Summary
Looking back at some of the stories that have been in the news during this series of Moral Maze you could be forgiven for despairing of humanity. The suspected firebombing by Jewish settlers killing a Palestinian baby, the white supremacist who shot dead nine people at a church in South Carolina and where to start with so-called IS? Public stoning, mass executions and lessons in beheading for school children are just some of their stock-in-trade. Faced with such a litany of horrors it's tempting to reach for the word "evil" - nothing else quite does justice to the enormity of this kind of barbarity. If we can comfortably categorise an action as evil, what about the people who carried them out? Are they evil too? The problem of evil has long exercised theologians and moral philosophers. As our understanding of psychology and the neurosciences has developed what role should the notion of evil have in our moral, political, and legal thinking? Is evil an out-dated, redundant superstition which should be abandoned? Are we all, given sufficient provocation or circumstance, capable of committing evil acts? And if that is the case is there no horror which cannot be explained away? If we abandon the concept of evil what does that do to the idea of free will? Without evil would we drift into moral relativism? Or is the charge of being evil an easy get out for us all? By suggesting that evil is something alien and other, something of which we are possessed, that takes us over, it conveniently absolves us of the deeply unpleasant task of recognising that these people are part of our world. On the six hundredth and sixty-sixth edition of the programme the Moral Maze looks at the problem of evil.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to a program from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:04.0 | Good evening. The news this summer seems to have been full of event so awful we can hardly explain them without recourse to the idea of metaphysical evil. |
| 0:11.9 | When IS torturers blow the heads off their captives with explosives, when children here are casually, routinely abused, our humanity is challenged, and evil is the easiest answer to the question how and why. |
| 0:25.7 | But is that a cop-out? Does evil really exist? Can only actions be evil, or are people, some people anyway, evil too? |
| 0:33.9 | Are we all capable of evil, given the right or rather wrong combination of circumstances? |
| 0:39.3 | This has to be the central question of faith, philosophy, psychology and even neuroscience, |
| 0:44.3 | with the most profound implications. |
| 0:46.8 | For the faithful, how evil can coexist with an all-good, all-powerful God. |
| 0:51.7 | For the rest, if evil does not exist, malevolence is biologically and |
| 0:56.2 | culturally determined, or even just psychologically explicable, where does that leave free will? Where does |
| 1:02.0 | that leave moral responsibility? In this, the 666 edition of the moral maze, the devil's number |
| 1:08.7 | according to the book of revelations, the mark of the beast. We ask, is evil the reason people do very bad things? Our panel, Claire Fox from the |
| 1:17.1 | Institute of Ideas, the political analyst Jill Kirby, Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the RSA, |
| 1:22.7 | and Giles Fraser, Anglican priest and broadsheet polemicist, Giles, from your faith perspective, is evil the absence of good, or God, I suppose, or something worse? |
| 1:33.4 | I think the whole idea of metaphysically evil is actually very problematic. I think we're deeply disturbed by the idea that really awful, wicked things might be located too close to us. |
| 1:46.7 | And so we distance ourselves from it by calling it, you know, it's over there, |
| 1:51.1 | or we get possessed by it, or it's metaphysical, or we don't understand it. |
| 1:54.4 | We distance ourselves from it, and I think that's a really dangerous thing to do. |
| 1:57.5 | John Kirby. |
| 1:58.9 | I certainly think evil exists and can be found in all of us. |
| 2:03.5 | Alexander Sojitin said that the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. |
| 2:09.3 | And I think that's very true. |
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