Earlier this year, on the eve of the birthday of my beloved late father Alexander Phillips, I asked for submissions for an award contest in his honor — the first annual Alexander Phillips Arete Award. The submissions were to treat with the theme “Deliver Us From Evil.” Here is the insightful essay by Michael Dea. Michael graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in English. Since graduating, he spends his days as a marketing professional, while by night he works on exploring politics, economics, ethics, and other social issues underpinning the modern human condition. This is the first of his essays to be published. And we are honored to publish it.
Here’s Michael’s compelling submission in its entirety:
“Deliver Us From Evil”: How Examining Circumstances Serves to Protect Against Evil
Christians, in a common prayer called “The Lord’s Prayer,” ask God for protection from evil in the words “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” but the prayer does not specify what exactly “evil” consists of. Each member of any given population has a concept of what constitutes “good” and what constitutes “evil,” and overlap frequently exists among groups of citizens. This overlap allows nation-states to operate, as it often gets shared by many and allows cooperation between individuals, allowing for a peaceful society. This overlap provides only part of the story, however, and in ignoring the places where consensus fails, evil flourishes.
“Good” and “evil”[1] are two labels with competing moral valences that get attributed to a person’s actions. They have value in differentiating what benefits and harms society, but fail to account for the gradient that societal benefits and harms can fall along. Denoting something as good or evil implies automatically that there are only two possible impacts an act can have on society and provides no room to implement potential solutions.
“Nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known,” a quote attributed to da Vinci, offers the best path towards mitigating evil through seeking to understand the reasons underlying it. Understanding an evil action does not mean that the act should be excused; “understanding” the action in this context means to look at the reasons and causes leading up to the act itself. The purpose of this understanding can result in forgiveness for transgressions, both large and small, but regardless of if the act is forgiven, knowing where it came from allows steps to be taken that would minimize the chances of recurrence and allocate responsibility for the action appropriately.
For example, if Person A steals from Person B, then there are likely reasons motivating him or her towards that action. This does not imply that Person A was justified in committing the act, but that circumstances surrounding the theft from Person B can provide an opportunity to minimize the chances of the action occurring again through mitigating the circumstances that led Person A to steal. Labeling the act as evil does not suffice; it paints Person A’s action as a stable part of their character in a diametrically opposed system rather than something that has resulted from a misguided interpretation of his or her life’s circumstances.
Due to the inability of labels to stop theft from occurring again, understanding the circumstances that led Person A to harm Person B becomes the most likely road to combating evil. To do so, it becomes necessary to look at Person A’s experiences with compassion and accepting Person A’s resulting interpretation as a valid one.
Accepting Person A’s theft as a response to a system of bad circumstances could be construed as absolving Person A of any responsibility for his or her actions. Seeking to understand the circumstances that led Person A to steal does not exclude holding Person A accountable for their actions, however. Person A still harmed Person B, and did so understanding that his or her actions had consequences that were likely to be detrimental to society, and therefore must repay that debt to society, but that does not mean that Person A’s circumstances are necessarily unique. If Person A’s circumstances are found to be more likely to produce a thief, then it would benefit society to study Person A’s circumstances with an eye towards alleviating them to prevent other individuals from following Person A’s example.
However, in studying these circumstances with an eye towards preventing future thieves, one must respect the individuals living within these systems. It may be proven irrefutably through data and studies that better education among the lower economic classes, for example, may prevent people from turning towards theft to make a living, but if no interest exists in educational institutions, then further inquiries must be made regarding why no interest exists. Implementing a potential solution unilaterally would do little more than cultivate hostility towards the power forcing others to obey it, and consequently result in a similar problem that exists when actions are boiled down to the moral dichotomy of good and evil.
Once Person A’s chosen course of action gets validation and the moral valences of good and evil are stripped away from the act against Person B, it becomes possible to move towards repairing what damage was done by the act itself through the mitigation of the circumstances that led to the act itself.
No one may change the past, and therefore little can be said of repairing the damage done by Person A’s theft that would “deliver” Person B from evil, but looking towards future conduct presents an opportunity to truly seek deliverance. In understanding the circumstances that led Person A to steal, society can take steps to prevent future harm from occurring in repairing broken social systems—as the case may be in poverty, criminal activity, access to medical care, and similar—or, in some cases, removing Person A from society in order to prevent future harmful actions from being carried out, if they are beyond reform. By doing so, the evil action does not become normalized in society, and thereby allowed to repeat.
Psychopathology can be treated, crime can be contained, but what often gets labeled as evil cannot be actively stopped unless society at large and individuals are willing to look at what historically caused the harmful action to occur in the first place. This does not change an action’s effect, and may not even effectively reform the perpetrator, but it offers the best road to preventing the creation of future agents of evil from coming into existence, let alone providing a need for victims to be delivered from them.
[1] From here on, the use of “good” and “evil” will be without quotation marks, under the assumption that they are relative, rather than absolute in their definitions.