Moral Evil

Chapter Five: Evil as Inaction: Augustine, Aristotle, and Connecting the Thesis of Privation to Virtue Ethics

C H A P T E R F I V E Evil as Inaction Augustine, Aristotle, and Connecting the Thesis of Privation to Virtue Ethics ‘‘Quite often even the most important step in a man’s life, his choice of vocation, is taken quite frivolously. He does not bother to find out enough about the basis and the various aspects of that vocation. Once he has chosen it, he is inclined to switch off his critical awareness and to fit himself wholly into the predetermined career.’’ —Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich Overcoming Evil Situations Disheartening stories of forsaken opportunity mar today’s headlines. Just as Hurricane Sandy bore down on the New York metropolitan area in late October 2012, a mother drove across Staten Island to find shelter for her two sons, aged four and two. Battling winds of nearly 100 miles an hour, her Ford Explorer hit a ditch, and the woman carried her boys to a tree in hopes of anchoring them with the support of its branches. The futility of this strategy evident, the mother banged on the door of a nearby residence and begged the occupant for shelter. Her request was abruptly denied, and very shortly afterward her boys were swept to their death by the rising waters. Their bodies were found four days later a quarter of a mile from where the mother had relinquished her final grip. Just over a month later, an argument broke out at a Times Square subway station in Manhattan as a result of which a thirty-year-old man threw a fifty-eightyear -old man onto the tracks. As the victim struggled to lift himself up to the platform, he was run over by an oncoming train to an untimely death. The aggressor was arrested shortly afterward, but the feature of this story that 2 0 7 2 0 8 C H AP T E R 5 brought it special notoriety was the inaction of a freelance photographer who witnessed the incident up close and opted to capture it on film rather than attempt to offer the victim a helping hand. Affixed next to his image picturing the doomed man about to be caught between the train and the edge of the platform, the tag in the New York Post read, ‘‘Pushed on the subway track this man is about to die.’’ Neither the resident who refused a desperate mother safe haven for her sons nor the photographer at the Times Square subway station did anything illegal. One might say they acted well short of, even offensively below, the line of duty. Still, in terms of causing the tragedies in question, they retained deniability. Hurricane Sandy and a madman were the ones directly responsible. In both cases the bystanders had reasons of which they could avail themselves to appeal to common sense notions of that for which we are to be held minimally responsible in society. Charitably, one could argue that the Staten Island resident who denied shelter to strangers might have been thinking about the safety of his or her family, and the photographer perhaps desired not to risk his own safety in a low probability rescue attempt. After the incident he repeatedly claimed he was not close enough to the fallen man to have made a difference. Nevertheless, something is terribly disappointing about the self-absorption of these two bystanders. Although neither intended harm, their priorities were tied exclusively to their needs, and in these two cases this was enough to make both complicit in the unfolding of potentially avoidable tragedies. Is being complicit in this fashion something for which human beings should be found morally culpable or, for that matter, something that belongs in a book about evil? In the real world, one must look after oneself, and perhaps it is too much to expect that an altruistic impulse should override self-preservation, especially when the stakes are high. The temptation to be for oneself is powerful , and this consideration provides some natural sympathy for these bystanders when we think about how we would behave if we were in similar circumstances. In life, simply by waking up in the morning, we can find ourselves in a situation in which, starting out doing something good, or neutral, we end up doing something bad. On the other hand, this does not have to be the outcome, and it is conceivable that the episodes described are ones of a good character that has either devolved or never...