciding which question there are no “objective” criteria, but that doesn’t seem to stop the law working, with its handy concept, which we might fruitfully consider here, of “duress”.

I’m interested meanwhile in Philip K. Dick’s admiration of the “authentic” human being because: “He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves.” I find the second half of this extremely problematic. Really - even if he knows that his family will be killed because of it, his action is still somehow right? Surely it is not so simple.

Forgive me for citing Baudrillard again, but I think this from him is apt:

The exciting question is not why there is evil. First there is evil, without question. Why is there good? This is the real miracle.”

Well, at first, it looks like Baudrillard is merely cutely inverting the old saw of the “problem of evil”, while keeping the same theological language. But remember that the French for evil, “mal” (which also means “pain” or “badly”) is not so specifically theological as the English word. And I think the upside-down viewpoint is useful: in a sense, Baudrillard “naturalizes” evil as simply a feature of the world as we find it (whether you read this as a Hobbesian view of “human nature” in particular, or a more general gloss of “nature red in tooth and claw” etc). But does this avoid the question of what we actually do about evil? Maybe it only points out that labelling things “evil” is pointless since “evil” is already everywhere, and the point, as Jason and the Buddha suggest, is to get on with trying to fix what can be fixed in terms of actual behaviour and institutional practices.

Steve’s right that the legal concept of “duress” fits squarely into this debate, but so far I’m not finding many signs that legal scholars will shed much new light on the topic. Rather, it seems more likely that the jurists are hoping the psychologists will clarify the issue. For example, J. Dressler, quoted by Peter Westen & James Mangiafico in The Criminal Defense of Duress, comments:

To determine when coercion should excuse, we must conduct a balancing process somewhat similar to that which occurs in choice-of-evils justification analysis. [The] issue…is not whether the actor made…[a] choice [that] was expected as a predictive matter, but rather whether, in light of the nature of the demand and the expected repercussions from noncompliance, we could fairly expect a person of nonsaintly moral strength to resist the threat.

This definition begs the questions of what Dressler means by a “person of nonsaintly moral strength”: once again, we’re hurled back on the quandary of what society can reasonably expect of people placed in extreme situations where their normal mental (and thus moral) processes are tested to (or beyond) breaking point. “Heroes are hard to find in an environment of total terror,” as Dressler puts it.

How to define that breaking point? Maybe neuroscience has some answers. I do worry, however, that the jurists are seizing upon an interpretation of the neurological findings that’s based upon a fallacious naturalism: that is, that they risk using neurochemistry to justify pre-existing moral or legal ideas, rather than letting science open up new ways of considering the scope of human agency. In Jeffrey Rosen’s article on neurolaw in the New York Times last Sunday, for instance, he describes his encounter with Owen Jones, professor of law and biology at Vanderbilt University and Rene Marois of Vanderbilt’s psychology department, that illustrates the problem I’m describing. Jones and Marois speculate that:

….If they discovered a significant gap between people’s hard-wired sense of how severely certain crimes should be punished and the actual punishments assigned by law, federal sentencing guidelines might be revised, on the principle that the law shouldn’t diverge too far from deeply shared beliefs.

The problem here is that Jones and Marois are making the meta-scientific assumption that the neurological correlates of our concepts of justice would necessarily be causally prior to the psychosocially driven phenomenon of the law. But the reverse interpretation could equally be valid. My idea of the injustice of, say, capital punishment is quite different from, for instance, John Ashcroft’s idea — for all sorts of reasons, many of them undetermined by neurobiology. If an fMRI scan were to reveal a section of the brain that lights up when Ashcroft or I think about the electric chair, I’d bet that it’s our moral ideas that are driving their neurological correlates, rather than the other way around: no “hardwiring” there.

So, absent conclusive neuroscience or jurisprudence, are we yet again back to the business of trying to sort out the limits of human responsibility on the basis of an imperfect and fallible societal consensus regarding the nature of reasonable actions in unreasonable times? Help us Obi-Wan, you’re our only hope….

To quite an extent, we are approaching this from a “free will”/”determinism” perspective - but so heavily shaded with psychological and sociological colours that we are quite comfortable with the nonexistence of either black and white extreme (and so are rejecting absolutes, and with them, “objective criterion” for judging a situation).

has become an insistence that this has to be looked at as a strict matter of free will vs determinism, especially given that I am saying that the actual binary is itself rejected - and with it the possibility of objective criteria. (Yes, I used free will vs determinism in my earlier post, but passingly, and in the same way). My point is this: the debate, even about “duress”, is about qualifying the moral nature of the choice - the extent to which that choice is possible, the extent to which it is determined by circumstances or, less controversially, the social influences and and duress and coercion at work in limiting that choice; and how these conspire to defy objective standards. When asking how a nonsaintly but moral person would be expected to act (or not to act), Dressler is appealing to choice sans extraordinary determinants. What would a decent, average person under similar circumstances choose if he or she were fairly free to do so? This is by no means an “objective” criteria, though it pretends to be. My question is not about the worth of free will and determinism in questions of evil, but about whether this structure (of choice, of duress, of what the average bloke would do) is more comfortable intellectually than discussing it in religious terms; and then to wonder whether evil always fades away in these secular discussions of “evil”, because these legal and bureaucratic concepts of duress and choice and social determinants can’t quite capture what evil is - though they wonderfully explain the context for how people harm one another (or even, “again back to the business of trying to sort out the limits of human responsibility on the basis of an imperfect and fallible societal consensus regarding the nature of reasonable actions in unreasonable times”). The turn to Buddhism, then, is part of this failure to grasp evil, as a nonsecular approximation of the religious without the most uncomfortable decorations and claims of other religions. The notion that Buddhism here provides an answer may be true for you in many wonderful ways; but here, to me, it smacks of anti-intellectualism (”let’s throw that metaphysical garbage where it belongs”) and vapid platitudes (”let’s stop blogging about evil and start reducing harm in the world! What can I fix first?”) Sincerely - apologies if this misrepresents your evocation of Buddhism, Jason. I know very little about Buddhism outside of some yoga classes and adolescent Pirsig binges.

The desire for objectivity in evil outside of the free will/determinism/choice/duress discourses, which cannot provide an objective category, and without resorting to theologies, leads us to hoping that a bright glow in the frontal cortex might be an objective standard. While I am not at all pessimistic about the possibilities of neuroscience in partly explaining some of what we wonder about, I quite agree that any conclusions about concepts of justice drawn from fMRIs would be quite premature.

I’m baffled, along with Jason, by Jones and Marois’s invocation of a “hard-wired sense of how severely certain crimes should be punished”, as if such a sense had already been shown to exist. Do they really think there is something like a Chomskyan grammar for justice “hard-wired” into our brains from birth? Are ideas of justice - and, indeed, of “evil” - not learned socially?

The idea of “neurolaw” itself is fascinating, though I agree with Jason’s representation of its dangers, as though it evinces a wish to sweep all our messy moral problems away and replace them with shiny, hard objective fact. There is also a new discipline of neuroeconomics, which aims for a better understanding of how people actually make choices. Doubtless these disciplines will illuminate some matters, but it seems to me that they are unlikely to tell us the answer to the problem of “evil”, since that question is already couched so as to be impossible to answer in terms other than the metaphysical.

It’s worth making a distinction here between a) Buddhism as a 2,500 year-old Asian cultural tradition; and b) the insights into the nature of mind and reality that Buddhist philosophy and the contemplative practice of meditation may offer us. As Sam Harris argues, the latter would not necessarily be inflected as “Buddhist,” even if their origins could be traced to Buddhist practitioners. To cite an analogy, the invention of the mathematical concept of “zero” by Indians does not lead us to think of “zero” as a product of “Indian mathematics”; we simply think of “mathematics.” One stream within Buddhism, itself aware of the tendency Harris identifies, has deliberately attempted to resist religious reification precisely to avoid collapsing the psychological territory it may illuminate into any one culturally-located map, illustrated notably by the instruction from ninth century teacher Lin Chin: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”

Where Buddhist thought helps us approach the question of “evil”, I think, is in asserting the non-duality of “good” and “evil” and stressing the iinsubstantiality and interdependence of ostensibly distinct phenomenological entities. Don Cupitt has argued along these lines in After God for a new form of ethics that asserts a post-metaphysical way of living based on a very Buddhist-sounding acceptance of transience (the “Blissful Void”) and a commitment to increasing self-knowledge. Through this move, there is no “problem of evil” as such; there is the problem of suffering in the world and the question of why we stay intellectually attached to the good-evil binary even if appears inconsistent with the continuous spectrum of real human behavior. In my opinion, such a move isn’t anti-intellectual, bureaucratic, or banal – it’s a shift to a post-metaphysical paradigm which allows us to confront ourselves and the world with philosophical and practical efficacy. And it’s also a move away from “evil-doers”, “axis of evil”, and all the many egregious abuses of organized religion idenitifed by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion. But it sounds to me like you still need or want “evil” - why?

I am, however, no more impressed by your contention that it’s “a move away from “evil-doers”, “axis of evil”, and all the many egregious abuses of organized religion idenitifed by Richard Dawkins” than I would be by some spaced-out hippie telling me that “Buddhism is the way, man, where there’s only peace and harmony in the world” - or whatever cartoon of occidental Buddhism you can imagine. Bush’s stupid use of “evil-doers” does not prove that the term is entirely worthless (although, I would admit, it’s pretty close to being worthless).

You ask “it sounds to me like you still need or want “evil” - why?” Let me take a step back: in all fairness, the first mention of evil is by you in your subtitle to this post, and you go on to talk about evil in the post and the blomments. My line of questioning has been to ask whether you are actually always talking about evil - there are times when I question whether you are doing so (although I’m not disputing that you’re talking about people doing bad things - just whether or not it is “evil”). This line of questioning has followed this trajectory: are there approaches to the concept of “evil” that erase the moral (and aesthetic) dimensions of “evil” and that simply become banal, vague descriptions of people causing intentional harm? and, is it then possible that “evil” - evil - requires some sort of objective correlate, provided by explanations that do not rely on cause/effect/duress/psychological interpretations of actions? One answer to this is adequately provided by your last blomment, in which you reject these questions by rejecting “evil”; fair enough.

In answer to your question, do I need or want “evil”? Maybe - not quite sure. I can hardly reject “the non-duality of “good” and “evil” [or] the iinsubstantiality and interdependence of ostensibly distinct phenomenological entities” But I leave the concept of “evil” alive as an essential part of the moral imagination, without which I fear we cannot countenance the full range of human ethics. Or, perhaps, I am not morally imaginative enough to see the full spectrum of human ethics without it.

But by contrast, there might equally (or even more persuasively) be a case for dispensing with “evil.” Suppose that an historical analysis of the consequences of a metaphysically-laden ethical system led us to the conclusion that the dualistic moral categories of “good” and “evil” were both inadequate to representing the (dimensional, non-categorical) nature of human behavior as we now understand it, and had also contributed to a false polarization in our ethical thinking that diminished or even corrupted our understanding of the Other. We might then say that “evil” was a metaphor that had outlived its usefulness (or had declined in “philosophical efficacy,” to clarify my ill-formed phrase) - and that consequently we would be better off exploring new modes of thought.

“Better off” in what way? Well, I think we would be likely to agree that ultimately our debate here is far from value-neutral: the world would doubtless be a better place with less violence, torture, war. The question then presents itself of what forms of societal and philosophical systems are most likely to effect that reduction in violence. S’s cartoon stereotype of the Panglossian Buddhist hippie contends unconvincingly that following Buddhism will necessarily lead to universal peace. But while I may be premature in heralding some aspects of Buddhism as the potential doorway to a post-metaphysical ethical paradigm (with an impact, we might conceivably discover, not just on our understanding of man’s inhumanity to man but that inhumanity itself), surely the stakes are high enough to warrant its consideration? If this post-metaphysical landscape risks succumbing to the “banality” S identifies, then it would be the challenge of progressive theologians, artists and philosophers to mitigate this risk by reinvigorating human ethics through a moral imagination beyond the limits S currently feels applies. Should this endeavor fail, nothing would presumably prevent us from returning to the older, theologically-inflected metaphors. Yes, I mentioned “evil” first in my headline, but I hope it’s clear that part of the article’s objective was to interrogate this storied concept to see how well it still holds up.

Quickly, my “stereotypical hippie” - no doubt beaded, bearded and lentil-scarfing - was conjured up only to counter your claim that dispensing with evil would protect us from the rhetorical claims of Bush et al; the misuse of Buddhism may not have caused all the strife that the Christian misuse of “evil” has caused, but we would surely agree that that misuse does not necessarily obviate correct usage. (The concern that whether what I characterise as Christian misuse of “evil” is actually always Christian misuse of “evil” and not Christian use of evil is accepted as a caveat.)

But I wonder if clues exist as to the shape of one such possible future ethical landscape in the course of a different (yet related) stream within the history of ideas: aesthetics. Looking back roughly three millennia to Homer’s The Odyssey, we find the human story first conceived as a narrative interwoven with supernatural forces: the gods. Cut forward three thousand years to twentieth century Dublin in Joyce’s Ulysses and the gods are reconceived as symbolic features of a man’s multi-layered inner consciousness – a novelistic rendering of Freud and Heisenberg – with Homer’s Kingdom of the Dead replaced by an alcoholic’s funeral, presided over by a priest whose lecture on the immortality of the soul Leopold Bloom refuses to believe. Individual skeptic rationality replaces epic supernaturalism.

Cut forward another century and waste management expert Nick Shay wanders through the post-Hiroshima existential scrap heap of De Lillo’s Underworld: Joycean intertextuality evolves to the radical interrelatedness of Derridean differance and Dennett’s “multiple drafts” model of consciousness. In De Lillo’s story, the psychic echoes of a Russian hydrogen bomb test reverberate across the planet at a New York Giants game - the ethical implication of this most recent version of the archetypal human narrative perhaps being that an epoch of indeterminate or fractured meta-narratives is one nonetheless of profound global interdependence. The ethical verities of Homeric supernaturalism may still hold a nostalgiac allure, but like a child letting go of fairy tales as he evolves towards psychic autonomy, maybe 21st Century ethics can bid farewell to the old gods and assert humanity’s interconnectedness without them. Lennon again: “I hope someday you will join us, and the world will live us one.”

In The Science of Good and Evil (Times Books, 2004), I argued that we evolved moral emotions that operate similarly to other emotions, such as hunger and sexual appetite. Thinking of these emotions as proxies for highly efficient computational programs deepens our understanding of the process. When we need energy, we do not compute the relative caloric values of our food choices; we just feel hungry, eat and are rewarded with a sense of satisfaction. Likewise, in choosing a sexual partner, the brain employs a computational program to make you feel attracted to people with good genes, as indicated by such proxies as a symmetrical face and body, clear complexion, and a 0.7 to 1 waist-to-hip ratio in women and an inverted pyramid build in men. Similarly, in making moral choices about whether to be altruistic or selfish, we feel guilt or pride for having done the wrong or right thing. But the moral calculations of what is best for the individual and the social group were made by our Paleolithic ancestors. Emotions such as hunger, lust and pride are stand-ins for such computations.

But the general idea in principle seems to me plausible. Just as cavemen thought the weather to be caused by the emotional caprice of gods, and our understanding of what actually causes weather has advanced, now requiring no more appeal to deities, so too, perhaps, the idea of “evil” is an outdated supernatural mode of folk science (for the cavemen, too, were scientists, just not very advanced ones by our standards). Of course, this remains to be demonstrated and argued properly, but I see no reason in principle why human psychology should not be thought capable of the same advances in understanding as has been the weather, etc - unless one is already committed to metaphysical explanations.

I have read, though, the book cited by one of the commenters, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, and it is very good (and there’s an extract here).