People preserve the quantum-of-evil view by licensed exceptions

Evidence

Sometimes, like the poor suspense novel, the real world fails us. That is, we cannot find the requisite quantum of evil when we examine the perpetrator of some particularly evil set of crimes. When this is so, I suggest, we fall back on some alternate models of explaining evil actions. A fellow named Whitman, who one day went up to the top of the University of Texas bell tower and shot and killed a number of his fellow students, had a rather wholesome, Boy-Scoutish, background. Rather fruitlessly, for several days after the incident, the newspapers scrabbled for “the story”—on my terms scrabbled for some prior evidence that Whitman was evil behind his amiable mask, and some further story that would account for the origins of that evil. None was found, but rumors of a brain tumor detected on autopsy provided an alternate, physical, source of causality for the acts that otherwise would require an evil individual to produce them. My point is this: These alternate explanations for evil actions have a particular function; they are the “licensed exceptions” to the quantum-of-evil view and thus protect the application of that view to other unexamined cases. For most of us, cerebral dysfunction whether by tumors, or involuntarily ingested mind-altering drugs, would explain acts we would otherwise ascribe to an evil actor. For some, other more psychological disturbances, such as posttraumatic stress syndrome or schizophrenia, also provide an alternative explanation for acts that would otherwise be taken as revealing the evil nature of the actor. Notice that these alternate explanations work best when the entities being postulated, such as tumors, are imagined to have a thinglike character, much like the quantum of evil I have suggested people imagine. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3886

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in mechanisms of moral judgment and person-perception — evil attribution in social psychology resembles legal concepts of diminished capacity and the ‘banality of evil’ debate (Arendt, Eichmann).
• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘licensed exceptions’ concept is a genuinely subtle mechanism: alternate causal explanations (tumors, trauma) don’t just explain away individual evil but functionally protect the everyday theory of evil as a thinglike quantum, preserving the model for all other unexamined cases.