ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on collective moral failures: drastically harmful events stemming not (only) from individual deeds or inaction but (also) from the deed (and/or inaction) of multiple people. They are failures because the events in question could have been prevented. They are collective because their happening depends on a collection of people not intervening or acting otherwise to prevent them. Thus the malignant intentions of a few cannot by themselves account for what has happened: a collective is complicit. Might such events still be designated as ‘evil’? I argue that collective moral failure is a definite category, that it has been a condition of the largest-scale atrocities, that such collective moral failures cannot be sufficiently accounted for in terms of the malignant intentions of individuals and that to the extent that the evil characterising large-scale atrocities cannot be reduced to individual intentions, we must be able also to locate evil in social situations, relations, or structures. This does not mean that evil functions as an explanation of such event, but rather that it is something itself to be explained. Thus only a suitably deflationary conception of evil is of relevance in the characterisation of large-scale collective moral failure.
