Paul Bloom's Reading List

"I hadn’t read Eichmann in Jerusalem until very recently. Obviously, I’d heard about it. I knew the gist of it. But it’s only recently that I’ve come to see what all the fuss is about. “Evil is often a result of recognising another’s humanity, which is pretty much the opposite of the usual view.” It’s a controversial book, of course, and very provocative. Arendt explains her famous idea of the banality of evil in relation to Eichmann and what he said at his trial. She suggests that the Nazis, like Eichmann, who were responsible for such evil acts were stupid, short-sighted and ordinary. They were clownish. Rather than reflecting malevolence, their actions were unthinking and routine. But she also makes claims about the complicity of Jews and others working with the Nazis, some of whom may have thought they were doing the best they could to rescue people, others who were acting out of self-interest and personal gain. She thought many more could have been saved if they hadn’t played along with the Nazis. And she also fumed against the hypocrisy of the Israelis, as with their outrage against the Nuremberg Laws, when their own laws didn’t recognise a marriage between a non-Jew and a Jew. No wonder her book provoked such a furious reaction. Eichmann may not have been typical. Arendt may have put too much weight on his case. And there’s been recent research which suggests that he might not have been as stupid as he appeared at his trial—that this was in some way an act. So yes, the banality claim may have been overstated. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In many ways, Arendt reminds me of Noam Chomsky , the way she puts her case so forcibly, not sparing anyone. Chomsky always comes out fighting, and Arendt is like that. And, like him, she puts her case too strongly at times. But I’d definitely recommend reading this book."

"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."

"David Livingstone Smith’s Less than Human . Smith, a philosopher, makes the best case for what you might see as the received opinion, the view that evil most often stems from dehumanisation. He’s also keen to show that the worst atrocities are committed by ordinary human beings, not by people radically different from us. We’ve already mentioned the Nazi propaganda depicting Jews as rats, as somehow subhuman and parasitic, but the same mechanism was going on when the Hutus described the Tutsi as cockroaches as a prelude to the Rwandan genocide , and so on for countless other cases. “Without the distance of dehumanisation, real evil would be impossible for most of us. ” Part of what Smith argues is that it is very difficult for most of us to kill or torture another person, and that we need to get away from the other person’s humanity in order to do that. Without the distance of dehumanisation, real evil would be impossible for most of us. So dehumanisation is a way of overcoming those inhibitions, and that’s the path to genocide. Yes. And I agree with Smith that much evil does arise from this. But that’s not the whole story. As I’ve suggested, some violence and cruelty relies on actually recognising people’s humanity. For instance, in parts of Europe racist fans throw bananas at African footballers or call them monkeys. But they obviously don’t literally believe that they’re monkeys: they wouldn’t go after a monkey and shout ‘monkey’ at it. These racists might seem to be dehumanising the footballers, but a different way of seeing this is to recognise that the taunts would only work on the assumption that the footballers can feel shame and anger at being described that way. The taunts can only work as taunts because the racists recognise the players’ humanity."

"This is a book of interviews with Japanese perpetrators of extreme evil during the Sino-Japanese War. These men are elderly men, but in the interviews they describe rapes, horrific torture, mass murder, murders of children—absolutely gruesome stories. Dawes has a lot to say about this. At one point, he points out something which Baumeister also discusses, which is after you’ve done something once, it gets easier to do it again. Often these men say that it was tough to rape or maim or kill the first time, but after that, well, it went smoother. Dawes also talks about the role of groups where if everyone else is doing something, you want to do it too: you don’t want to be seen as weak, you don’t want to be seen as cowardly or not manly enough. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . What I found really interesting about the book, and why I put this on my list, is that he talks a lot about the fascination we have with these men, and in particular he talks about the moral issues we have when we struggle to understand them. One observation that he gives, which is very moving, is that these are nice guys: they are elderly Japanese men, they are very contrite about their actions, they’re often funny and gracious hosts, and interesting people to talk to. Dawes found himself liking many of them, and he talks about what that feels like. But he’s not in a place to forgive them—he wasn’t a victim, nothing was done to him. So how do we deal with this? He also talks more generally about the pornography of violence that draws us to atrocities—to the Holocaust, slavery, and so on. He does make that connection. The response to horror movies, and our response to the Holocaust , or to Nanking, are not entirely dissimilar. There are similar itches that are being scratched. One might be for recreation and one might be for scholarly study or concern about the future of humanity, but there is a lot of common ground. “He talks a lot about the fascination we have with these men, and in particular he talks about the moral issues we have when we struggle to understand them. ” This is an extraordinary book that defies classification. He doesn’t have a single pitch or argument to make, but it is a beautiful exploration of evil, not just of what motivates the perpetrators, but also about how we see the perpetrators. Yes. And he’s appropriately cautious about that. These stories have been told many times, and they’ve become sanitised in the retelling. What’s interesting is that sometimes new things emerge. He’d have these discussions, and at the beginning he’d ask, ‘Have you ever killed a child?’ And the person would say, ‘No. Never….I would never kill a child.” Then they would talk a bit more, and the old man would add: “But, well…there was this one time when a woman was holding a child, and she wouldn’t put him down, and she ran away, and then we shot and killed them both. But besides that one time, no! Well, maybe one other time…’ What’s revealed in this sort of conversation is fascinating and at the same time horrible. Yes. And in general, the same accusation could apply to experimental moral psychology. Philosophers and psychologists both like sanitised cases, clean examples. It’s not surprising that the trolley problem caught on so much in our field—it is simple, easy to understand, you can modify it in systematic ways, you don’t upset the undergraduates. But it might be too far from reality. A related complaint is that philosophers and psychologists study, almost exclusively, interactions between strangers. But in the real world, moral questions often come up within families and other intimate relationships, and so we miss a lot of the complexities of actual morality, concerning obligations, promises, expectations and so on. It’s a shame that these sanitised cases with strangers have come to dominate our field."

"Agreed! This is a very timely book in the light of the current ‘Me Too’ movement. She describes sexual harassment and sexual assault, and she has a moving chapter on strangulation. She spends a lot of time on the case of Eliot Rogers, this man who felt he was always rejected by women, and then went on a shooting spree, killing many people, and finally killing himself. She describes these cases in some depth, and provides a really interesting analysis. I see this analysis as the mirror image of David Livingstone Smith’s, although they could both be right for different cases. Manne’s proposal is that in cases of misogyny, it’s not that men don’t see women as people. It’s not that they lose control in some way. It’s rather that men are morally outraged. They expect things from women: they expect nurturance, they expect sex, they expect love, they expect care, and they get enraged when these expectations aren’t being met. So, for Manne, the husband who strangles his wife out of rage, it’s not that he doesn’t think of his wife as a person, it’s not that he’s lost control in some way; it’s rather that he is morally driven, he feels his wife has done something horribly wrong by not being a good wife and she deserves what’s coming to her. And so Manne, very vividly and very powerfully, presents a important perspective on cruelty. Using the example of misogyny as a case study, she suggests that cruelty can be a moralistic act based on a certain ideology about how people should act. For Manne, misogyny is a belief that women should act a certain way towards men. When they don’t, violence and cruelty are often directed towards the women to punish them or to bring them in line. (She notes as well that certain positive feelings towards women could also reflect misogyny. If somebody is made Woman of the Year for supporting her husband, that also reflects the same ideology. But it’s cruelty that her book is mostly about.) As I said, this is the mirror image of the very convenient, very palpable message in the dehumanisation work. What Manne is saying is that when you recognise people’s humanity—she links this with Peter Strawson’s notion of reactive attitudes—there are all sorts of moral risks. There’s a lovely passage on this in her book where she points out that to see someone as human means it is possible for that person to be a true friend or a beloved spouse, but it also means that he or she can compete with you, or disagree with you, or humiliate you, or betray you. Men and women often live together, and so you’re nose to nose with an independent cognitive agent, and this, along with misogyny, makes possible all sorts of cruelty and violence. Yes. She calls misogyny ‘the law enforcement branch of the patriarchy’. It emerges from society. If her book has any weakness, and it’s a weakness that applies to many other books on the topic, it is that there is a lack of interest in the psychological mechanisms that underlie all of this. Manne doesn’t wrestle at all with the empirical evidence on the nature of aggression and bias, but focuses primarily on the broader philosophical arguments, and on real-world cases. Yes, definitely. But there are also the psychological issues of how it’s acquired, how it’s represented, and how people differ. Not everybody is equally misogynistic. Some people might show subtle implicit biases, others obvious and blatant ones. We may all be misogynists to some extent, but I’ve never strangled anybody, and I don’t think I ever would. There are all sorts of psychological questions that Manne, by choice, isn’t that interested in. That’s OK. It’s her book. “For Manne, misogyny is a belief that women should act a certain way towards men. When they don’t, violence and cruelty are often directed towards the women to punish them or to bring them in line. ” I resonate to her way of thinking because it chimes well with my own interest in the ‘moral’ quality of violence: when people who do bad things think they are doing the right thing, out of a sense that they are morally right. Morality explains a lot of the terrible things that we do to one another. This claim isn’t unique to Manne or to me, of course. Another book that could have ended up on my list is Virtuous Violence by Alan Fiske and Tage Rai which argues that a lot of violence is motivated by moral principles—it summarises a lot of interesting research in this area. There’s a lot more to say to say about evil and cruelty, of course. For instance, some people’s cruelty comes very directly from physiological causes such as different forms of brain damage. Also, even for those of us who are neurologically fine, a great cause of cruelty is simply lack of impulse control. Most of us have cruel thoughts to one another which we don’t act on. But sometimes we slip. If you want a palate-cleanser to think about humanity at its best after the more pessimistic outlooks I’ve been discussing, Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature is a tremendously optimistic book. He describes a lot of cruelty though the ages, but argues convincingly that we’ve been getting better and better. (He’s followed this up with Enlightenment Now , which I’m currently reading.) And Larisssa McFarquar in her book Strangers Drowning has a series of case studies of real good-hearted individuals: some of them are effective altruists, some are driven by religious convictions, and some are just really nice people, who give their kidneys to strangers, and won’t order a Martini because the money spent on it could go to feed the poor, and so on. She begins by taking a bemused view of these moral saints, but by the end she’s not cynical: she says these people really are good people, they really are leading good lives. Reading about all these kind people doing kind things is a great antidote to reading all the descriptions of torture and murder and rape in the books I’m recommending!"