Op-Ed: A Question of Evil

Yesterday’s Washington Post brings us the story of psychiatrist Michael Welner, who is trying to define evil. As a forensic psychiatrist, his aim is to help juries to classify acts of violence as vile, heinous, evil, etc.

This is important because often sentencing guidelines or instructions to juries turn upon whether a crime was inhuman, vile, heinous, or evil. But ask each person what is “evil” and you’re likely to get a bunch of different answers. Religions and philosophies have wrestled with this question for millenia. Welner wants to define evil in a legal sense. What I found most interesting about the article was the important presupposition it relies upon. The Washington Post stated it outright, though in most lives today it dwells beneath the surface of the conscious mind. Neely Tucker, writing for the Post, writes that “the search for absolute evil is as old as mankind.” The presupposition, of course, is the existence of absolute evil. The existence of absolute evil implies an existence of absolute standards to begin with, a concept that atheists and secular college professors often seek to explain away. G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and countless others have written about this subject. Without an appeal to a superhuman or supernatural standard, we are doomed to failure in our search for absolutes because the existence of absolutes implies a standard which cannot be changed by human or natural means. Untimately, Dr. Welner’s search has led him to create a Depravity Scale by asking people what they think is evil. You can take the survey yourself at depravityscale.org/depscale. The answer probably gets us closer as a society to a definition of evil acts, but it cannot move us closer to a definition of evil. In effect, we’ve removed the discussion of evil one step semantically by discussing acts of evil. One cannot both seek an absolute standard for evil and deny the existence of an absolute Good. So I guess even depravity can bring you back to church.