George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” or Barack Obama’s assertion in his Nobel Peace Prize speech that “evil does exist in the world” are obvious examples. But as the philosopher Richard J. Bernstein points out in his book “Radical Evil: A Philosophical Investigation,” intellectuals have been reluctant to deal with the concept. If we heed discussions about political evil, in the classics of political philosophy and elsewhere, we notice that behind the most diverse arguments stands a similar pattern. Sucked into a destructive maelstrom of unlimited freedom, he seems to finally give a true representation of the “radical evil” glimpsed and named by Kant. For Dostoyevsky, this means Stavrogin goes past the point of no return as evil has as its object and target the absolute innocence of the victim.

Source: New York Times September 16, 2016 23:48 UTC