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http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5/alenkazupancic.php
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Why is it that evil captures the imagination but the good does not?
Ethics would seem to be bound to the idea that the good is attractive,
allied with the beautiful and, as such, something that solicits our
desire. But, as you suggest, the opposite is perhaps more plausible.
The combination of attraction and repulsion one finds in evil seems,
perversely, more attractive to us. What does this tell us about our
desire and about the nature of evil and the good?
Here I turn to Kantian ethics, which utterly breaks with the idea that the
good is attractive and, as such, can solicit our desire. Kant calls this kind
of attractionthis kind of causality"pathological" or nonethical.
Moreover, Kant rejects the very idea that ethics can be founded on any
given notion of the good. In Kantian ethics, we start with an
unconditional law that is not founded on any pre-established notion of
the good. The singularity of this law lies in the fact that it doesn't tell us
what we must or mustn't do, but only refers us to the universality that
we are ourselves supposed to bring about with our action: "Act only
according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it
should become a universal law," goes the famous formulation of Kant's
categorical imperative. The only definition of "good" in Kantian ethics is
that of an action which, firstly, satisfies this demand of the universal
and, secondly, has this demand for its only motive. The Kantian notion of
the good has no other content. Only an action that is accomplished
according to the (moral) law and only because of the law is "good." If I act
out of any other inclination (sympathy, compassion, fear, desire for
recognition, etc.), my action cannot be called ethical (or "good"). The
uneasiness that this aspect of Kantian theory often provokes springs
from the fact that he rejects as "non-ethical" not only egoistic motives
but also altruistic ones. Kant doesn't claim that altruism cannot be
genuine or that it always masks some deeper egoism. He simply insists
on the fact that ethics is not a question of lower or higher motives, but a
question of principles.
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5/alenkazupancic.php
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murders, massacres, and so on. Radical evil is not some most horrible
deed; its "radicalness" is linked to the fact that we renounce the
possibility of ever acting out of principle. It is radical because it perverts
the roots of all possible ethical conduct, and not because it takes the
form of some terrible crime. I said before that the principal function of
the Kantian notion of the good is to hold open the space for the
unconditional or, to use another word, for freedom. Radical evil could be
defined as that which closes up this space.
Photographs of Trotsky from a 1927 album Ten Years of Soviet Power. The
imgae to the right is from a defaced copy of the book found by David King at a
Moscow bookstore. It is unknown who defaced the book. Photos courtesy of
David King C ollection
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http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5/alenkazupancic.php
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