Introduction

For the theistic tradition of the West, good and evil are constitutive elements of reality and ethics hinged upon the gap between the 'is' and the 'ought', the recognition of the 'facts' of good and evil. Spinoza was opposed to inherited Western morality in his refusal to recognize evil. For all the differences in the metaphysical apparatus and content, Spinoza's is as radical as Hume's ethics of approbation and disapproval. The God of Spinoza's Ethics is not a lawmaker or a judge: it is a substance is beyond 'good and evil' – every much as the 'superman' of Nietzsche. Perhaps of all nineteenth-century writers, Charles Baudelaire employs the concept of evil to most dramatic effect in his Les Fleurs du Mal and throughout his poetic oeuvre. Charlotte Brown and William Edward Morris present Hume's views about evil both in the realm of his philosophy of religion and in his ethics.