Professor Geoffrey Goodwin: What makes people judge acts as evil rather than merely wrong?

Abstract

What makes people judge an act as “evil” rather than merely morally wrong? Despite an abundance of philosophical theorizing on the nature of evil, existing psychological research has not yet answered this question. To address it, we first examine how readily people apply the term “evil” to heinous acts and their perpetrators, finding that its use is commonplace at both the act and person level. We then examine whether judgments of evil differ qualitatively, rather than merely quantitatively, from judgments of wrongness. We find evidence for a qualitative difference by showing that some acts—specifically, those that produce unambiguously good consequences but that are driven by appalling motives—are judged evil more readily than they are judged morally wrong. The reason for this, we propose, is that judgments of evil are more sensitive than are judgments of wrongness to whether the perpetrator holds a disdainful or contemptuous attitude toward the welfare of those affected by their actions. Finally, we show that judgments of evil are distinctively linked to support for the violent punishment of offenders and skepticism about their prospects for rehabilitation. Overall, the present results point to the value of better understanding the nature and function of judgments of evil. 

Bio

Geoff Goodwin is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. His research spans topics in thinking, reasoning, social cognition, and moral judgment. It aims to answer such questions as: Do people think of their moral beliefs as objective facts or subjective preferences? What underlies people’s desire to punish wrongdoers? What role does moral character play in guiding the global impressions we form of other people? What makes people judge certain acts as evil rather than merely morally wrong? The main goal of this research is to understand the basic psychological processes that underlie people’s moral judgments and reasoning processes, and to do so in a way that unites conceptual analysis with modern empirical methodologies.