Booksmart: Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide

Claudia Card came to UW–Madison during the tumult of the late 1960s. In her second year of teaching, her student Christine Rothschild was murdered on campus. Another honors student, 18-year-old David Fine, became infamous for his role in the Sterling Hall bombing two years later.

“When the Dow demonstrations took place, the violence converted my pacifist students from pacifism,” says Card. “They saw pregnant students being battered by clubs and decided they had to fight back.”

At the time, Card’s work centered on the theory of justice — specifically, extreme injustices such as slavery, which Card says is “almost an understatement to refer to as injustice.” But she found herself moving towards an exploration of evil, then an underdeveloped field of philosophy.

Forty years later, she has completed the second volume of a planned trilogy on the atrocity theory. With affiliate status in women’s studies, LGBT studies, Jewish studies and environmental studies, she has tackled the issue from multiple angles.

“Evil is an unfortunately timely topic,” says Card. “You never run out of material. There’s a long history of using ‘evil’ as a loose synonym for something bad, or wrong, but it’s not; evil is more specific,” says Card.

Building on concepts laid out in her first book on the topic, Card expands her definition of “evils.” In order to capture collectively perpetrated evils, she moved from making culpability part of her definition to include the more general idea of inexcusable wrongs. This becomes especially crucial when examining institutions, such as genocide, in which multiple individuals play roles in the torture of others.

“Torture can be something that one individual does to another,” says Card. “But even if individual agents are not fully at fault, it may be that the rules of the institution are inexcusable. If you’re encouraged to look at what one individual does, and abstract it from the concept, the collective harm completely outruns that individual’s contribution.”

As president of the Central Region of the American Psychological Association, Card will give an address in April on surviving such atrocities. This topic forms the backbone of her next work, the final volume in her trilogy. She hopes to examine the ethics of survival strategies, including ways in which those responding to atrocities can avoid becoming perpetrators themselves.

Since the incidents of 9/11, the philosophy of evil has taken a more prominent role in discussions. The days of the Dow riots may be long gone, but the growing instance of events such as classroom shootings remind Card that evil is capable of hitting very close to home.

Despite this, however, she still finds the ability to be optimistic in the face of atrocity.

“It’s not so much with respect to what people will do; that’s hard to predict,” she says. “But what people CAN do — that’s always a possibility. We could even achieve what Immanuel Kant called ‘perpetual peace.’ Maybe it never will happen, but the thing is: it could.”