"Evil is the most serious of our moral problems. All over the
world cruelty, greed, prejudice, and fanaticism ruin the lives of
countless victims. Outrage provokes outrage. Millions nurture
seething hatred of real or imagined enemies, revealing savage and
destructive tendencies in human nature. Understanding this
challenges our optimistic illusions about the effectiveness of
reason and morality in bettering human lives. But abandoning these
illusions is vitally important because they are obstacles to
countering the threat of evil. The aim of this book is to explain
why people act in these ways and what can be done about it." John
Kekes
The first part of this book is a detailed discussion of six
horrible cases of evil: the Albigensian Crusade of about 1210;
Robespierre's Terror of 1793 94; Franz Stangl, who commanded a Nazi
death camp in 1943 44; the 1969 murders committed by Charles Manson
and his "family"; the "dirty war" conducted by the Argentinean
military dictatorship of the late 1970s; and the activities of a
psychopath named John Allen, who recorded reminiscences in 1975.
John Kekes includes these examples not out of sensationalism, but
rather to underline the need to hold vividly in our minds just what
evil is. The second part shows why, in Kekes's view, explanations
of evil inspired by Christianity and the Enlightenment fail to
account for these cases and then provides an original explanation
of evil in general and of these instances of it in particular."
General
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