Defining Evil in the Wake of 9.11 |
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Written by <a href='/community/profile/382-laurence/'>laurence</a>
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Sunday, 06 October 2002 08:07 |
Article: Defining Evil in the Wake of 9.11, nytimes.com
Philosophers and religious leaders invoke the concept of evil. Some blame the sinful behavior of the citizenry and cite divine retribution; others believe that civil society will soon restore itself.
In Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation (Polity Press), Richard J. Bernstein, a philosopher at the New School University, begins by quoting Hannah Arendt, who declared in 1945, "The problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe." But Arendt's prediction was right for only a short time.
Despite all the horrors of the 20th century, including the Gulag, the Cambodian killing fields and the "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans, the "problem of evil" began to seem somewhat quaint. Mr. Bernstein writes, "It is almost as if the language of evil has been dropped from contemporary moral and ethical discourse."
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