Peter Brian Barry

"This book examines what makes someone an evil person and how evil people are different from merely bad people. Rather than focusing on the "problem of evil" that occupies philosophers of religion, Barry looks instead to moral psychology—the intersection of ethics and psychology. He provides both a philosophical account of what evil people are like and considers the implications of that account for social, legal, and criminal institutions. He also engages in traditional philosophical reasoning strongly informed by psychological research, especially abnormal and social psychology.

In response to the popularity of phrases like "the axis of evil" and the ease with which politicians and others describe their opponents as "evil," Barry sets out to make clear just what it is to be an evil person."

There is a decided consensus that Kantian ethics yields an absolutist case against torture—that torture is morally wrong and absolutely so. I argue that while there is a Kantian case against torture, Kantian ethics does not clearly entail absolutism about torture. I consider several arguments for a Kantian absolutist position concerning torture and explain why none are sound. I close by clarifying just what the Kantian case against torture is. My contention is that while Kantian ethics does not support a variety of moral absolutism about torture, it does suggest a strong version of legal absolutism.

I offer a unique argument that liberal states are committed to recognizing same-sex marriage if they recognize opposite-sex marriage. My argument does not appeal to familiar liberal commitments to neutrality or equal protection, but to liberty. I articulate a principle that I contend liberals are committed to--the Rational Basis Principle--that has its origins in American constitutional law. I then argue that this principle is enough to show that prohibitions of same-sex marriage are illiberal.

Some jurisdictions acknowledge, as a matter of positive law, the relevance of evil to capital punishment. At one point, the state of Florida counted that the fact that a murderer’s crime was "especially wicked, evil, atrocious or cruel” as an aggravating factor for purposes of capital sentencing. I submit that Florida may be onto something. I consider a thesis about capital punishment that strikes me as plausible on its face: if capital punishment is ever morally permissible, it is permissible as a response to evil. Call this the Punishment as a Response to Evil thesis, or PRE. If capital punishment is not morally permissible as a response to evil, then, according to PRE, it is not morally permissible, period. PRE admits of at least two different readings: on the first, if capital punishment is ever morally justified it is justified as a punishment for evil crimes; on the second, if capital punishment is ever morally justified it is justified as punishment for evil people. While this first version of PRE has found advocates in both philosophy and forensic psychiatry, I argue against this first reading of PRE and for the second. To secure this conclusion I appeal to an account of evil and evil personhood that I have developed elsewhere.

A number of absolutist opponents of torture are apt to complain about the use (or misuse) of thought experiments involving ticking bombs to justify the use of torture, even if only in rare and exceptional circumstances.  Some sort of complaint is to be expected since, if torture is morally permissible in ticking bomb scenarios, then moral absolutism about torture is mistaken.  One fairly popular strategy is to dismiss ticking bomb scenarios as mere fantasy—to contend not simply that they are rare or unlikely or contrived, but that they are not really possible and therefore are no counterexample to the absolutist’s position concerning torture.  I call this “the fantasy complaint” and it is advanced by some of our best philosophers.  I contend, however, that ticking bomb scenarios are conceivable in a sense supported by recent philosophical research concerning conceivability and modality.  If so, then there is a strong case to be made that ticking bomb scenarios are conceivable and that moral absolutism is false.  I consider several versions of the fantasy complaint offered by Henry Shue, Bob Brecher, and Jeremy Wisnewski and contend that none are successful.  The good news for opponents of torture is that while ticking bomb scenarios are possible not much else follows, and I close by considering other philosophical positions concerning torture that are untouched by the ticking bomb that torture’s opponents would do better to defend.

The moralistic term ‘wickedness’ has fallen on hard times. Still, some of our best moral philosophers have found the subject interesting and relevant enough to distinguish varieties of wickedness. One reason to reconsider the concept of wickedness is because they have. Another reason to reconsider the concept of wickedness is because further reflection on it might reveal something about the concept of evil. More specifically, reconsidering wickedness might reveal something about what evil people are like.  I provide an account that specifies the constitutive motivational, epistemic, and affective properties of evil people, an account that distinguishes evil people from other morally flawed kinds of people.

The issue of voluntary amputation—that is, the elective amputation of seemingly healthy limbs—has been much discussed by ethicists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and medical caregivers recently.  I consider several issues related to the ethical permissibility of voluntary amputation, but especially the issues of autonomy and informed consent.  On the one hand I argue that so-called “wannabes”—persons who want to become amputees—may well be autonomous agents who can autonomously decide and desire to become amputees.  However, I suggest reasons for doubting that appeals to autonomy suffice to demonstrate that voluntary amputation is permissible, for it is unclear that wannabes can adequately consent to becoming an amputee.  However well-informed wannabes may be, I argue that, of necessity, they lack access to qualitative or phenomenal knowledge crucial to evaluating the desirability of post-operative life.  Roughly, I argue that wannabes cannot know “what it’s like” to be an amputee in a way that this undermines their ability to consent, such that prohibiting voluntary amputation is not unethical.

However liberalism is best understood, liberals typically seek to defend a wide range of liberty. Some have argued that it is the recognition of same-sex marriage--not its prohibition--that conflicts with liberalism's commitments. I refer to the thesis that recognition of same-sex marriage is illiberal as "The Charge." As a sympathetic liberal, I take The Charge seriously enough to consider and ultimately reject it. Ultimately, I contend that The Charge is simply misguided and that arguments for it either fail to find support in some liberal principle or else find support from some illiberal principle.

Almost everyone allows that conditions can obtain that exempt agents from moral responsibility—that someone is not a morally responsible agent if certain conditions obtain. In his seminal “Freedom and Resentment,” Peter Strawson denies that the truth of determinism globally exempts agents from moral responsibility. As has been noted elsewhere, Strawson appears committed to the surprising thesis that being an evil person is an exempting condition. Less often noted is the fact that various Strawsonians—philosophers sympathetic with Strawson's account of moral responsibility—at least appear to have difficulty incorporating evil persons into their accounts of moral responsibility. In what follows, I argue that Strawson is not committed to supposing that being evil is an exempting condition—at least, that he can allow that evil persons are morally responsible agents.

Luke Russell defends a sophisticated dispositional account of evil personhood according to which a person is evil just in case she is strongly and highly fixedly disposed to perform evil actions in conditions that favour her autonomy. While I am generally sympathetic with this account, I argue that Russell wrongly dismisses the mirror thesis—roughly, the thesis that evil people are the mirror images of the morally best sort of persons—which I have defended elsewhere. Russell's rejection of the mirror thesis depends upon an independently implausible account of moral sainthood, one that is implausible for reasons that Russell himself suggests in another context. Indeed, an account of moral sainthood that parallels Russell's account of evil personhood is plausible for the same reasons that his account of evil personhood is, and that suggests that Russell himself is actually committed to the mirror thesis.

It is plausible that being an evil person is a matter of having a particularly morally depraved character.  I argue that suffering from extreme moral vices—and not consistently lacking moral vices, for example—suffices for being evil.  Alternatively, I defend an extremity account concerning evil personhood against consistency accounts of evil personhood.  After clarifying what it is for vices to be extreme, I note that the extremity thesis I defend allows that a person could suffer from both extremely vicious character traits while possessing some modest virtue as well.  By contrast, consistency theses rule out this possibility by definition.  This result does not suggest that extremity accounts are flawed however since, as I argue, a proper account of the virtues and vices allows that extreme vice is compatible with modest virtue and since prematurely privileges skepticism about evil personhood.  Ultimately, I contend that an extremity account is most consistent with common intuitions about putative evil persons as well as plausible assumptions about aretaic evaluations of character quite generally.

A number of philosophers have been impressed with the thought that moral saints and moral monsters—or, evil people, to put it less sensationally—“mirror” one another, in a sense to be explained.  Call this the mirror thesis.  The project of this paper is to cash out the metaphorical suggestion that moral saints and evil persons mirror one other and to articulate the most plausible literal version of the mirror thesis.  To anticipate, the most plausible version of the mirror thesis implies that evil persons mirror moral saints insofar as the characters of each are marked by similar aretaic properties: suffering from extremely vicious character traits—in a sense to be explained—suffices for being evil whereas possessing extremely virtuous character traits similarly suffices for moral sainthood.

I articulate and defend a conception of evil action. Many philosophers who ruminate about evil suppose that some particular concept should be foundational in a theory of evil, such that other related concepts can be derived from it. On one popular view, evil action is foundational such that all other related concepts--say, the concept of evil personhood--must be derived from it. In this paper, I argue that there is no good reason to suppose that evil action must play this foundational role. Second, I argue that it is not possible to derive evil personhood from evil action--roughly, any adequate account of evil personhood must explicate what it is to have an evil character, and no account of evil action itself can do this. Finally, I propose and defend my favored conception of evil action that is derived from my favored conception of evil personhood. The consequence of this argument is that evil personhood, not evil action, is foundational in a theory of evil.

(Note: this draft is a seriously revised version of my "Evil Action and the Priority of Evil Personhood.")

It is common enough for philosophers interested in the topic of evil to appeal to folk judgments about evil: for example, "Hitler is evil", "Hitler is evil if anyone is", and so forth. Some arguments for evil-skepticism--that is, the view that calls for deep skepticism about the existence of evil people--appeal to the folk concept of evil to demonstrate that there are no such people. But what do the folk think about evil? In this paper, I consider a series of actual folk judgments about evil. I contend that the folk concept of evil is not what some evil-skeptics have understood it do be and that the arguments for evil-skepticism that I consider ultimately fail.

Christine Korsgaard’s Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity is an impressive endeavor to synthesize the ethics of Plato and Kant in a comprehensive account of action and agency that locates the key to understanding both in self-constitution. A purportedly comprehensive account of action and agency will fail on its own terms if it cannot adequately account for some morally salient phenomenon. Korsgaard’s account fails to adequately account for the possibility of evil actions and evil people. If self-constitution is key to action and agency, then we must abandon the Platonic and Kantian elements that Korsgaard endorses.

Consummation is a legal requirement for marriage in any number of jurisdictions. Liberal philosophers are bound to be especially hostile to consummation requirements for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that legally requiring consummation for marriage would seem to be an obstacle to legally recognizing same-sex marriages. However, I contend that there is a presumptive liberal-friendly rationale for including a consummation requirement in marriage law, a rationale that follows from a more general liberal rationale for marriage law that I find plausible, one does not preclude the possibility of same-sex marriage in a liberal state. While there is much about marriage law in current practice that would be revised or abandoned in a fully just liberal state, the requirement that married partners consummate their marriage is surprisingly not one of them.

In a recent paper, David Gilboa contends that liberal states ought to endorse a kind of compromise position with respect to same-sex marriage, one that permits save-sex marriage ceremonies but refrains from legally recognizing such marriages. I argue that Gilboa's proposed compromise position is no compromise position at all. Further, I both refute Gilboa's arguments that liberal states should refrain from legally recognizing same-sex marriage and show why liberal states really are committed to recognizing them.

While conceptions of evil action are not uncommon in the philosophical literature, I am skeptical that any of the proposed accounts is successful. But I deny that this is grounds for skepticism about evil. I propose a number of constraints that should govern any plausible conception of evil action. I then propose my own favored account. While the typical conception of evil personhood defines evil personhood in terms of a propensity for evil action I suggest that this gets things exactly backwards. I contend that  a conception of evil action is parasitic on an account of evil personhood.

Christine Korsgaard’s Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity is an impressive endeavour to synthesize the ethics of Plato and Kant in a comprehensive account of action and agency that locates the key to understanding both in self-constitution. A purportedly comprehensive account of action and agency will fail on its own terms if it cannot adequately account for some morally salient phenomenon. Korsgaard’s account fails to adequately account for the possibility of evil actions and evil people. If self-constitution is key to action and agency, then we must abandon the Platonic and Kantian elements that Korsgaard endorses.