Why Evil Returns: The Question for Contemporary Ethics

A Brief Engagement with Robert Meister's After Evil

What happens when moral statements do the work that moral deliberation is supposed to do? Not only does evil still happen, but we wind up impoverished as well. This is a subscriber-only post. Become a paid subscriber and help support this work.

Robert Meister’s After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights was recommended to me by a friend who’s gone digitally anonymous, so I’ll just say thanks to Charles for recommending it. Meister, a professor of social and political thought, approaches the question of what it means for modern moral movements to take the form of abolitionist ones. For Meister, the “never again” approach is, he says, a replacement of political deliberation with moral imperative—something is so horrific that instead of understanding where evil came from, we abolish it, and with it, the capacity to understand where evils come from and why them emerge.

It’s a provocative thesis, but also one with a lot of explanatory power. The book begins with a brief observation: previous versions of human rights advocacy emphasized social equality, while modern human rights advocacy turns on the avoidance of evil, preventing large scale atrocity from happening. In the process, he argues, human rights advocacy justifies increasingly antidemocratic measures (such as unilateral interventions), and with it, increasingly anti-political visions of the world (viewing all of the world as a “human community” instead of attending to the particulars of local differences). The move to “abolish evil” ironically, he argues, leads to the destruction of local politics by seeing local politics itself as part of what produces things like genocides.

I was drawn to reading this partly because Charles always recommends interesting stuff, so whenever he suggests books, I go ahead and put them on my list. But it was the question of how abolitionist-style advocacy happens that caught my attention. As one who has written frequently on the question of nonviolence, this is a common (albeit stereotyped) criticism: that nonviolence is the refusal of political thinking and replacing it with an ethical mandate, that by bypassing the local work of disagreement and deliberation and jumping to abolishing the Bad Thing, we actually destroy the ability to prevent the Bad Thing from occurring.