Goldberg, Zachary J. “A Relational Approach to Evil Action: Vulnerability and Its Exploitation.” – 2019

In his article, Zachary Goldberg reviews what he considers the most compelling contemporary philosophical theories of evil. To this end, he classifies them into three categories: those theories which base their understanding of evil on the immense harm suffered by the victims, the “Naïve harm accounts”; those which focus on the perpetrators’ evil intentions, the “Perpetrator accounts”; and those theories which attempt to combine both, the “Nuanced Harm Accounts.” In a second step, Goldberg argues that the latter are best suited to describe evil since they avoid the pitfalls of the two other more extreme stances. In this sense, “Nuanced Harm accounts” can accommodate those evil actions in which the evil intention of the perpetrator does not play such a salient role – which the “Perpetrator Accounts” necessarily exclude. Moreover, they avoid the difficulties of unequivocally locating immense harm which derive from the “Naïve Harm Accounts”, by focusing on the quality instead of the quantity of the harm. Despite conceding that “Nuanced Harm Accounts” do provide a working definition of evil, Goldberg criticizes the fact that they only describe the fundamental aspects of evil “and nothing more” (40). To supplement this gap, he proposes a relational approach to evil, which concentrates on the asymmetrical balance of power between perpetrator and victim, in which the former exploits the state of vulnerability of the latter. Further, he states that this process is always a reciprocal one: “We see the position of strength possessed by one party emerge out of the other’s weakness or vulnerability” (49). In Goldberg’s view, this form of interaction is characteristic of evil. Identifying it is therefore a way of better understanding how evil actions unfold.

Author of this entry: Sofia Forchieri

Goldberg, Zachary J. “A Relational Approach to Evil Action: Vulnerability and Its Exploitation.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 53, no. 1 (2019): 33-53. doi:10.1007/s10790-018-9637-x.