[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] Evil and Empathy
Nov. 5th, 2005 04:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldAnyone immersed in the Resident Evil line of games and movies almost instantly recognizes the Umbrella Corporation as evil*. Why is this so? Two grounds come immediately to mind.
The evil that outsiders see in the Umbrella Corporation, in short, comes from its lack of empathy, from its failure to realize that there are individuals apart from itself, that these individuals are almost certainly as internally complex as itself, and that destroying these individuals needlessly should be avoided, perhaps because it itself wants to continue to exist or out of simple pragmatism, and that one should come to terms with their wants and needs as legitimate. (Yes, the Umbrella Corporation isn't a person, but then corporations are legal personalities. Grant me this not-overstretched analogy.)
But then, there are those people--like the mullah interviewed by Michael Ignatieff in Teheran on recent visit to Teheran--deride this idea as "intuitionism" and favour the establishment of strict and unchangeable guidelines, that surprise! guarantee their own positions and their right to dominate other people. They get to define who lives, who dies, who gets caught in between. How convenient for them.
This tendency to pretend that the other isn't fully human leads to many things. Guantanamó is simply the latest and most public example of this tendency, active even in democracies. Yes, many of its defenders acknowledge, bad things are done there, but these are necessary things, good things for us, therefore we must consent, you must approve, you must know we are defending you and feel proud that we are, these people are beyond the grounds of humanity as you'd define it for they are not rational and not moral beings and we must defend ourselves accordingly.
This is a seductive argument. The problem comes only after you've begun to define whole classes of people as beyond the bounds. How do you decide when to stop expanding the category, or even if you are to stop?
The 21st century is only five years old. We've plenty of time yet for horrors, to find the classes set to be excluded. I'd prefer to wait a bit, but it looks like we've begun the process already.
* For the purposes of this post, I'll define "evil" as a personality trait that enables one or more individuals to consciously inflict harm on others and derive pleasure from so doing. Don't ask me to define "individual."
- The Umbrella Corporation developed a zombie-generating virus. People tend not to want to be flesh-eating monsters incapable of conscious thought. Too, more pragmatically still, people don't want to be eaten by flesh-eating monsters incapable of conscious thought. The idea that this fate can be visited on people uncontrollably, irreversibly, pointlessly, is abhorrent. Likewise, the agency that makes this possible.
- The Umbrella Corporation doesn't really care about the virus. Yes, admittedly the obliteration of Raccoon City, firstly by the virus and secondly by the nuclear strike, was unfortunate. The effect that the horrific deaths of a million or so people had on the corporation, though, seems to have been viewed as more unfortunate than the deaths themselves. The Umbrella Corporation distanced itself entirely from the consequence of its acts, rationalizing the horrors as bad things to be covered up.
The evil that outsiders see in the Umbrella Corporation, in short, comes from its lack of empathy, from its failure to realize that there are individuals apart from itself, that these individuals are almost certainly as internally complex as itself, and that destroying these individuals needlessly should be avoided, perhaps because it itself wants to continue to exist or out of simple pragmatism, and that one should come to terms with their wants and needs as legitimate. (Yes, the Umbrella Corporation isn't a person, but then corporations are legal personalities. Grant me this not-overstretched analogy.)
But then, there are those people--like the mullah interviewed by Michael Ignatieff in Teheran on recent visit to Teheran--deride this idea as "intuitionism" and favour the establishment of strict and unchangeable guidelines, that surprise! guarantee their own positions and their right to dominate other people. They get to define who lives, who dies, who gets caught in between. How convenient for them.
This tendency to pretend that the other isn't fully human leads to many things. Guantanamó is simply the latest and most public example of this tendency, active even in democracies. Yes, many of its defenders acknowledge, bad things are done there, but these are necessary things, good things for us, therefore we must consent, you must approve, you must know we are defending you and feel proud that we are, these people are beyond the grounds of humanity as you'd define it for they are not rational and not moral beings and we must defend ourselves accordingly.
This is a seductive argument. The problem comes only after you've begun to define whole classes of people as beyond the bounds. How do you decide when to stop expanding the category, or even if you are to stop?
The 21st century is only five years old. We've plenty of time yet for horrors, to find the classes set to be excluded. I'd prefer to wait a bit, but it looks like we've begun the process already.
* For the purposes of this post, I'll define "evil" as a personality trait that enables one or more individuals to consciously inflict harm on others and derive pleasure from so doing. Don't ask me to define "individual."
