The Drivler has requested more evil.
I suppose I could dance around the issue indefinitely, doing as I always do: saving my thesis to the very end of this argument so that you have been led down the primrose path to accept what I've said as defining, and
only what I've said as defining.
Let me state this another way, my basic structure for any essay of this type is to simply lead by implications from one fertile example to the next--gaining in implicative power with each exploration, until but one string may lead through all the examples to explain them, and this is the discovery that I hope to show. I make you discover, through this process, the discovery that I have also made. But ultimately, I am not out to show one possible reading of a situation amongst many other possabilities--such has never been my intention, but rather to show THE explanation of a situation.
There are those who will say, and rightfully so, is there ever really an ultimate reading given what we know about relativism and the roadblocks to interpretation, but I think that yes, there is always something that can be said that all will have to agree upon or else be in error. We might think of the otherwise facile details of novels, so often overlooked, as one of those conditions which demonstrate my point...and yes, I do have to demonstrate my point as positivism is not only under fire, but bombed out. If I suggest positivism, I cannot simply ignore relativist arguments and I won't. However, I do require a liminal space--a few moments free of objection to make the point before objections are raised.
What I mean by the pedestrian details of a novel are things like the first word on page 58. Whatever argument you want to bring up, you have to agree that, if we have the same edition to a book, then the same word will be the first word on page 58. Perhaps this is so simple that it barely is worth saying, but think for a moment what exactly it is that I'm up against--the relativist argument, so popular these days, is that everything, every little thing, is up for debate, and what I'm saying is, in fact, no. There are some things, like the first word on page 58, that are not, in fact, up for debate.
Moreover, though we gain very little by coming to a consensus about what page 58's first word might be, we lose much by not being able to come to a consensus about how to define "evil." Most people would agree that, in its most basic definition, evil is something that should be avoided, but how do we avoid something that no one can define.
Current definitions of evil, and I may be covering some earlier ground from earlier posts, are that evil is committed when someone knows that something is wrong but does it anyway with the proviso that their justifaction for their action is not sound. See here why the relativist might raise objections? What do I mean by wrong? What do I mean by know? What do I mean by justification? And what do I mean by sound? All of these terms are subjective, and are, unlike the first word on page 58, open to interpretation. I may, of course, turn to what these people call a "meta-narrative" and say, "I mean according to _______." That's what a meta-narrative is: an according to. But then, these people have done a really good job of arguing against the validity of such structures. No, if I want to get this done, I have to do it the right way, or else whatever answer I give ammounts to a great parental "because I said so," and I'm serious about this, so I have no desire to pull such a ridiculous move. The idea here is to keep the dialogue open--it can close down either on my part by becoming overtly stubborn, or on the subjectivist part by dessimating my points one by one showing that they have receded into the world of interpretation--mine being but one possible variant, and having no greater validity than any other.
So, this is somewhat to suggest, not a methodology, but a goal for this "project": Provide a definition of evil in such a way that it is not immediately disposed of.
Returning to the pedestrian defintion of evil that I have defined, I'd like to take it apart for a moment in order to reconstruct a new definition that holds greater validity, but before doing that I'd like to make some commentary about this pedestrian definition.
First of all, though this definition is flawed--almost to the point of having no ability at all of diffentiating the good from the evil--it is the definition which we have internalized. It is, in short, the definition we use in our own personal and political lives with which to judge the moral from immoral. It is, furthermore, the definition we use to justify punishment (whether that punishment be corporal or social). When we have judged someone to have committed an evil act, our opinion of them is lowered; we may ostracize them, censure them, imprison them, inflict financial or bodilly harm on them, or even kill them. However, the two great and damning features of this definition of evil are that the acts which are committed are only a corpus of praxi--they are laws and not irrefutable moral truths. The second of these damning features is that justification can nullify, and even reverse, our judgement. The most classic example of this feature of the current moral system is that we consider killing another human being wrong, and yet, if this killing is committed in self defense, it is excused. If the killing occurs in the line of military combat it is heroic.
In this way, the justification becomes all important. Even if we grant, artificially and for the sake of argument, that the moral laws themselves are, in fact, immutable and universally valid, justification can nullify and reverse such laws, rendering them mutable in our experience of them.
To wit, it is necessary to define evil in such a way that justification cannot modify our definition. Evil must be defined so that the "unless justified" clause cannot be ascribed to any act under investigation. This cannot simply be accompished, however, by turning a deaf ear to justification. That is not at all what I am suggesting--quite the contrary. Rather, I am suggesting that this moral system requires such extensive modification as to make itself immune, rather than simply apathetic, to justification.
