Insights in Evil II: Card's 'Atrocity Paradigm'

In The Atrocity Paradigm, Claudia Card (2002) presents a theory of evil which breaks from previous accounts which focus on perpetrators, by reframing the debate as to give “victims’ perspectives…their due” (2002:10). For Card, evil is that which involves culpable wrongdoing, intolerable harm, and reasonable foreseeability – without reference to the perpetrator’s underlying motive.

In this essay, the purpose of a theory of evil is assumed to have a primary and secondary face; first, to provide a comprehensive and realistic account of evil as it exists, and second, to prioritise the perspective of the victims of evil (with the latter remaining secondary in importance to the former). Since Card takes both as aims of her theory of evil, it is in reference to these objectives which the atrocity paradigm is judged. Specifically, this essay argues that Liam Lyburd’s 2014 failed school shooting reveals the inadequacies of Card’s harm condition for both objectives, regarding evil character and evil acts (2015:1). Meeting these objectives requires internalising perpetrator motives into her definition of evil – a transformation which diverges too significantly from Card’s original formulation, rendering her theory indefensible.

Note that, for a concise analysis, this essay focuses solely on the atrocity paradigm as it pertains to individuals (rather than institutions), and that Card’s (2010) later amendments – in Confronting Evils – to the culpability requirement are excluded, since these do not change the fundamental issue with the harm component presented below. First, Card’s atrocity paradigm is explained in detail, before assessing the issues in regard to evil character and evil acts for the harm condition. The case of Liam Lyburd is used as a central case study, and finally a possible transformation of Card’s original formulation is considered to solve these inadequacies.

Card’s theory takes on atrocities as ‘paradigm evils’ – such as the Holocaust, Rwandan Genocide, and Tuskegee syphilis experiments (among others). Her motivation is intuitive – they are “uncontroversially evil” and the characteristics of evil in general tend to be “writ large” in cases of atrocities. This approach is appealing, since presenting the most obvious and extreme cases of any event allows us to easily tease out underlying philosophical principles. Beyond just explanatory power, however, Card also notes that atrocities “deserve priority…attention”; given the focus of philosophical debate on evildoers themselves, Card’s approach differs by starting with the victim’s perspective. This is important to Card both methodologically and morally, as since evil is “both perpetrated and suffered”, overlooking the experience of victims misses what makes us “recoil” so strongly in cases of evil (2002:9). This also remains highly convincing, as any theory of evil would be incomplete without considering the perpetrators and the victims, since both play an essential part in our understanding of the events (consider the Holocaust, without an understanding of both Jewish people and the Nazis).

Card’s theory of evil is split into three characteristics: culpable wrongdoing, reasonable foreseeability, and intolerable harm.

First, Card defines culpable wrongdoing as the immoral acts responsible by a “moral agent”. This includes both the obvious wrongness assumed in cases of an atrocity, as well as the agency of the perpetrators. For the latter, Card notes the “degrees” of voluntariness, ignorance, and duress, which complicate a clear categorisation in many cases. However, it is clear that these two terms in principle are required for atrocities; where wrongness is lacking, candidates for atrocity status are accepted as ‘mass casualties’, and in lieu of agency, a ‘catastrophe’. Furthermore, Card pre-empts the obvious counterargument considering so-called ‘natural evil’; whilst earthquakes, tsunamis, and plagues all incur great suffering, she notes the absence of culpable wrongdoing precludes them from being atrocities, in much the same way that death from natural causes is not itself evil. This is convincing, particularly as Card rightly recognises that such events may become atrocities where “human agents…failed to intervene to prevent it when they could and should have” – as seen in the debate over the status of the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake (2002:5).

Second, Card defines reasonable foreseeability to be the rational ability of moral agents to anticipate the effects of their actions. As with agency, Card notes that what is ‘reasonable’ to be anticipated is subject to argumentation, but again at least in principle, committing moral wrongs with either knowledge of the effects of one’s action – or gross negligence to gaining this knowledge – qualify the act for this characteristic of evil. Card justifies this by proposing a hypothetical of a thief who, in robbing a weak-hearted young woman, inadvertently kills her. Here, it is intuitively clear that the thief – whilst still the cause of death – does not commit evil, as there was no reasonable way for him to know that robbery here would lead to death. As such, unable to hold the thief responsible beyond the robbery, this reasonable foreseeability condition is also compelling.

Third, Card defines intolerable harm as harm so severe that it deprives victims of “basics necessary to make life possible, tolerable, and decent”; by a tolerable life, she means one that is at least minimally worth living, from the perspective of the victim (2002:16). Where harm is severe, yet not intolerable, Card labels these ‘lesser wrongs’ – still worth moral attention, yet not rising to the level of evil.

Whilst Card goes on to list eight further factors which determine the severity of intolerable harm, we can find an issue with her account here. In her atrocities listed, reasonably foreseeable culpable wrongdoing is uncontroversial – as is the intolerable harm found in the Holocaust, Rwandan Genocide, and others. Yet it is not immediately clear why there must necessarily be intolerable harm committed in certain potential atrocities. David Blumenfeld and Gerald Dworkin (1966) raise this point in the case of two assassins – one fails because they sleep past their alarm, whilst the other shoots, but misses. Here, the second assassin takes all the steps required to kill but is prevented by ‘unforeseeable outside forces’ (1966:397). This surely seems a case of evil, but Card disagrees – stating that whilst there is “commitment to evil”, we cannot confuse an ‘evil person’ with ‘evil actions’ (2002:22). It appears Card has dealt with the issue – intolerable harm must be needed for cases of evil, since convincingly, evil acts are not just those done by evil people (though the assassins’ evil character here is undisputed), and so should be treated separately.

However, this division becomes more problematic when conducting a further test for necessity of Card’s harm condition. Consider the case of Liam Lyburd – in 2014, the 19-year-old planned a massacre at his former college. He followed instructions online, stockpiled pipe bombs, bought overalls and gloves, and sourced a 9mm handgun with 94 hollow-point bullets. He even posted a manifesto online – before police raided his home and arrested him – stating his full intentions to commit the act, and other shootings that inspired him (2015:1). Now consider again Card’s theory of evil: whilst Lyburd clearly reasonably foresaw the effects of his actions, and even in planning and preparing for his act had culpable wrongdoing, Card would maintain that in lieu of intolerable harm, there was no evil in his actions. To clarify, she would certainly – much like the assassins – label him as ‘committed to evil’, yet the actions itself would not rise beyond the status of ‘lesser wrong’.

Two core issues are raised with this harm condition. First, whilst recognising Lyburd as an evil person, Card’s theory ignores how motive essentially contributes to this judgement – limiting both the explanatory and normative objectives. Second, it seems intuitively clear that to refuse to recognise Lyburd’s actions as evil is wholly unsatisfying. Despite the failure of the shooting, we are still left ‘recoiling’ from horror of his plan, which is not fully captured by relegating this to ‘lesser wrongs’ like murder or rape. Most of us would feel strange to say that nothing really evil occurred in his planning and preparing to massacre children at a college of 18,000 (2015:1).

Considering the first issue – of evil character – Card anticipates this counter by differentiating between ‘intentions’ and ‘motives’. Intentions are the desires to act in a certain way, whereas motives are the underlying character behind the act. For example, during torture, Card notes there is a direct intention to harm the victim, and there can also be an underlying motive of sadism (though other motives are possible). Card explains that whilst “an evil intention is a culpable intention” – so, included within her atrocity paradigm – motives are to be excluded from her theory. Taking the infamous case of Nazi Adolf Eichmann, Card explains that he was “rightly judged an evil man on the basis of his…evil intentions, regardless of the banality of his motives”, and later, that “his motives scarcely matter”. Again, Card is focused on the harm condition – evil intention as the intention “to do someone intolerable harm…even if the intention does not succeed” (2002:20-21). Here, Card draws heavily on the work of Hannah Arendt (1964), who likewise argues that evil need not be “diabolical [or] demonic”, as Eichmann’s evil is found in the harm of his actions, rather than his moral character (1964:288).

Whilst Card convincingly establishes that those who intend to commit evil acts possess an evil character, she falls short of justifying her exclusion of motive. Certainly, in the case of Eichmann, the addition of some sort of sadistic motive would only prove further that what is already judged from intention: the evilness of his character. Yet, excluding motive entirely implies that there is no difference relevant for a theory of evil between Adolf Eichmann and Adolf Hitler. Whilst both clearly possess evil intentions, Card would admit that only the latter possessed evil motive. By excluding motive from her account entirely, Card has committed herself to a theory of evil which fails to differentiate between ‘banal’ and ‘demonic’ evil. Clearly, this is problematic for the primary objective: to give a full account of nature of existing evil.

In addition to the primary objective, the work of Jean Améry (1980) is useful to see how this missing distinction is problematic to the secondary objective. Regarding his own time in Fort Breendonck, Améry describes the torture he endured there as a loss of “trust in the world”, causing both great physical and psychological damage (1980:45). Against Arendt, Améry details the evil character of his torturers, as “ordinary faces become Gestapo faces”, and how “evil overlays and exceeds banality” (1980:43). In this way, Améry – as a victim – found the evil character of his perpetrators, in terms of their motive, an essential part of understanding the horror of his suffering (as banal people became evil). This is largely convincing, as it indeed seems strange to suggest that the psychological damage inflicted upon victims can fully be captured by an account of their intended actions alone. Whilst Card is right that intention here is relevant, she misses how a form of ‘demonic’ evil can change the effect on victims beyond ‘banal’ evil. Returning to Lyburd, then, we see how his sadistic motives cause us further moral disgust, beyond an account of just his intended actions. And, whilst our judgement of his evilness can be met by intention alone, it is erroneous to suggest therefore that his motive need have no place in our account of his character. Thus, it seems that Card’s theory, in excluding his motive on account of the harm condition, fails to either provide a sufficiently comprehensive account of evil character, or to fully reframe the debate on the entire complexity of victims’ experiences.

Considering the second issue – of evil acts – we find another problem with Card’s harm condition. Here, since Lyburd failed to commit the intolerable harm he intended, all Card would have to comment on is his moral character. Relegating Lyburd’s actions – as Card does – to the sphere of ‘lesser wrongs’ like murder and rape seems to fail to capture the extremity of moral disgust we feel when considering both the act and its perpetrator. This is a similar position advanced by Stephen De Wijze (2017); taking the case of a perfectly lifelike, but completely inanimate, robot, who is subject to sadistic torture. Whilst the robot is lifeless and suffers no harm, De Wijze maintains that “motives…render the act evil without the necessary condition of severe harm” (2017:35). This is highly convincing, as – presented with the plan to mercilessly massacre children at school – many of us would intuitively suggest that the sadistic act of preparing so thoroughly was itself an act of evil. In much the same way, we would expect victims – when Lyburd was charged – to frame his punishment not in terms of his being evil, but the evilness of his actions directly. As such, Card’s use of the harm condition creates an additional dissatisfaction in terms of the evilness of the act, which permeates both the primary objective to account for our intuitions about existing evils, and therefore also the secondary aim of focusing on the victims.

Given these two issues arising from the harm condition, it seems more convincing to argue that – holding for reasonable foreseeability and culpable wrongdoing – either evil motive or intolerable harm (or both) are sufficient for determining the evilness of an act. As such, we can first understand Lyburd as evil both from his evil motives, and his evil intentions. Second, given his act was unsuccessful, we are still able to argue for evilness on account of his evil motives; likewise, if he had been successful – but held no sadistic motives – we would also be able to condemn his acts as evil. This transformation far better captures the primary and secondary objectives of a theory of evil (in terms of character and acts) yet diverges too far from Card’s atrocity paradigm – thus rendering her original formulation ultimately indefensible.

In conclusion, whilst Card’s atrocity paradigm provides a mostly comprehensive account of evil – and largely reframes the debate in terms of the victims of evil – she falls short of a complete account, when considering the role of evil motives. Both the culpable wrongdoing and reasonable foreseeability conditions remain defensible, but Card’s requirement for intolerable harm alone – instead of an alternative of evil motives – fails to provide a comprehensive or truly victim-focused account of perpetrators or acts of evil. As such, Card’s exclusion renders her theory indefensible without undergoing significant transformation.

Bibliography:

• Améry, J. (1980), “At the mind's limits: Contemplations by a survivor on Auschwitz and its realities”. Indiana University Press.
• Arendt, H. (1964), “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”. Penguin Books (5th ed.), 1994.
• Card, C. (2002), “The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil”. Oxford Academic (online ed.), 2003.
• Card C. (2010), “Inexcusable wrongs” in “Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide”. Cambridge University Press, pp. 3-35.
• De Wijze, S. (2017), “Small-Scale Evil”. J Value Inquiry, 2018, Vol. 52, pp. 25-35.
• Dworkin, G. and Blumenfeld, D. (1966), “Punishment for Intentions”. Mind 75, Vol. 75, No. 299, pp. 396-404.
• Gayle, D. et al. (2015), “Newcastle teenager Liam Lyburd found guilty of planning college massacre”. The Guardian (online); https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/30/newcastle-teenager-liam-lyburd-found-guilty-of-planning-college-massacre . Date accessed: 12/02/2024.