Wrong vs. Evil and Intent vs. Impact

I just finished teaching through John Inazu's Learning to Disagree: the Surprising Path to Navigating Differences With Empathy and Respect, and John was in town a couple days ago to speak at Syracuse University, so I got to meet him and talk for a bit. I've been thinking a bit about one of the points he makes in the book that has serious implications for how we conceive of each other and how we engage with each other. He distinguishes between being wrong and being evil. It's important to understand how he's using those terms before going on, so let me explain what he means.

Lots of people are wrong about lots of things. No one is infallible, and we make many mistakes in our thinking every day. Sometimes those mistakes are relatively minor, and sometimes they are significant errors with serious moral consequences. But what he means by evil is something else. You can have a position that is incorrect, that we can evaluate as being morally wrong to hold and to carry out, without being evil in the sense he means it here. By evil here, he means holding your view because of absolutely terrible motivations. He intends things like wanting to harm people, ignoring people's interests not because you mistakenly think some good will come of it but because you genuinely don't care about their well-being and merely want to take advantage of them. People's well-being is irrelevant, or else you actually want to harm them.

Now lots of views are very wrong without being evil in that sense. Anyone who favors a policy because they think it will make people's lives better, when it fact it makes their lives worse, is wrong. Anyone who intends to say something complimentary but in fact insults someone is wrong. The person who insults someone because they want them to experience pain is being evil. The person who favors a bad policy because it will harm people is evil. Serial killers are evil. But many misguided people have good intentions for believing things that are very harmful. On Inazu's distinction, that puts them on the side of being wrong, not evil. Yet we label them as evil because we disagree. I saw a reference to a study done in 2016 that showed 40% of Americans believing anyone in the opposite political party was evil. Another study in 2020 showed 15% of Americans believing anyone in the opposite political party counted as engaging in terrorism by supporting the other side.

What that means is people are pretty bad at distinguishing between wrong and evil. Why do we care? Because motives matter, but also someone who is wrong can be reasoned with. Someone who is evil cannot be. That means we can engage in civil discourse and perhaps try to change people's minds if they are wrong. But genuine evil simply needs a red line drawn around it. The polarization we find ourselves in now is untenable, and we will never be able to move forward unless we can engage with people across differences of opinion without seeing the other side as evil.

So I want to think a bit about how to apply this in our current setting, along with some reflections on how this applies to the longstanding discussion about intent and impact.

Read More