Reason Weighing Improperly Account Of Evil Action

What does it take for an action to be evil? Among theories defining an evil action in secular philosophical literature,most of them agree that the essential components of evil action include at least one of the following two properties:(1)significant harm,such as harm that causing unrecoverable physical or mental trauma;(2)certain motivations,such as a motivation to get pleasure from a victim’s suffering.However,the theories including these two features all face strong challenges,either unable to distinguish evil actions from acts of ordinary wrongdoing,or miss out particular situations that evil actions lie in.In order to develop a more complete theory of evil action,above-mentioned challenges have to be overcome.Regarding above two features as essential issues of evil action,this article seeks a more substantive account that goes beyond its fundamental conditions and responds to contests against this claim.The following are the main contents of each chapter.The chapter "Introduction" mainly introduces the backgrounds and research status of the topic,generalizing main ways of clarifying the concept of evil in modern analytic philosophy.First,I explain why I choose evil actions rather than evil character as the breakthrough point of understanding evil as well as the theoretical significance of discussing the topic of evil actions.Second,I introduce theories of evil in the historyof philosophy and their recent revival in contemporary philosophy.I then sketch the two main ways of considering evil actions in modern philosophy and the difficulties in both of them.At last,I introduce the research route of this paper.In chapter 1 and 2,I examine the boundaries of the concept of evil action.In chapter 1,I distinguish "the concept of evil" in secular context from "the problem of evil" in religious context.Besides,I set aside some misconceptions and misapplications of evil action in our daily life,then clarify some intuitions about evil and figure out whether they are correct or not.For many,telling the difference between evil actions and ordinary wrongdoings seems very hard.In chapter 2,I explore the difference between evil actions and ordinary wrongdoings.First,I assess two representative positions on this question,namely,quantitative distinctness and quantitative distinctness.Then I conclude that neither quantitative distinctness nor the presence extra quality tactics can differ evil actions from merely wrongdoings,while the two concepts can be distinct from each other in quality of emphasis distinctness(QE distinctness).In chapter 3,4 and 5,I seek the necessary and sufficient conditions of evil action.In chapter 3 and 4,I consider whether the significant harm and certain sorts of motivations are necessary in defining an evil action by analyzing the most challenging objections against them.In chapter 3,I examine three non-harm situations under contention and illustrate the real challenges faced by the harm part of the framework proffered by most philosophers.In chapter 4,I discuss two popular ways of exploring evil motivations and explain how they fail.Then I focus on Garrard’s silencing account of evil.I argue that while Garrard’s theory fails to provide an adequate account of evil action,it can be modified to form a more plausible theory which can solve the strongest challenges faced by theories of evil currently.In chapter5,I raise a new theory of defining an evil action named "Reason Weighing Improperly Account".This account focuses on the competing considerations rather than silencing phenomenon,adding the non-harm situations to the harm part.I believe this theory is a better version of defining an evil action,avoiding the difficulties faced by Garrard’s theory.Comparing with previous theories of evil action,I believe this account has at least three advantages: First,it successfully solves the challenges faced by most theories of evil action and explains why significant harm and certain sorts of motives are necessary in the conception of evil action.Furthermore,it helps explain how our intuitions work or fail in understanding evil actions.Also,it partly explains why an evil action happens.Evil actions do have a close relationship with certain situations when one has the power to decide whether to sacrifice others’ values of lives.In the end,it provides us a proper direction of exploring evil actions further that we should focus more on the evil actions done by ordinary people and indicates that the best ways to prevent ordinary people from doing evil are to cultivate public spirit and moral judgments and to build a safer and more stable social environment.