Card, Claudia. Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide

In Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide, philosopher Claudia Card revisits and aims to improve the account of evil developed in her first book, The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil (2002). In Confronting Evils, Card further expands her theory of evil as a secular concept, in order to address collectively perpetrated evil and to examine the challenge of responding to evil while still preserving humanitarian values. She does so by exploring terrorism, torture, and genocide, which are to her paradigmatic cases of evil, arguing that understanding such practices enables us to recognize similar evils in everyday life. The monograph serves as a complex philosophical exploration of the difficult concept of evil, spelling out the normal evils of our time.  

The book is divided into two parts. The first part, “The Concept of Evil,” builds upon The Atrocity Paradigm by furthering the understanding of evil as culpable wrongdoing to the notion of inexcusability; “evils are reasonably foreseeable intolerable harms produced by inexcusable wrongs” (16). Important are the introduction of “lesser harms” (set out in chapter 2 “Between Good and Evil”) and Card’s emphasis on understanding wrongdoing as evils without demonizing its perpetrators. An interesting portion of the first section is Card’s exploration of complicity, in chapter 3, in which she examines the various ways in which individuals may participate in collective evils. In the fourth chapter, Card explores to whom and what evils can be done, and makes a case for “ecocide,” arguing that ecosystems and non-sentient beings can also be victims of evil. 

The shift in the concept of evil as presented in the first part of the book allows Card to clarify the meanings of terrorism, torture and genocide in the second half of her study. She dedicates two chapters to each type of evil, demonstrating that these evils are not only characteristic of dictatorial regimes, but can often be found in the policies and conduct of democratic governments. Card discusses instances which go beyond commonly accepted paradigmatic examples of genocide, torture and terrorism, thereby showing her readership the broader scope of these evils. 

Card’s work offers a broad overview of philosophical traditions in thinking about evil and wrongdoing (introducing, among others, the ideas of Kant, Nietzsche, Plato, Rousseau and Hobbes) and engages in a dialogue with current scholarship on the topic. As such, it offers a productive and interesting addition to philosophical writing on evil, raising important ideas that can further the understanding of evil in a nuanced and novel way. 

Author of this entry: Marit van de Warenburg

Card, Claudia. Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide. Cambridge UP, 2010.