ABSTRACT
The philosopher Mary Midgley favors a privative conception of evil personhood insofar as she holds that “[e]vil…is essentially the absence of good, and cannot be understood on its own.”1 Such a conception is at odds with the conception of evil personhood that I have defended, one exemplified by Dorian Gray: insofar as evil personhood consists in virulent viciousness, being evil demands more than just the absence of goodness. Suffering from extreme vice amounts to suffer from something and not just lacking virtue, for example. Interestingly, Midgley favors a privative conception partly because she worries that if evil were understood as something positive, the cure for evil personhood would be as problematic as the disease:
Evil, considered as something positive, would indeed have to be an alien being, a demon that had taken possession. The only possible kind of treatment would then be to cast it out somehow from the possessed person…. This casting out will not get far unless it is somehow replanned to take account of the fact that evil traits are not just something alien.2
