Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T10:40:54.543Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - Roads to Hell

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 March 2023

Predrag Cicovacki
Affiliation:
College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts
Get access

Summary

Tell people you work on the problem of evil, and you’re bound to disappoint them. For you’ve begun by raising hopes for solutions we’d all like to hear. We’d prefer an answer to the practical question: how can the amount of evil in the world be reduced? But if we can't actually get rid of evil, we’d like some help in thinking about it properly; in particular, we’d like to know how to justify the world, and life within it, when massive evil abounds. But this was Job's question, and not even God could answer it. Where does that leave the rest of us?

For me, it serves as a warning: solving the problem of evil is a hopeless undertaking, and may even involve an element of hubris that's uncomfortably close to blasphemy. So I want to try something else—itself not undaunting—namely, to compress a narrative of the modern history of the concept of evil into fairly short space. It's a project I’ve been working on for many years, and I was faxing final changes to my editor on September 11. Without wanting to raise other sorts of false hopes—nobody is more aware than I am that what might have been not too much more than an interesting topic in the history of philosophy has suddenly moved to the forefront of political discourse. So I’ll conclude my narrative of the history of modern philosophy by suggesting ways in which I hope that conceptual clarity might contribute to a bit of moral and political clarity.

Let's begin with the recognition that the word “Lisbon” was used, in the eighteenth century, to mean approximately what the word “Auschwitz” means for us: the sudden and total collapse of a set of assumptions that give the world sense and meaning. You think you know what justice is, more or less, and how much of the opposite a world can be expected to contain and still count as being civilized. You think you are realistic, know that the distance between this world and the best of all possible ones is vast and unbridgeable; you don't expect kitsch or fairy tale, just a world which doesn't make you cry out in disgust and shame.

Type
Chapter
Information
Destined for Evil?
The Twentieth-Century Responses
, pp. 91 - 110
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Roads to Hell
  • Edited by Predrag Cicovacki, College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts
  • Book: Destined for Evil?
  • Online publication: 17 March 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781580466400.007
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Roads to Hell
  • Edited by Predrag Cicovacki, College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts
  • Book: Destined for Evil?
  • Online publication: 17 March 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781580466400.007
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Roads to Hell
  • Edited by Predrag Cicovacki, College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts
  • Book: Destined for Evil?
  • Online publication: 17 March 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781580466400.007
Available formats
×