The Most Important Factor that Contributes to Evil Doing

Factors that Contribute to Evil Doing

In your view, what is the most important factor that contributes to evil doing and why? What examples from the readings can you find to support your views? Use at least four of the following authors: Arendt, Brecht, Conrad, Engels, Foucault, Freud, Lewis, Orwell, or Sontag.

Throughout the history of humanity, humans have committed inconceivable and unthinkable acts of cruelty towards one another. From the brutal wars during the times of the ancient Greeks and Romans, to the modern area of ethnic cleansing and genocide one cannot help but wonder what is the root cause of this evil. Unthinkable numbers of human life has been lost in every corner of the world from the genocides in Armenia and Nazi Germany to the guerilla wars in Vietnam and Cambodia and presently to the devastating conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sudan. Do humans do these unthinkable things to each other because there is something innately evil within each one of us? Is humanity really doomed to the world that philosopher Thomas Hobbes proclaimed as being “solitary, nasty, brutish and short” or is humanity simply suffering from the effects of a greater factor or power that could contribute to this commission of evil in the world? While a definitive answer to this question may never be possible to obtain, after examining the works of several authors it is clear that across the many differing contexts in which evil is committed certain commonalities exist which contribute to the commission of evil doing. From the writings of Hannah Arendt and George Orwell on the evils of imperialism, to the writings of Foucault on the evil of biopolitics, and finally to the modern day horrors of the abuse of prisoners a...

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...tor to evil in the modern world will we begin to understand how to prevent such atrocities from occurring. Until then we will forever be not in the Hobbesian condition of perpetual war, but rather has Rousseau described man as being “born free, but everywhere in chains.”

Works Cited

- Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Inc., 1976. 123-302.

- Carlson, Elof A. The Unfit. New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory P, 2001.

- Foucault, Michel. "17 March 1976." Society Must be Defended. New York: 2003. 239-263.

- Lewis, Anthony. "Making Torture Legal." The New York Review, 17 June 2004: 4-6.

- Orwell, George. "Shooting an Elephant." A Collection of Essays. Garden City, NY:

Doubleday, 1953. 154-162.

- Sontag, Susan. "Regarding the Torture of Others." The New York Times 23 May 2004: 1-6.

Lexis Nexis. 5 Jan. 2005.