Trump is “unquestionably” evil, Marty has said for years now, because Trump separated immigrant children from their parents. Harold, Marty’s son, responded, “You still holding on to that?” Harold’s meaning, according to Roland, is that Trump’s action of separating parents from children has been forgotten by everyone, held onto only by extremists like Marty. Extremist reasoning is inherently dismissable.
Let us switch from the factual to the counterfactual, Roland goes on. Suppose instead you had told Harold that Hitler was evil because he was responsible for the Shoa. Harold would not have asked you dismissively, “Are you still holding on to that?” As contrarian as your imagination may be, it will not disagree with the preceding sentence.
The schema of Roland’s refutation is as follows:
(1) If someone like you, talking to someone like your son, premises the worst thing a third person has done to prove that the third person is evil,
(2) and if someone like your son can dismiss your premise,
(3) then your reasoning has failed. The third person (Trump, for example) is not evil.
But
(1) If someone like you, talking to someone like your son, premises the worst thing a third person has done to prove that the third person is evil,
(2) and if someone like your son cannot dismiss your premise,
(3) Then your reasoning has succeeded. (Hitler, for example, is evil.)
Marty speaking: I think that I profoundly disagree with Roland. It seems to me that Roland is looking for a consensus basis for describing evil. Evil is characterized as people who others will disagree with whether the person is found to be horrified as evil. If there is one exception that the person is not evil, even if the person in question has been outrageous or cruel, then the person is not evil. But that is to beg the question of what evil is in the first place and, second of all, anyone, including Hitler, gets off the hook. Goebbels didn't think Hitler was evil. Roland cites a number of Twentieth Century moral philosophers to support his view and it has some appeal. It operationalizes evil so as to decide who is and who is not evil and does not engage in deep psychology to decide who is pathetic or foolhardy rather than evil.
Marty (me), however, appeals to an even higher authority than the moralists Roland mentioned. St. Augustine offered an objective rather than a consensus based standard of evil. Evil is what happens when a person engages in unnecessary or gratuitous cruelty. There may be evil events, choices people make, that are relatively trivial or ordinary but which are incidents that are nevertheless evil, as is the famous case of when St. Augustine stole some pears that he didn't even want to eat. Everybody has at one time or another has engaged in doing that. It is just human nature and so can generalize and say that there must be original sin as an explanation for this tendency but I just prefer to think it just that most people make mistakes or have a bad day. To characterize a person as evil means that the gratuitous suffering is continuous, significant, and betokens the essential character. So Hitler is evil but the guy who robs a convenience store is doing what seems to be an expedient so as to get some money, and so is not. We can alleviate most of such evils by giving people money or else providing people with happy childhoods. People who are evil, on the other hand, have to be incarcerated so as to shelter the rest of the people from them, and we find an operational definition of those people by finding them guilty of crimes rather than by trying to assess incarcerating people for their evil, which is much more difficult to assess.
Now we have to be careful not to allow a person to be considered other than evil if they are simply mistaken or misinformed. Those who allowed Black men who had syphilis to not be treated but who had been well cared for in Tuskegee during the Forties were in accord with the customs of biological experimentation while experiments done by doctors at Auschwitz were evil because the pain inflicted was gratuitous, fanciful, rather than for a real scientific experiment. A lot of action is bad without being evil. We have to make such very hard distinctions, as well as not to excuse people for thinking there was a reason to do so. Trump thought he was separating mothers and children to defer a great influx of illegal aliens who would disrupt American life, but the fact was that there were no hordes crossing the border. Trump was incorrect to the point that his excuse was just an easy out so as to create pain for its own sake. Consulting facts has to be judiciously done so as to offer an excuse for evil. People that doctors leeched patients were doing the best medicine that could be done at the time. Trump, on the other hand, is cavalier on the facts and doesn't care much about the suffering. That is testament to evil. So moral judgment requires a set of factual findings of sometimes considerable consideration and so morality does include factual matters and not just matters of conscience, despite Kant, though it could also be said that Kant appealed to common sense appreciations of how people dealt with one another and not just the separation between “is” and “ought”, it having been the cornerstone of moral philosophy for now two hundred years.
The straightforward assertion that evil is gratuitous suffering, profound as it is as an insight into human psychology, is now understood, I am saying, to rest a moral judgment on an empirical matter. Trump is evil because the evidence on which Trump was based was so outrageously false that one can claim that behind it was an animus to vilify people needlessly and so to engender evil. It was clear that the number of illegal immigrants were going down during the early Trump years, that those who immigrated were not increasing crime rates, and that those crossing the border were not criminals but mothers or grandmothers and their children. To say otherwise, which is what Trump said, was clearly a violation of fact and Trump could therefore be said to have an animus against Hispanics even if he tried to cover up an excuse. Separating families from their homes was regarded as a harsh but necessary expedient when applied to the internment of Japanese American families after Pearl Harbor, while Trump’s separations were just a way to exhibit and implement his hatred of Hispanics. Remember that the Japanese American internment camps did not separate mothers from children.
Not all questionable moral decisions are subject to being defined as so outrageously unfactual that a person is regarded as evil rather than mistaken. But some are. Dante thought it was outrageous that atheists believed there not to be an afterlife rather than simply mistaken in their beliefs. They must have an underlying animus against God and so could not just be assigned to the sidelines, sort of like in a limbo. They were instead put into coffins where they would last in pain eternally. There are situations more current than that to show that people are so bereft of factual matters that we would consider them suspect of harboring ill feelings to the extent that it amounts to being an evil intent if not an evil action. So most people would say that the sad history of anti-Semitism in the Second World War would lead people to think that demonstrators who think Jews are out to replace whites with Blacks is reason enough to think that those people who marched in Charlottesville had an evil animus against Jews, rather than a cultural or social distaste for one or another ethnic group. I would similarly argue that people like William Jennings Bryan, fully ignorant of evolution, had an animus against the modern world rather than merely a preference for a religious value over another value, the secular one. He is deeply benighted and risks evil. This is a strong claim in that I am treating Creationists as deluded to the point of being warped rather than mistaken, and it is a position not at all acknowledged by Catholics who, sometime after Bryan, endorsed natural evolution as the way God did things.
There is a convergence between the Wulbert proposition, that people dismiss extreme positions for their being extreme, and the Wenglinsky view that factual matters become so outrageous that we regard them as evil. So people will say that Marty is just fanciful for being a climate change denier, and find it amusing, dismissed as extreme, rather than the object of anger, even if I have significant facts to apply to my argument. These arguments don’t matter because there is a contrary consensus. Amusement, however, is not the response with other controversies where moral issues rely, as is the inevitable case, on facts. Saying, for example, that African Americans are inherently inferior, as Charles Murray made in his book about IQ measures, is answered with derision and by the fact that Jah Johnson is smarter than I am, as well as the overall sense that nurture overwhelms nature and so African Americans do better when they are raised in stable households, which is ever more the case. The sense of having inherited inferiority is seen as so ignorant, at this point, that it is considered bad taste rather than a minority opinion, and is suppressed for that reason, and well it should be, in that it reveals an animus rather than a factual dispute. On the other hand, there are debatable arguments about whether affirmative action is a good thing, combining moral issues having to do with the meaning of right and recompense, and shared or individual culpability, which have to do with morality, as well as with factual matters concerning which groups are hurt by affirmative action, as Asians suffer if places are given to African Americans, and whether people do well on affirmative action, as seems to have been the case with Justice Sotomayer, or whether people are swamped by the standards to which they are now confronted. Factual and morally contentious matters that do not necessarily hide an animus though one that could be engendered from the consequences of the policy.
All these terms, such as "cavalier" and "legitimate explanation" are tricky matters, and so it is difficult to assess evil, but it is an attribute that can be made, whether or not most or few people will agree, and Trump is a good modern example of someone who is mean spirited who also makes up his excuses so as to make people suffer. We are well rid of him even if a lot of people in the country were tainted by association with him and would not do evil by themselves but, I think, liked the taste of it even if only by emotional association or in their imaginations as ways of being free so that they could indulge their prejudices and other evils, even though, to the contrary, Trump people were profoundly unfree because they entertained their prejudices and other animuses rather than a Kantian desire to speak of everyone as ends in themselves rather than as means to ends..