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BOOKSHELF

MAY 6, 2011

The Problem With 'Evil'

Simon Baron-Cohen, a psychologist at Cambridge, argues that we can do better than the concept of evil as an explanation for cruel behavior.
By R AYMON D ZH ON G

Is it time for "a new theory of human cruelty"? The old theories of human cruelty were many things, but scientific was not one of them. Cruel behavior is cruel because it transgresses some boundary of rightness, and that boundary is usually decided upon outside the realm of hypothesis and experiment: in law, in religion, in society's norms. Science has had things to say about each of these, though on certain subjects its record is uneven. Still, wickedness has proven curiously resistant to puncturing by other means, and no amount of Epicurus, Kant and Hannah Arendt has yet lessened our interest, not least this week. Why do men commit repugnant acts upon their fellow man? How can we stop it? We are probably not past the point of finding better answers. In his new book, Simon Baron-Cohen wants to sweep away the moral and philosophical clutter and get to cruelty's core. "If I have an agenda," he writes, "it is to urge people not to be satisfied with the word 'evil' as an explanatory tool." Much preferred, for him, is "empathy erosion": a diminished ability to role-reverse, to imagine oneself into another person's consciousness. In this view, a cruel person treats other people like objects because that is, after all, what other people are, at least until we ascribe to them thoughts and feelings and aspirations. Devilish deeds get done when we fail to make that last step. Barbarism is a failure of imagination. Mr. Baron-Cohen is a psychologist at Cambridge, and much of his book is devoted to elaborating the scientific architecture that supports this theory. Research suggests that empathy falls on a spectrum, from low to high. "Zero degrees of empathy means you have no awareness of how you come across to others, how to interact with others, or how to anticipate their feelings or reactions." At the opposite end are people "who are continuously focused on other people's feelings, and go out of their way to check on these and to be supportive." Not everyone at the low end becomes brutes or murderers. Some suffer quietly, as narcissistic or psychotic personalities. Others are autistic and make unique contributions to art, music and

mathematics. But brutes and murderers are zero-degree in disproportionate numbers. That discovery is useful in two ways, according to Mr. Baron-Cohen. First, it arms us in the fight against viciousness. Because one's measure of empathy is determined by factors both genetic and environmental, he says, encouraging empathy ought to be deployed as a means of promoting good behavior and deterring or even rehabilitating bad seeds. The other main usefulness of this view, Mr. BaronCohen writes, is that it at last obviates words like "evil" for describing behavior that is cruel beyond description. Mr. Baron-Cohen's problem with the word "evil" is the same one many scientists have with the word "good" (in its moral sense), or the word "beautiful," or the word "love": They are imprecise, unscientific. "Cruel beyond description" is an unhelpful way of putting it, Mr. Baron-Cohen might argue, because there are few cruel acts that truly beggar description when one has a brain scanner and a team of graduate students at one's disposal.

Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty

By Simon Baron-Cohen Allen Lane, 208 pages, 20

But widespread adoption of the word "evil" not only gets the issue wrong, according to Mr. BaronCohen. It impedes progress on resolving it as well. He reserves special scorn for the "religious" understanding of cruelty, which is what he calls the view that propensity for malice is a fixed inner state, like being possessed or being a witch. That fatalism, he says, has made religion "singularly antienquiry" on the causes of cruelty. "For most religions, the existence of evil is simply an awkward fact of the universe, present either because we fall short in our spiritual aspirations to lead a good life or because such forces (e.g., the Devil) are in constant battle with divine forces for control over human nature." I wish I could say that Mr. Baron-Cohen's grasp of religious metaphysics were more sophisticated than this. "Zero Degrees of Empathy" is an illuminating summary of an important body of scientific work. Mr. Baron-Cohen's case studies offer arresting glimpses into the only inchoately mapped world of empathic malfunction, and as a concise, nonspecialist's tour of the brain's emotional machinery the book is unlikely to be bettered. But it is a profoundly nave work of moral philosophy, one whose conclusions suggest the natural limitations of Mr. Baron-Cohen's approach. The trouble with taking great issue with "evil," not

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"Evil" or "empathy-eroded"?

the thing but the word, is that it misunderstands why such terms exist in the first place. Most people who use the word would agree that malicious actions usually have causes. Evil is something rather separate, having to do with the effects those actions produce, not their causes. The reason that the concept of evil recurs in religious belief is not that it exceeds the bounds of rational consideration. It is that wickedness throws a troubling wrench in any attempt, religious or otherwise, to consider the world systematically. That does not mean we are uninterested in figuring out the biological basis for cruelty, just that biology alone is not likely to go far enough in describing our actual experience of life out there in a cruel world. Mr. Baron-Cohen argues that calling it "evil" fancifies cruelty, gives it a patina of inscrutability. It is true that evil signals a sort of retreat away from concreteness and the muck of ordinary experience. Evil is not a sturdy enough concept on which to hang a legal system, for instance, though despite what Mr. Baron-Cohen suggests, modern court decisions haven't generally turned on the distinction. There is also something to Mr. Baron-Cohen's observation that the word "evil" has become degraded through misuse and overuse. None of that justifies discarding the term wholesale. To cordon evil off in the language is to afford it a position of seriousness in the culture. For anything to do with the dark extremes of human behavior there is a balance to be struck, between animating it and glamorizing it, between making it important and letting it off the hook. That balance is one main reason that literature and philosophy exist. The moral clutter is, in a way, the point. Mr. Zhong is a Princeton-in-Asia fellow at The Wall Street Journal Asia's editorial page.

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