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.

Take the abortion debate. If you look at the motives of pro-life critics of abortion, you will generally not find people who just want to control women, despite what pro-choice activists like to say about them. Might there be the occasional politician who really does just want to control women? Sure, but most pro-lifers genuinely care about the unborn. They believe them to have rights on the same level as infants and do not think it's okay to end their lives without the same kinds of unusual circumstances that would make it okay to end the life of an older human being. On pro-choice assumptions, such a person is wrong. But should pro-choicers conceive of them as evil? Not if they pay heed to Inazu's distinction between good motives and bad motives. This is someone who, on pro-choice assumptions, has a view that needlessly restricts women's reproductive choices and ends up controlling women, but that's not the goal. The motive is concern about needlessly ending the life of someone with full human rights to life. If that's wrong, it is not evil.

Now go the other direction. To the pro-lifer, the pro-choice position is wrong. Not only that, it's very wrong. The pro-choice view is tantamount to saying that murder is okay as long as the person being killed hasn't been born yet. (And there are even pro-choice positions that see infanticide as not intrinsically wrong.) So should a pro-lifer see defenders of the pro-choice position as evil? That's certainly what I see many pro-lifers doing. But that sort of take is actually falling afoul of this distinction and confusing wrongness with evil. On Inazu's distinction, a pro-lifer should indeed see the pro-choice view as very wrong. But it is not evil, as he is using this term, because evil requires wanting what's bad for someone. A pro-choice view does not necessarily require that. It does not require wanting the death of human fetuses. It does not even require not caring about those deaths. Pro-choicers can grieve the loss of life that abortion involves. What distinguishes their view is that they place a higher value on women's autonomy than they do on the life of a fetus, and that comes in some cases from having  a lower view of the moral status of a fetus than an infant, but it does not require not caring about the fetus's well-being. It only requires having a higher moral principles than life in this particular case.

The reality is that both pro-life and pro-choice positions care about women's autonomy and about fetal life. Or at least they are compatible with valuing both things. Where they disagree is the relative importance of the two moral principles. One places autonomy higher, and the other places life higher. Anyone familiar with me will know that I side with life on this question. I think abortion is wrong in far more cases than most pro-lifers do, in fact. Only in cases where something akin to self-defense is involved will I think abortion is ever okay. Nevertheless, I don't think people who sort out the issue differently than I do are evil, in the sense Inazu means. I just think they are very wrong.

I would say similar things about some of the big debates going on right now about President Trump's use of DOGE to shut down lots of government-funded work indiscriminately and without regard to which ones are actually wasteful. I disagree with using a sledgehammer to do the work of a scalpel, and many of the particular ways this is happening might well be unconstitutional. Certainly some are illegal, and several judges have said so, issuing orders that the administration has simply ignored and kept on doing what they wanted to do, even posting stuff to social media about being above the law. It's clear that I think what DOGE is doing is wrong. But the motivation here among people who support DOGE is to reduce government waste and save taxpayers money. There is no motive to try to harm people. There is no motive to want people to lose jobs, to want food being wasted sitting in warehouses and not being allowed to get to people who need it. There is no motive to prevent projects that are 90% complete from being completed, thus creating more waste. That is all happening, and it is the effect of what the government is currently doing, but it's not the motive. Or at least it's not the motive of many of the people who support these measures. So I cannot call those people evil, even if I think they are supporting something that is wrong.

At the same time, those who oppose what is going on here are in fact opposing something that will do away with a good amount of government waste in the long run. I see people posting on social media in ways that feel like they think anyone opposing DOGE is evil for wanting a wasteful government. It's pretty obvious from what I said above that you can oppose what they are doing without wanting the government to be wasteful. In fact, several arguments I just gave are recognizing that the behavior of DOGE is in fact wasteful itself. In neither case does anyone in this debate have to count as evil even if their view might be wrong. As with abortion, maybe there are grifters and manipulators involved whose motives truly are evil, but with most of those cases we can't really perceive someone's motives, so we have to be hesitant in applying such criticisms without really strong evidence of such motives. Maybe that can be done. But certainly the vast majority of people on either side of this question do not count as evil the way Inazu is using the term.

I would say the same of the majority of opponents and proponents of Trump's immigration policies. Those who support it care about the law being followed. It is not a bad thing to hate laws being consistently broken with no consequences, especially because it's an insult to those who follows those laws. Legal immigrants have led the charge in pushing for the kinds of efforts that Trump is engaging in. Even if you think Trump is very wrong in how he is doing this (and I am very much among that group), it's hard to say that there aren't good motives for wanting to increase border control. There are. Similarly, those who want open borders certainly have good motives, even if they are favoring a policy with terrible consequences, as many on the other side believe. They want to care for the needy, and who is needier than those who are trying to escape from terrible circumstances, which is true of most border crossers? Now there are terrible ways to defend either side. Some of those might involve genuine evil. But I'm talking here about the ordinary person who has a view on the question. Most who disagree about this issue are not evil, as Inazu means that term.

I can imagine someone objecting to this by pointing to the distinction between intent and impact. That distinction lies at the heart of a big difference between the approach of the left and the right on a number of social issues, and it's my contention that both sides are wrong in how they try to put those things together, but they are wrong in opposite ways. And the ways they are wrong do involve Inazu's distinction between being wrong and evil.

I was discussing Elon Musk's recent supposed Nazi salute with my class a few weeks ago. This discussion was before we had gotten to Inazu's chapter on being wrong and being evil, also, so we didn't have that terminology to describe anything. I was amazed to see every point I would have wanted to make being raised by the students as they talked about the case. And by the end of the conversation, I felt like they were all kind of on the same page about the incident, too, which was even more amazing to me. Several students raised the difficulty of knowing his intent. One pointed to his probable autism or other neurodiverse characteristics, whatever that might be in his case. Others pointed to the fact that he should know how it would be perceived, even if he didn't intend it that way. In other words, they pointed to the impact even if the intent was not there. There are a number of features there to think through as we evaluate the entire incident.

The same issues come up with discussions of microaggressions in general. The whole point of a microaggression is that it is not actually an aggression at all. It's a pretty bad misnomer. Microaggressions are not even micro aggressions, because they are simply not aggressions. They don't count as aggressions, because they are not intended to harm, and aggressions are. But no one thinks the problem with microaggressions is the intent. Those who criticize them are pointing to the impact.  There is often a response to that, completely lacking in empathy, which asserts that people just need to learn to deal with things that offend them. On one level, that's true. Each incident like this is worth very little. I can't let everything someone might say about me harm me, to the extent that I can move past it and get on with my life. Maturity does require that. At the same time, solid research shows that even small incidents of being excluded and pushed to the social margins can have effects similar to actual physical pain and have long-term effects on motivation, creativity, productivity, self-worth, and general health. Lots of little things add up, and the point of drawing attention to microaggressions is to get to the impact, not to accuse people of bad intent.

Impact is important. It's a reason to criticize what people do even when they don't intend harm. It's a reason to call upon people to pay attention to how their words and behavior will be received and to think through the effect of what they do. But intent is also important, because it shows us the difference between wrong and evil. Sometimes when someone does wrong the reason it's wrong is because they should have cared more to understand the impact and should have made an effort to avoid it. But that does not amount to evil in our current sense. But I see people trying to push it to that. That's wrong.

Similarly, intent is important. We need to distinguish between good motives and bad motives, because that shows us the difference between wrong and evil. But that still doesn't mean we can excuse everything anyone does just because they meant well. It might be that they should have been more understanding of what they impact would be. it might be that they should have been more aware of what the impact would be. That doesn't mean they didn't do anything wrong. It just means they weren't being evil. There is a moral difference.

There is a significant debate right now between those who see racism as merely a matter of the heart (e.g. Jorge Garcia has an influential paper in philosophy defending such a position, and I think it's shared by something like half of Americans) and those who have adopted a more expanded definition of racism to include systemic and structural features of the system we find ourselves in, where something can be racist even with no ill intent. Occasionally you will find unusual views that put things together differently from either approach (e.g. Robin DiAngelo thinks only the systemic stuff is racism, whereas the stuff in the heart is just prejudice and discrimination but not racism, but her view is so at odds with the way ordinary people use the word that I don't take it very seriously.) But the reality is that about half of Americans do hear the word "racism" in ways that include the systemic stuff. And half do not. That leads to lots of disagreements that really amount to verbal or semantic disagreements, rather than substantive moral disagreement.

The word "oppression" has also been similarly expanded by activists and academics to include more than just intentional severe policies and behavior from governments to keep particular groups of people in situations of great harm. In their use, it now includes structural and systemic elements of society or of institutions that no one intends to harm anyone. If someone is marginalized by unconscious processes or if cultural imperialism happens by innocent people simply borrowing stuff from those they want to imitate, then it still counts as oppression. And there are significant linguistic communities that use that word in each way. Since meaning is determined by use, I have to recognize that both uses amount to genuine meanings of the word. It simply can mean different things in the mouths of different people.

But what should we say morally about such expansions of meaning? Both racism and oppression are serious things. They are strong words that should be reserved for very serious things. That's why I think the 1990s era language from Christians in the United States about the war on Christmas was a bit over the top. Sure, some government entities were taking down manger scenes or blocking Christmas carols from being sung at holiday programs in schools. But to call that oppression when people were being locked up in the Soviet Union and beheaded in Saudi Arabia for being Christians is a bit much. Can we say the same thing about black Americans being assumed to be less intelligent merely for their race, as compared with being enslaved or killed in cases of the most severe kinds of oppression in the world today and throughout history? There's an argument there for being hesitant about expanding the meaning of these words too much, as if it undermines the seriousness of intentional racism and oppression. And it falls afoul of the distinction between wrong and evil to push those terms too far into areas where it's just good intent with bad impact.

At the same time, intent is not the only moral concern we should care about. We should care a lot about impact, and many views are wrong precisely because they have bad impact, even if they don't have bad intent. In my experience, too many people resisting the use of "racism" or "oppression" in cases with more innocent intent or not so severe consequences as doing so to excuse genuine wrongdoing or at least not to have to address it. Many things that the right doesn't want to call racism or oppression are nevertheless wrong and worth calling attention to and trying to prevent or reduce. Just because it's not evil in the sense Inazu means that term does not mean it's not wrong. The distinction is important, but it's not the only thing we should care about.

I want to end with a really interesting example that got me thinking for a bit before I arrived at what seems to me the right way to think about this. At Inazu's talk this week, someone asked a question about President Trump's executive order regarding what some call affirming care for transgender people. He wanted to suggest that with such an order, evil has actually arrived, because it involves not caring about the well-being of people who are in need of such care. But is that the right way to think about that? We have a debate going on precisely about whether such care is affirming. Whether it is even care. One side of that discussion sees the gender identity of a person (defined as how they come to see themselves) as definitive of who they really are. It follows from such a view that the only way to affirm such a person is to affirm that identity and pursue any ways that they want to get their body to match their perception of who they really are. In their view, any resistance to that is harmful to transgender people. On Inazu's classification system, that would make such resistance wrong. But would it be evil?

Think about what the other side says. They perceive such gender identities as a fictional view about oneself. What is really definitive of who the person is comes from biology. That might take some nuance and complexity once you understand what some people refer to as intersex conditions, and so on. But the main idea is that gender identities are a mistake about who you are. Your biology determines who you really are. Now whether that take is right or wrong, it's clearly their take. And on that view, someone is actually harming themselves by undergoing surgery that mutilates their sexual organs irreversibly. Even hormone therapy can have permanent effects. Growing breasts out or having your voice changed is not rally reversible, even though I have seen people claim that such treatments are reversible. What is the intent, then? It's to prevent harm. And in the case of minors, it's to prevent harm being done to those who cannot consent by those who have the decision-making capacity to give in to desires that a not fully mature person has when a few more years of maturity might well change their mind (statistics actually do bear that out, too).

So it seems to me that the case this commenter raised is actually not a good case of evil having arrived in power. It's a case that illustrates someone seeing something as evil when at most it should be classified as wrong. If that professor's view of gender-affirming surgery is correct, then Trump's policy is wrong, but it should not count as evil by Inazu's categorization. And I think those on the other side need to recognize the same thing about people who do want children to be able to undergo such hormonal and surgical treatments. If their view is correct, then such people are wrong to want to allow children to be treated in such ways. But they are not evil, because they are not trying to harm anyone. They just have a very mistaken view about what counts as the well-being of transgender children.

I see people making these blunders every day on social media. I think they are wrong to do confuse wrong with evil. But they may not be evil to confuse wrong with evil, and I think that has to govern how I should interact with them.