Structural evil

A re-enactment of the Milgram experiment in which unsuspecting subjects would inflict pain upon others when instructed to do so in a respectable setting.

Structural evil or systemic evil is evil which arises from structures within human society, such as slavery, rather than from individual wickedness or religious conceptions such as original sin.

Rousseau proposed that the structures of human society were the main source of evil in his works such as the Discourse on Inequality (Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes).[1] These ideas were influential upon French revolutionaries such as Robespierre.[1]

Thomas Nagel is a modern philosopher who has argued that the great evils of the 20th century, such as genocide, required extensive structural support from the societies in which they occurred.[2] Claudia Card is another modern theorist who has defined structural evil as being intolerable harm which results from the normal operation of social structures.[3] Her list of such institutions is controversial as it includes marriage and motherhood.[4]

See also

Notes

References

  • Calder, Todd (2013), "Evil Institutions", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 
  • Card, Claudia (2010), Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9781139491709 
  • Grant, Ruth W. (2008), "The Rousseauan Revolution and the Problem of Evil", Naming Evil, Judging Evil, University of Chicago Press, ISBN 978-0226306742 
  • Goldburg, Peta; Blundell, Patricia; Jordan, Trevor (2012), "Social and structural evil", Exploring Religion and Ethics, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0521187169 


This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Wednesday, August 05, 2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.