EVILICIOUS: Cruelty = Desire + Denial (25 page)

The law often invokes the notion of future dangerousness as a means of evaluating risk. The general presumption is that for certain kinds of offences, there is a predictably high level of recidivism, of doing the same thing over and over again. But the implication of this judgment is that those who are deemed guilty are, in some way, not responsible for their future. Their future is determined for them. In fact, it is so determined that the law is willing to make a confident wager and send these criminals to prison or to their death. On this view, someone who has already repeated a crime is more likely to repeat than someone who has only committed a crime once. On this view, those who engage in certain kinds of crimes are more likely to repeat because it is “in” their system. Unfortunately, both folk perception and legal analysis of future dangerousness are based on weak evidence, unfounded assumptions, or both.

Consider sexual offenders. Their crime is intentional, frequently repeated, and aimed at innocent victims. Given that many sexual offenders repeat their offenses, it has the appearance of inevitability, of a process that is highly determined. Because many sexual offenders were abused as children, some experts conclude that we should blame their parents. Other experts believe that particular situations either promote or support sexual offenders, including the church and medical exam rooms. And yet other experts, including the clinical neuroscientist Boris Schiffer, reveal brain differences among pedophiles, including especially the areas involved in reward and self-control. Together, these observations suggest that the combination of a deviant nature and toxic nurture have led to a more deterministic universe.

If this assessment of sexual offenders is right, how should we think about responsibility, blame, and punishment? If sexual offenders can’t help themselves, how should we assign blame? How should we assign an appropriate level and form of punishment, if punishment is even appropriate? Studies of recidivism among sexual offenders generate rates as low as 15% and as high as 80%. These studies also reveal that recidivism rates differ for incest perpetrators, rapists, and child molesters. These numbers tell us that even child molesters don’t always repeat their crimes. They also tell us that sexual offences should not be lumped, but split apart into their underlying causes and triggers. Like the high odds favoring a horse with a distinguished lineage and top rated jockey, there are high odds favoring repeated sexual molestation in an individual who was sexually abused as a child and enters the clergy. Does this mean that we should all bet on this one horse or forget the race altogether? Does this mean that we should lock up the priest before he has an opportunity to enter his parish? No and No. Neither horse racing nor sexual molestation are that easily determined. Future success and future dangerousness are probabilistic. They represent our best guesses based on the available evidence. When law enforcers determine that someone is at high risk of committing a future offense, they don’t care whether the individual is perfectly healthy or brain damaged. They care about risk. In terms of blame and punishment, however, the law cares about the perpetrator’s brain. The law cares about a person’s capacity to act rationally and independently. It is this capacity that allows us to assign responsibility. It is this capacity that drives many theories of blame and punishment, including the legal scholar Michael Moore’s treatise
Placing Blame
. These are some of the reasons why scientific understanding of future dangerousness is important for law and society.

For the law to evolve, however, we need better tools to evaluate the biological underpinnings of diminished capacity. These measures, still in the early stages of development, will help refine our understanding of risk, guide our clinical interventions, and contribute to the construction of a safer society.

As we move forward, we must also recognize the rapidly changing landscape and the future dangerousness of globalization, especially its capacity to nurture individuals with a taste for harming others. Like authority, conformity, dehumanization, and self-deception, each with both beneficial and toxic personalities, so too does globalization carry this duality. Globalization has integrated developing countries into the global economy and allowed them to profit from new resources and advances. But globalization has also fragmented these countries by giving them access to resources that corrupt, such as arms for guerrilla leaders and rogue armies. What has changed, perhaps as early as the 1990s, is a new form of war, one that is tied to the signature of evil and its expression as gratuitous cruelty. No longer are wars confined to state borders, restricted to states and their legitimized militaries, financed by governments and tax revenues, and focused on combatants. Instead, the new wars of the twenty-first century have entirely porous boundaries, are funded by private organizations, run by grass-root groups, and motivated by the use of horrific means to achieve equally horrific ends, including torture, rape, mutilation, and the use and abuse of civilians, women, children and men alike. As a result, international law is effectively ineffective. Those running these new wars are outside of international law.

The consequence of the new wars extends beyond the travesties experienced by those living in these hot spots to the humanitarian aid workers and journalists who attempt to help the victims. Humanitarian aid is often pirated by rogue militias and journalists are frequently killed or badly injured. We must therefore face the sad reality that as we ended the twentieth-century and launched the twenty-first, casualties to non-combatant civilians shifted from few to many. We must face the reality that combating the potential for horrific atrocities will require new laws and new protections for those who risk their lives to aid victims and give voice to their often silent suffering.

• • •

We won’t eradicate evil. Why? Because the capacity for evil is rooted in human nature, born of a creative mind that enables ideas and feelings to flip between beneficial and toxic. Though we institute programs and practices that promote the beneficial, living within every human mind is a toxic neighbor, waiting to move in. Adhering to authorities is beneficial in that great leaders are energizing, empowering, creative, and a source of guidance into a brighter future. But even great leaders can turn toxic, imposing corrosive ideologies and eliminating basic human rights. Conformity is beneficial in that we want to live in a society where norms are followed, providing stability and cooperation. But conformity is toxic when it leads to blind faith and uncritical thinking. Dehumanization is beneficial in allowing us to carry out medical procedures and live with certain kinds of human suffering. But dehumanization is toxic when it facilitates ethnic cleansing by shrinking the moral circle, turning atrocities into virtuous offerings. Tolerance and pluralism are beneficial in that they lead to respect and concern for others’ attitudes and desires. But tolerance and pluralism are toxic when they breed apathy and a willingness to stand by as passive bystanders.

My diagnosis of evil is not meant to be defeatist, but realist. It is only through an acknowledgment of our biology and the environments it has created — and can create — that we can look for solutions to ameliorate the human condition. We are all vulnerable to walking on the wrong side. We are fallible. We are also enormously creative, capable of great change. Like no other species, we relentlessly seek novelty. No one wants to be like his or her predecessor. Whether it is a new culinary tradition, extreme sport, technological innovation, musical genre, or weapon of destruction, our search for novelty is an indestructible component of human nature. It is this capacity that is, in part, responsible for the general decline in violence since the beginning of human history, a point developed in great detail by Steven Pinker in his treatise
The Better Angels of Our Nature
. With our capacity to reason and to think of alternative ways of being, we have greatly reduced cruelty to humans and other animals. This is a good thing. But if my diagnosis of evil is correct, we must always be vigilant, as periods of peace can so easily be disrupted by violence, excessive, over-the-top violence.

Our journey into the nature of evil has come to an end. Bombarded by the sheer magnitude of lives lost or damaged beyond repair, it is natural to deaden our senses and choke our feelings in the hope of finding solitude and peace. As painful as a re-awakening is, we must remember the individuals that make up these massive atrocities. Reflecting upon the loss of his son who was murdered by the Lord’s Resistance Army, an 80 year old Ugandan chief summed it up – “We have been forgotten. It’s as if we don’t exist.”
⁶⁴

We must never forget. We must never deny our potential to cause horrific pain and suffering while finding ways to forgive and express deep compassion. We must never give up on humanity.

Recommended Books

Glover, J. (2000).
Humanity
. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Grossman, D. (1996).
On Killing.
New York: Back Bay Books.

Moore, M.S. (2010).
Placing Blame.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pinker, S. (2011).
The Better Angels of Our Nature
. New York, Viking/Penguin.

______________

¹
The difference between human and animal brains, and especially the distinction between dedicated modules serving one function and interconnected modules working to serve multiple functions, has been highlighted by other authors, including especially the philosopher Daniel Dennett, in
Consciousness Explained
(New York: Little, Brown, 1991), and the archaeologist Steven Mithen, in
The Prehistory of the Mind
(London, U.K.: Thames & Hudson, 1996). These and other authors emphasize that language was essential in forging the connection between modules. But, as I will discuss in chapter 3, language itself is based on interconnected modules, including those dedicated to phonology, semantics, and syntax. It is thus more likely that the connections were in place before language, providing benefits in thinking that went far beyond the parochial style of other animals.

²
See especially Amotz Zahavi and Avishag Zahavi,
The Handicap Principle
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). On conspicuous consumption, see Thorstein Veblen,
The Theory of the Leisure Class
(London, U.K.: Macmillan, 1899). On credible threats, see Thomas C. Schelling,
The Strategy of Conflict
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960).

³
See, for example, the philosopher Philippa Foot’s
Natural Goodness
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) and the literary critic Terry Eagleton’s
On Evil
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

⁴
See Luke Russell’s essay “Is evil action qualitatively distinct from ordinary wrongdoing?”
Australian Journal of Philosophy
85(4): 659-77 (2007). For a counterargument in favor of the distinctiveness of evil, see Todd Calder “Is evil just very wrong?”
Philosophical Studies
163(1): 177-196 (2013).

⁵
For an explicit philosophical argument for the connection between pleasure and evil, see Colin McGinn’s
Ethics, Evil, and Fiction
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

⁶
See especially Olds, J. & Milner, P. (1954). Positive reinforcement produced by electrical stimulation of septal area and other regions of rat brain.
Journal of Comparative Physiology and Psychology
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Inquiry 52
(4): 378-98; Kringelbach, M. L. & Berridge, K. C. (2009). Towards a functional neuroanatomy of pleasure and happiness,
Trends in Cognitive Science
13(1): 479-87.

⁷
See for instance their books
How Monkeys See the World
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) and
Baboon Metaphysics
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). See also Marc Hauser (2009). The possibility of impossible cultures.
Nature
460: 191-96.

⁸
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Human Nature
23(1): 5-29; Wrangham, R.W. & Peterson, D. (1996).
Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence
(Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin); Wrangham, R.W. (2010). Chimpanzee violence is a serious topic: A response to Sussman and Marshack’s critique of Demonic Males: Apes and the origins of human violence.
Global Nonkilling Working Papers
1:29-50.
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, Developments in Primatology: Progress and Prospects, 36(3): 249-70; Hart, D. & Sussman, R.F. (2009),
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⁹
Wrangham, R.W. (1999) “Evolution of coalitionary killing,”
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¹⁰
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¹¹
The evidence behind the elements of desire: Berridge, K. C. (2009). Wanting and liking: Observations from the neuroscience and psychology laboratory.
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¹²
Genetically engineered mice: Peciña S., Cagniard B., Berridge K.C., Aldridge J.W., Zhuang X. (2003). Hyperdopaminergic mutant mice have higher “wanting” but not “liking” for sweet rewards.
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¹³
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¹⁴
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¹⁵
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¹⁶
Potato chip tastes: Morewedge, C. K., Gilbert, D. T., Myrseth, K. O. R., Kassam, K. S., & Wilson, T. D. (2010). Consuming experience: Why affective forecasters overestimate comparative value.
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¹⁷
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¹⁸
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¹⁹
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²⁰
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