People make untroubled, consensual judgments of evil in daily life

Evidence

These are the ways that I think ordinary people in our culture come to identify acts as evil. I should admit that, armed with these definitional remarks, I do not think that it is possible to definitely, unequivocally categorize certain acts as evil, and certain others as merely “bad.” That limitation is not fatal to the kind of psychological enterprise I am attempting. Instead I claim three things. First, a person who identifies an act as evil, when operating at the level of day-to-day understandings, does so with considerable personal certainty. Second, and again at this level, there is a considerable consensus among people about acts they will classify as evil. (Not surprisingly, this consensus contributes to the sense of certainty of classification that each individual feels.) Third, principles ordinary people say lie behind their intuitions about evil are the ones I have spelled out. Of these three claims, the first—that people, in their day-to-day lives, make untroubled judgments of what actions are evil—is central to my argument. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3876

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that cross-person consensus generates individual certainty in moral classification is a subtle social-epistemology point: certainty arises not from evidence but from agreement, which then feeds back into certainty. Worth sitting with.
• XREF: Echoes the social capital reading on how group consensus stabilizes norms, and connects to moral panic literature where shared outrage amplifies individual certainty. — connects to: Myths convert personal grievances into timeless universalized judgments — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 666; Humans deflect death anxiety onto cultural symbols, and defending those symbols produces real-world evil — Jeff Greenberg and Spee Kosloff, Terror Management Theory: Implications…, 25