Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

"Baumeister is an experimental psychologist. He takes evil to be intentionally harming another person who is undeserving of such treatment. His focus is on how the perpetrators of evil experience what they do, their perceptions of it. He argues that people who commit evil generally don’t see what they do as evil, but rather as some sort of justified response to a difficult situation. In one fascinating set of experiments, he asked people to think about the worst thing that anyone has ever done to them, describe what happened, how they felt as victim of this, and so on. Then he asks people to think about the worst thing that they have ever done to someone else. The two get described in completely different terms. When evil is done to you, you see it as a terrible injustice, you see its effects as long-lasting. But when you describe something that you have done to someone else, there are always mitigating circumstances, explanations and justifications. The language is different. No matter how extreme the act of cruelty, the perpetrator’s story always introduces some factor that explains it: he was forced, or under great pressure, and besides, it wasn’t as serious as the victim says it is. Yes. The consequences of this are extremely serious. When one person is violent to another this sometimes leads to what the victim sees as a justifiable and proportionate retaliation; but in the eyes of the person whom he takes action against, that retaliation is going too far, and so it provokes an even greater counter-reaction. And so on. If Baumeister is right, the escalation of violence in these sorts of circumstances is inevitable since the recipient always sees the violence against him as worse than anything he had previously done. There’s much more in the book than this, and I don’t agree with all of it. But Baumeister has lots of interesting ideas about violence and its causes."

"Baumeister reviews the various psychological roots of evil, and what we know about them from social psychology, history and criminology. He argues convincingly that aggression does not come from a single motive in humans, but from a variety of motives, such as practical means-end reasoning, moralistic vengeance, dominance and utopian ideologies. The widespread belief that evil acts come from evil minds is itself an interesting psychological phenomenon. Baumeister argues that the human conception of harmdoing, including violence, depends on whether one takes the viewpoint of the perpetrator or of the victim. A perpetrator psychology and a victim psychology can describe the same events in extraordinarily different terms. The perpetrator always believes that he is acting reasonably, that he was provoked by the circumstances, that anyone else would do the same thing, that the harm was minor, and that we should get over it and move on. The victim always thinks that the harmful act was deliberate, sadistic and inflicted only because the perpetrator delights in the suffering of the victim – that the damage is irreparable and that we all have a moral imperative never to forget it. Baumeister showed this in experiments in which people recalled a story about a minor harm as accurately as possible, while narrating it from the vantage point of the perpetrator or the victim. Though nothing was at stake, each emphasised details that the other omitted. Baumeister also notes that the viewpoint of the moralist is basically the viewpoint of the victim, whereas the viewpoint of the scientist overlaps with the viewpoint of the perpetrator. A scientist, who seeks to explain the causes of an evil act in terms of the context and general principles about human motivation, is bound to seem as if he is making excuses for the perpetrator, and minimising the harm the perpetrator has done. Moralists, by contrast, emphasise the harm, attribute it to an evil intention to make the victim suffer, and insist that the presence of evil in the world is ultimately inexplicable. Despite the risk of appearing to explain evil away, there is a moral imperative to understand the causes of evil, the better to minimise it. In doing so, we discover that many acts of evil are caused by motives that seem quite ordinary in the minds of perpetrators. Baumeister’s analysis overlaps with Hannah Arendt’s thesis of “the banality of evil”. That’s not a complete coincidence, since some of the classic studies in social psychology that Baumeister draws on – including Milgram’s famous experiment on obedience – were inspired by Arendt herself."