ABSTRACT
In Chapter 2, I contended that the evil person is most plausibly understood as the morally worst sort of person. In hope of fleshing out this modest proposal, I suggested that we consider what the very worst conditions of character are like. Following Aristotle’s suggestion that vice is the worst condition of character, it is worth considering which vices plague the morally worst sort of person. Does the morally worst sort of person suffer from intemperance? Some philosophers think that evil people must be intemperate. For
example, John Kekes insists variously that the passions of an evil person “disguised from them the true nature of their evil actions”1 and “prevents them from seeing their actions as evil or acknowledging their moral significance.”2 Kekes’ evil person suffers from the cognitive failing that plagues the intemperate person: she abides by her best judgment but fails to recognize that her best judgment is leading her to act wrongly. Hannah Arendt suggests something similar in her account of Adolf
Eichmann’s infamous trial when she suggests, “He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing.”3 Worse, according to Arendt, a fair number of enemies of humankind are similarly ignorant:
The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. …this new type of criminal, who is in fact hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.4
