This Philosopher Thinks It’s Time We Call Out Evil in Our World

Jennifer Szalai in the New York Times:

Susan Neiman has noticed a paradox. “As the world drifts toward disaster,” she writes in her new book, “our language has become more cautious.” Yet this tentativeness has been remarkably asymmetrical. President Trump loves to use hyperbole (“nasty,” “sleazebag,” “vermin”), while establishment Democrats have, at least until recently, mostly hewed to the language of decorous risk aversion.

In “Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era,” Neiman argues that widespread misapprehensions about what evil is make people too reluctant to use the word. Despite her willfully provocative title, she categorically states: “This is not a book about Donald Trump.” An American-born moral philosopher now based in Germany, Neiman wrote an incisive history of evil in modern thought in 2002. Her new book is less a philosophical exploration than a polemical guide to the current moment. She believes that people are so attached to understanding evil in terms of individual monstrousness — the gleeful villain, the depraved sadist — that they lose sight of how evil more typically works.

More here.

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