Understanding One Another in a World of Evil

The moral turn in the human sciences has led to an increasing emphasis on the problem of evil. While the Holocaust is frequently presented as the paradigmatic case of evil, this problem has also been used to underscore the unredressed wrongs of slavery and genocide in the history of empire and colonialism. This course aims to take the problem of evil seriously while also raising a doubt about the certainty with which some scholars have characterized evil as a problem of willful or culpable wrongdoing. We aim to think the problem of evil alongside and through a related problem, namely how we come to understand one another as shared participants in a moral universe. This will lead us to consider a series of subsidiary questions: How do we understand one another when ethical stances strike us as unacceptable or, more emphatically, inhuman? Under what conditions do we characterize acts that seem to conform to rival systems of value as evil? In other words, to what extent is the problem of evil a problem of understanding? And do our pronouncements about evil necessarily carry certain assumptions about transhistorical and transcultural human values? Our course resources include works by Ludwig Wittgenstein on the problem of human understanding, Hannah Arendt’s account of the problem of evil, and Stanley Cavell’s account of the problem of acknowledgement, as well as a number of film screenings.

BPRO 23200 | CCCT 23200 | DEMS 23200 | PLSC 23200 | ANTH 23200 | HIST 22804