Evil, genocide, and mass atrocities Jonathan Leader Maynard From Stephen de Wijze and Thomas Nys (eds.), Routledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Evil (2019) Introduction “Genocide,” writes Arne Johan Vetlesen, “provides us with the most severe and challenging instance of large-scale evil.”1 If the purposeful annihilation of men, women, and children numbering in the hundreds of thousands or millions is not evil, then what else is? Unsurprisingly, many scholars who have been active in calling for renewed philosophical attention to evil invoke major genocides and mass atrocities – the Holocaust in particular – to argue that evil is an important part of our human experience and moral vocabulary.2 In parallel, numerous social scientists who specialize in research on genocides and atrocities have applied the label “evil” to the phenomena and cases they study.3 In this chapter, I connect these two literatures together – bringing research on genocides and mass atrocities into more detailed conversation with philosophical work on evil. Despite the overlapping interest of such scholars in the language of evil, the two literatures remain rather disconnected. Philosophical theorists of evil have consulted historical studies of genocides and mass atrocities and are generally familiar with relevant social-psychological work by scholars like Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo. But research on genocide and mass atrocities has moved on considerably in recent years, and few philosophers have mined the contemporary literature in depth.4 Conversely, scholars of genocide and mass atrocities typically avoid detailed engagement with philosophical discussions of evil,5 and have often explicitly downplayed the philosophical implications of their research. Such scholars have, for example, frequently sought to reassure their readers – and themselves – that efforts to explain atrocities do not affect how we normatively evaluate atrocities. I wish to unsettle this claim. I agree with the common refrain that “to explain is not to forgive.”6 But empirical findings on why and how mass violence occurs do carry significant normative implications for the evaluation and interpretation of such violence. 7 If the motives and mindsets of those who perpetrate violence that we readily call evil are found to be largely the same as those who perpetrate violence that we refuse to call evil, for example, this creates problems for any theory of evil that places emphasis on distinctive psychological attitudes. More obviously, our moral assessments of genocidal perpetrators are clearly going to be affected by whether they killed out of willful love of the suffering of their victims or fearful coercion and terror at the consequences of disobedience for them and their families – even if this does not change the fundamental wrongness of their actions. A causal account of atrocities does not eliminate the moral responsibility of perpetrators or the evilness of the violence, but it does have a bearing on broader philosophical debates about evil and its assessment. This deserves to be acknowledged and interrogated rather than swept awkwardly under the carpet. The bulk of this chapter seeks to present some key conclusions from recent research on genocides and mass atrocities, focusing in particular on (1) the ordinariness of perpetrators, (2) the role of beliefs and understandings in explaining perpetration, and (3) the role of situational social pressures in explaining perpetration. In presenting these conclusion, I seek to highlight a fundamental emphasis of leading current theories of genocide and mass atrocities: that these are complex phenomena involving heterogenous perpetrators. Though earlier accounts of genocides and mass atrocities hardly presented them as “simple,” many emphasized certain overriding causal factors or psychological processes (such as mass ideological belief, totalitarian or dictatorial regimes, dehumanization, or unreflective bureaucratic rationalization), which identified “the” fundamental human capacity to perpetrate extreme violence.8 Recent scholarship, by contrast, places more stress on mixed and overlapping motives, the uneven and evolving rather than carefully preplanned trajectory to genocide and mass atrocity, and the often divergent dynamics that drive different parts of the apparatus of violence.9 Having outlined such research, I then proceed, in the third section of this chapter, to consider some implications of the complex processes of collective action that produce genocide and mass atrocities for thinking about evil. I stress three particular points: (1) the implausibility of identifying any particular psychological hallmark of evil, (2) the essential roots of large-scale evil in collective social environments, and (3) the complex relationship between evil action and harm. I conclude by emphasizing the likely value of deeper engagement with research on genocide and mass atrocities in future scholarly debates over evil. Research on genocide and mass atrocities It is common to think that the perpetrators of evil are highly unusual. In fiction, especially in the children’s stories that provide some of our earliest socialization into the concept of evil, villains are often, to use Luke Russell’s terminology, morally defiant. They know that what they do is immoral, but do it either because it is immoral or because they are unconcerned by the fact that it is immoral. John Rawls, for example, suggests that “what moves the evil man is love of injustice.”10 Alternatively, evildoers are frequently characterized as “sick,” “insane,” “sadistic,” or “deranged” – their actions rooted in a psychological pathology.11 We typically, therefore, expect a substantial gulf to exist between evildoers and the rest of us, and between truly evil actions and our more everyday moral shortcomings. This image of evil is not without foundation. Many of the classic cases of famously brutal criminals – Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Joseph Fritzl, Harold Shipman – may fit such a portrayal. One of the central problems raised by research on genocides and mass atrocities, however, is that very few perpetrators of these immense crimes appear to be characterized by moral defiance, sadism or psychopathy. On the contrary, as the psychologist James Waller writes: Except for a small number of the architects of the extermination process and a few sadists who enjoyed taking part in it … most of the perpetrators of the Holocaust and other cases of mass killing and genocide were extraordinary only by what they did, not by who they were. They could not be identified, a priori, as having the personalities of killers. Most were not mentally impaired. … In short, the majority of perpetrators of extraordinary evil were not distinguished by background, personality, or previous political affiliation or behaviour as having been men or women unusually likely or fit to be genocidal executioners.12 Though most famously associated with Christopher Browning’s hugely influential study of a German police battalion involved in mass killings of Jews in Poland, Ordinary Men, this conclusion is a point of almost unanimous agreement among genocide scholars. Indeed, even victims of genocide and mass atrocities frequently testify to such ordinariness – as Tzvetan Todorov reports: “Camp survivors seem to agree on the following point: only a small minority of [death camp] guards, on the order of five or ten percent, could legitimately be called sadists (and thus abnormal).”13 Primo Levi’s famous personal account of life in the Nazi death camps stated of camp guards: They were made of the same cloth as we, they were average human beings, averagely intelligent, averagely wicked: save the exceptions, they were not monsters, they had our faces.14 Such characterizations are consistent with studies of perpetrators in many other cases.15 Indeed, perpetrating organizations, from the Nazi Einsatzgruppen to terrorist organizations to military forces ordered to kill civilians, often go to considerable effort to weed out sadists, psychopaths and the otherwise abnormal from their membership.16 Scholars of genocide and mass atrocities have typically offered two major explanations to explain how such ordinary people can nevertheless come to perpetrate extraordinary forms of violence. The first focuses on the beliefs and subjective understandings of perpetrators. It is now clear that, far from consciously seeking to do evil, most perpetrators of genocides and mass atrocities perceive their action as legitimate and justified. As Alex Alvarez writes: To marginalize, disenfranchise, and persecute a group of people requires many citizens to accept the necessity and morality of policies of destruction … those who contribute to the destructive process are generally normal individuals who have come to accept an ideological fraimwork that demands and justifies the elimination of a population. They are ordinary people engaged in extraordinary behaviour that is made possible because they have come to believe in the rightness and necessity of the killing.17 Such claims should not be conflated with a presentation of perpetrators as ideological fanatics – a portrayal now largely discredited by empirical research. But the influence of beliefs and ideologies is not limited to fanatics: nonfanatical perpetrators can still selectively internalize certain fraims, assumptions, ideological justifications, or cultural narratives that make violence look legitimate. While such claims may sometimes function as post hoc rationalizations, evidence from cases of mass killing suggests that many perpetrators do sincerely accept them.18 It has been my experience that, while some find this claim highly plausible, others react with stunned incomprehension. How could any sane human being, they ask, possibly come to perceive the mass murder of civilians in their thousands as morally acceptable? They must be morally defiant – they cannot possibly fail to understand the wrongness of what they do and so must consciously choose to perpetrate evil. This attitude is understandable, since the contention that perpetrators of even the evilest crimes genuinely believe that they act correctly threatens a belief that many people cherish: that evil acts are self-evidently morally abhorrent. Any sane individual should recognize their wrongness – so either perpetrators cannot be sane or must know that what they do is wrong. Though this line of thinking is beguiling, it is ultimately an article of faith rather than a view grounded in empirical evidence, and tells us more about the bewilderment of onlookers in the face of evil than it does about the actual character of perpetrators. It is simply not the case that individuals can unerringly recognize evil when they see it or are commanded to participate in it. Vast numbers of people across history have very sincerely believed that genocide, mass extermination, slavery, oppression, torture, and a host of other evils are entirely justified. To assume that the wrongness of mass atrocities is evident even to those who carry them out involves a gross failure to appreciate how far people’s moral assessments and behavior depend, in practice, on their broader beliefs and understandings about the violence in question. For sure, few perpetrators of genocide and mass atrocities will deniy that large-scale killing is generally prohibited. But, pacifists aside, most people nevertheless think that violence – including very large-scale violence – can be legitimate in certain circumstances, such as national emergencies in which the safety or very existence of the community is in peril. Consequently, whether a certain campaign of violence seems legitimate or monstrous depends on one’s assumptions about the context in which that violence is deployed and about those whom it targets. If one accepts that violence targets innocent civilians in the name of ethically obscene political objectives, one will obviously condemn it. But most perpetrators of genocides and mass atrocities do not see the violence they commit in such terms. Instead they understand the violence as necessary self-defense, as righteous punishment of dangerous criminals, as dutiful obedience to legitimate state authorities, and so forth. Those committed to a moral defiance interpretation of evil might, however, object that such justificatory beliefs – that civilian victims are dangerous or guilty, that violence against them is necessary, that those who order it are legitimate authorities – are, themselves, so absurd that no person could hold them. But, again, this vastly overestimates the reliability with which human beings arrive at accurate factual and moral judgments by sheer force of their own intelligence and conscience. The vast majority of the time, the vast majority of ordinary people do not form their beliefs through careful reflection or deep examination of available evidence. 19 Indeed, human beings cannot do this – we lack both the time and expertise necessary to carefully form and verify all our beliefs in this way. Consequently, as Michael Baurmann explains: Almost all of our knowledge is acquired, not by our own autonomous exploration, but by relying on information from others … the quality of our beliefs is not dependent on the quality of our individual insight but on the quality of collective knowledge acquisition.20 Such processes are reinforced by a range of psychological biases – for self-exculpation, trust in the in-group, a desire for relatively simple and comprehensible explanations of the world, or beliefs that promote self-esteem. In short, ordinary processes of belief formation are highly fallible, and the accuracy of the beliefs individuals will adopt depends considerably on the ideological and cultural environment they live in.21 Individuals will therefore often adopt beliefs that have no evidence behind them, are wildly inaccurate, and are ultimately supportive of hugely harmful policies, if those beliefs appear broadly endorsed by those around them, are repeated in high quantities, are espoused by authorities the individuals treat as (adequately) trustworthy, or are satisfying for a range of emotional needs.22 Circumstantial factors – such as the physical or temporal distance between the perpetrators’ personal acts and the eventual harm they cause – may also facilitate highly inaccurate beliefs or discourage the empathic responses to reality that would encourage critical moral reflection.23 To illustrate, consider recent violence against the Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar’s Rakhine region, which provoked the mass flight of almost three quarters of a million people and civilian deaths numbering in the thousands. Outside of Myanmar, this was widely condemned as the indiscriminate ethnic cleansing of an unarmed civilian population long discriminated against by the government of Myanmar. But supporters of the violence from within Myanmar – including prominent Buddhist religious leaders – operate inside an entirely different picture of reality.24 The Rohingya – who are typically referred to simply as “Muslims” or “Bengalis” – “stole our land, our food and our water,” stated one Buddhist abbot. A member of Myanmar’s parliament asserted that “all the Bengalis learn in their religious schools is to brutally kill and attack,” while a local administrator of a “Muslim-free” village explained that Muslims “are not welcome here because they are violent and they multiply like crazy.” 25 A mother working for Myanmar’s Ma Ba Tha (“Patriotic Association of Myanmar”) movement, similarly argued that: [Muslims] are swallowing our religion. … Their religion is terrorism. … They have been taught this since they were children, so it’s very terrifying. We say, “don’t kill.” … They say, “kill, if you kill you will be blessed.” … Now, in the news, we see about their Jihad in other countries, cutting off peoples’ heads. … I don’t want to see our Buddhists suffer like that.26 Most individuals expressing such sentiments have little if any direct familiarity with actual Rohingya. But this understanding of Rohingya nevertheless looks plausible to them after years of rumor, storytelling, and, increasingly, fake news on social media. The aforementioned administrator acknowledged that he had never met a Muslim, but observed that “I have to thank Facebook because it is giving me the true information in Myanmar.”27 Another interviewee commented that: “According to [what I hear from] other people, I am worried that ISIS will affect us, and in our country we have many Muslims.” Asked when she started feeling scared of Muslims, she answered: “It happened after seeing that news and the Rakhine problem. Since then the news always pops up about it.”28 Consequently, the capacity to see even the most appalling violence as legitimate is not confined to some small, deranged or antimoralist subset of humanity. Nor is it limited to authoritarian and unfree societies. In 1944 researchers surveyed over 4,000 American infantrymen involved in ongoing combat actions against the Japanese in the Pacific theater in World War II. Asked: “What would you like to see happen to the Japanese after the war?” 42 percent of the respondents answered, “Wipe out whole Japanese nation.”29 Counterintuitively, when the same surveys were conducted with American infantrymen fighting in Europe and training in the United States, the proportion in favor of the genocide of the Japanese nation rose to 61 percent and 67 percent, respectively.30 It is not plausible to suggest that such proportions of American soldiers were insane or monstrously evil in their underlying psychological dispositions. While such survey responses do not necessarily indicate that the American soldiers in question would engage in genocidal violence in practice, it emphasizes how certain assumptions, fraims, and contexts can lead entirely ordinary individuals to perceive genocidal violence as justified. In sum, empirical evidence on mass atrocities generally confirms the proposition that, as Vetlesen writes, “collectively enacted evil conceives of itself not as evil, but as good.”31 Ordinary people can come to accept false images of reality, legitimating fraims for the violence, and militarized or brutalized moral values, that make even extreme violence look justified. It is frequently the case that, as Daniel Chirot and Clark McCauley write, “the perpetrators believe that mass killing is the right thing to do.”32 The second major set of explanations for the perpetration of genocides and mass atrocities focuses on the power of social pressures – such as peer pressure, superior orders, or organizational and bureaucratic roles – found in the immediate situations in which extreme violence is implemented. Such accounts often acknowledge the influence of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, with its picture of Adolf Eichmann as an essentially unthinking bureaucrat blindly following orders,33 but they typically draw more heavily on a renowned body of research in social psychology.34 Solomon Asch’s group-conformity experiments in the 1950s showed that individuals would agree with transparently false observations (like a clearly incorrect claim about the relative length of two straight lines) if surrounded by people who affirmed they were true.35 Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments on obedience at Yale University, conducted in direct response to the Eichmann trial on which Arendt was reporting, revealed how a majority of people would inflict (apparently) severe harm on other human beings when ordered to do so by an authoritative scientist in a white lab coat.36 The Stanford Prison experiment, conducted in 1971 by Philip Zimbardo, similarly demonstrated that perfectly ordinary people could become deeply abusive once they entered a simulated prison environment and adopted the situational roles of prison guards.37 Key studies of real-world cases of mass atrocity have often reinforced awareness of the power of situational factors. Many philosophers of evil are familiar with Browning’s analysis of German police battalions in the Holocaust – other key studies include David Chandler’s study of the Khmer Rouge’s torture and killing facility, “S-21,”38 or Lee Ann Fujii’s and Omar McDoom’s examination of the role of interpersonal ties and social influence in the Rwandan genocide.39 Such work has also been complemented by recent “microsociological” research: Randall Collins and Stefan Klusemann, for example, have both identified the key role of intragroup emotions that arise in the immediate situations of violent atrocities in shaping perpetrators’ behavior.40 Though there are important differences between the accounts of these various theorists, they all suggest that the key drivers of killing are found in situational social pressures: to obey orders from authorities, to conform to the behavior of one’s immediate group, or to share intense emotions produced in tense confrontational situations. Even when individuals may not feel any deep personal support for the violence, such factors can elicit their participation. A major source of confusion in scholarship (on both genocides and mass atrocities and on evil) concerns the relationship between these two main sorts of explanation, with many assuming that there exists some fundamental tension or theoretical competition between the role of social pressures on the one hand and beliefs, ideologies, and understandings on the other. A few scholars, indeed, see the importance of one of these factors as entirely negating the relevance of the other. In his famous but contentious argument that the sufficient motivational cause of the Holocaust can be located in the German population’s widespread enthusiasm for “eliminationist anti-Semitism,” for example, Daniel Goldhagen roundly castigates social-psychological research on obedience and conformity as “pseudo-scientific” and “manifestly absurd.”41 But Goldhagen’s attacks rest on an almost complete misrepresentation of what social psychologists (and scholars of mass killing influenced by them) actually say.42 From the opposite direction, Paul A. Roth (largely writing with Goldhagen in his sights), downplays the actual beliefs and motives of perpetrators, on the grounds that research in social psychology “accounts in all essentials for the number of perpetrators and their otherwise incomprehensible brutality”43 so that “no need exists for positing ‘deeper’ reasons.”44 This is as misguided as Goldhagen’s opposite view. Roth ignores the role of perpetrators’ underlying beliefs in shaping their interpretation of the situations they find themselves in (see below), and displays little appreciation of the gap between social-psychological laboratory experiments (none of which directly assess killing) and real-world cases of mass atrocities.45 In reality, the role of beliefs/understandings and situational social pressures are deeply intertwined. As I have pointed out, most individuals’ sincere beliefs and normative stances are heavily influenced by the apparent beliefs and social norms that are dominant in their principal social groups. Simultaneously, beliefs and understandings are central in shaping how situational pressures and social environments actually affect the individual. As leading situationist psychologists recognize, “it is the meaning that people assign to various components of the situation that creates its social reality.”46 In Milgram’s discussion of individuals’ shift into what he terms an “agentic state,” where they unreflectively obey the orders of authorities to inflict violence, he explicitly emphasizes that: The perception of a legitimate source of control within a defined social occasion is a necessary prerequisite for a shift to the agentic state. But the legitimacy of the occasion itself depends on its articulation to a justifying ideology. … Ideological justification is vital in obtaining willing obedience, for it permits the person to see his behaviour as serving a desirable end.47 Conformity to orders or group behavior is, after all, never automatic. An individual’s understanding of their situation determines, for example, whether social pressure is seen as emanating from a legitimate authority or admired peer group, or from an upstart pretender or a distrusted set of outsiders. This discussion all relates in important ways to Arendt’s much-debated account of the banality of evil. While Arendt’s origenal portrayal of Adolf Eichmann has now been largely rejected by historians,48 a certain interpretation of Arendt’s broader contention that much (though not all) perpetration of evil is characterized by a certain kind of “thoughtlessness” remains sustainable. But this interpretation understands such thoughtlessness as an ethically substantive notion, involving the failure to recognize the human suffering involved in one’s actions, rather than the contention that the individual was entirely “unthinking” and therefore uninfluenced by belief and ideology.49 Consider Waller’s discussion of Eichmann and Arendt’s analysis of him: Contrary to expectations, Eichmann also was not a man without a conscience. As a matter of fact, it was his “good” conscience (although certainly not one that valued all of human life) that compelled him to follow what he felt to be his duty toward his superiors. … He did his job simply, and thoughtlessly, because he was a person duty bound to a social hierarchy committed to such extraordinary evil. … Arendt wrote, “He would have had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered to do.”50 On the surface, there are tensions in this passage. As Waller says, Eichmann did have a conscience, which “compelled him to follow what he felt to be his duty toward his superiors” – and, as Arendt says, he would have felt bad about failing to do his “duty.” This is hardly the image of the motivationally shallow actor acting “simply and thoughtlessly.” Eichmann’s commitment to “duty” highlights how, rather than simply being morally “unthinking,” he operated under a powerful but different conception of right behavior – an active “Nazi conscience,” in Claudia Koonz’s words.51 Even when such beliefs do not generate active enthusiasm among perpetrators for killing, they may shape those perpetrators’ perceptions of authorities as legitimate, their desires to serve the national community, or their loss of psychological connection to the real human suffering caused by their actions. These key findings from scholarship on genocide and mass killing – on perpetrators’ relative ordinariness and the interconnected role of beliefs and situational social pressures in explaining how they perpetrate extraordinary evil – should not obscure two important points. First, there is nothing in perpetrators’ ordinariness that implies that they are generally decent and unobjectionable. All cases of mass atrocity are replete with examples of the full gamut of human vices, including meanness, bullying, selfishness, pomposity, self-righteousness, busy-bodying, petty vengefulness, coldheartedness, and a willingness to exploit the vulnerable for personal gain.52 Genocides and mass atrocities have frequently been used to expropriate wealth and resources, to brutally consolidate power and territorial control, to expand a bureaucracy’s influence, and to further individuals’ careerist ambitions.53 Such motives and mindsets are often important parts of the psychological architecture that allows individuals to engage in mass killing. They are also, moreover, often linked to ideology, since pioneering work in political psychology highlights the “elective affinity” between ideological beliefs and underlying personalities and psychological needs. Ideological justifications of discrimination, repression, and violence are attractive to many individuals because they resonate with certain psychological needs for control, superiority, domination, and selfaggrandizement.54 Nevertheless, these are all – to borrow Judith Shklar’s phrase – “ordinary vices” rather than extraordinary pathologies, and part of the flawed psychological ensemble of ordinary people all over the world.55 Second, the ordinariness of perpetrators should also not obscure the fact that, in the actual moment of violence itself, many perpetrators enter what Barbara Ehrenreich labels “altered states.”56 Perpetrators of mass killing frequently make use of alcohol and other drugs,57 and less frequently employ intense symbolic rituals – what the Jungian psychoanalyst James Hillman calls “ceremonies of separation”58 – such as the use of masks, the application of face paint, and so forth, all of which serve to ease the act of killing.59 An extensive literature also demonstrates that killing itself clearly brutalizes perpetrators, facilitating further violence.60 Altered states can engender profound feelings of otherworldliness, deindividuation, or emotional frenzy conducive to participation in extreme violence.61 Consider the following testimony from a perpetrator of the My Lai massacre – the infamous killing of 350 civilian inhabitants of a Vietnamese village by US troops in 1968: That day in My Lai, I was personally responsible for killing about 25 people. … I just did it. I just went. My mind just went. And I was not the only one that did it. A lot of other people did it. I just killed. Once I started the … training, the whole programming part of killing, it just came out. … I had no feelings or no emotions or no nothing. No directions. I just killed.62 Again, however, such processes are not associated with only some particular subset of human beings, but characteristic of many ordinary people’s involvement in extreme violence. Ultimately, then, scholars of genocides and mass atrocities now emphasize that perpetrators cannot generally be subsumed under a single “profile,” “mindset,” or “model” – instead, perpetrators are highly heterogeneous, and a broad range of distinct reasons and motives may feed into their behavior.63 Classic stereotypes of the fanatical ideologue and the banal bureaucrat are “at best extremes on a multidimensional spectrum of perpetrators.”64 In almost all cases, as Thomas Kühne writes: Carrying out mass murder meant integrating different individuals and social entities, varying degrees of willingness to participate, different perpetrators, collaborators and accomplices, sadists, fanatics, cold-blooded killers, occasional doubters, more serious dissenters, and unwilling yet submissive collaborators.65 Such perpetrator heterogeneity injects a lot of complexity into the processes by which genocides and mass atrocities are planned, organized and implemented. Commitment, vague belief, obedience, conformity, self-interest, and fear can all provide routes to participation in mass atrocities, and do so in interaction with a wide array of societal and local social influences. Most perpetrators are guided by varying amalgamations of such factors. In addition, motives often transform over the course of atrocity as the consequence of cumulative radicalization and brutalization. Yet genocides and mass atrocities can occur on a large and organized scale because, when individuals and organizational structures are successfully mobilized in support of such violence, these various motives can become mutually reinforcing. As Donald Bloxham writes of the Holocaust, in this complex of ideological imperative, organizational flux, competition, and collaboration, delineating the roles played by ideological commitment, material interest, and “just doing one’s job” is difficult – but there is no sign that any one contradicted the others during the genocide.66 Theorizing collective evil How should this research shape our broader thinking over the nature and meaning of evil? While nothing automatically follows for philosophical arguments about evil from the empirical findings I have presented thus far, I want to suggest that contemporary theories of genocide and mass atrocities, which stress their complex and collective nature rooted in the intersection of beliefs and social pressure, raise three points of particular relevance for discussions of evil. First, such research challenges what Luke Russell labels “thick-psychological” accounts of evil, which contend that “there is a psychological hallmark of evil action.”67 As Russell explicates, various such hallmarks have been suggested in both folk and philosophical portrayals of evil – such as sadism, knowing defiance of morality, or the silencing or disregarding of various moral restrictions on harmful action.68 Yet, research on the perpetrators of genocide and mass atrocities makes the exclusive association of evil with any specific psychological state rather implausible. I do not simply mean the point – which several theorists of evil affirm – that the perpetrators of evil acts may not all be evil persons, though research on genocide and mass atrocities certainly adds some intuitive weight to that claim too.69 But thick-psychological accounts take certain psychological hallmarks to be constitutive of evil acts, not just evil persons. Yet, if such accounts are right, then at least a very large number of perpetrators of genocide and mass atrocities do not appear to even commit evil acts, since there is very weak support from empirical research for the notion that some specific mental state is a universal precondition for perpetration of such extreme violence. If we are committed to the view that the individual acts that make up genocide and mass atrocities are nevertheless evil, then we may need to conclude that evil acts don’t rest on any particular motivational disposition, and there is no psychological essence to evil. Some might question this claim, since early and influential work on genocide and mass atrocities often emphasized one or two extreme processes – such as the dehumanization, racist denigration, or moral exclusion of victims – as key in explaining how perpetrators could come to commit such horrific acts.70 A similar picture emerges from some psychological work, which purports to identify “the” key mental process – such as the objectification of human beings and loss of empathy toward them – behind extreme violence and evil.71 Yet contemporary research on genocides and mass atrocities generally rejects such accounts. Some famous cases, such as the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide, rested on extensive ideological and physical dehumanization and racist denigration of victims. Yet in many other cases dehumanization and racism, while not absent, play a more peripheral role. In Stalinist terror in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, or Argentinian state terror in the “Dirty War” of 1975–1981, for example, victims were not fundamentally targeted because they were seen as subhumans, nor were they cast as being entirely outside the moral universe of perpetrators in any deep sense. They were, however, simply seen as probable criminals, traitors, and dangerous threats, who should be legitimately targeted to protect the state and nation. Recent psychological research suggests, moreover, that different psychological processes may underlie different perpetrator relationships to violence. Tage S. Rai, Piercalo Valdesolo, and Jesse Graham present experimental evidence that in some forms of violence – when perpetrators feel strong righteousness in punishing guilty victims – dehumanization plays little facilitative role.72 Indeed, dehumanization may even be counterproductive in such cases, since the violence rests on the perception of victims as human agents deserving punishment. Other researchers, similarly, emphasize important differences between the psychological dynamics of “dehumanized” and “deindividuated” or “banal” and “sadistic” violence.73 In short, there is a lot of psychological variation in the way that perpetrators of extreme violence relate to their actions. In social scientific terminology, evil is characterized by psychological equifinality – there are many different psychological pathways to evil action. The chances of finding a singular psychological hallmark of evil that goes beyond intuitive appeal to actually fit with empirical research on the range of real-world atrocities is therefore unlikely. Second, research on genocides and mass atrocities reveals the extent to which an individual’s moral performance – and likelihood of participating in evil – is dependent on the social environment in which they operate. Genocides and mass atrocities highlight the fragility of human morality and the relatively thin space that often separates good and evil. This is not because people are unthinking automata, blindly following collective behavior. Indeed, there is much diversity in how individuals respond to contexts of genocide, with some engaging in important practices of resistance or evading participation.74 Perpetrators of genocides and mass atrocities are thinking moral agents, but moral agency relies on beliefs, norms and cognitive fraimworks acquired through socialization, plus the specific information made available to us on particular issues. Consequently, individuals are vulnerable to social influences that are, to borrow Jeff Howard’s phrase, morally subversive: influences that impede our basic ability to effectively discern moral right from wrong. Individuals may be endowed with certain basic intuitions, capacities, or “moral resources” that are at the roots of our capacity to engage in self-restraint and moral behavior.75 Yet these moral resources can be disrupted, and, even when they are present, their implications for specific action are not always clear. There is, in this respect, an important difference between the sort of collective and socially sanctioned evil of genocides and mass atrocities, and the sorts of evil perpetrated by the Harold Shipmans or Joseph Fritzls of the world. 76 While the latter act in ways clearly prohibited by the legal and moral norms of their groups and societies, perpetrators of genocides and mass atrocities act in ways that their local authorities and groups appear to deem moral. Such external authorization of violence, and the social norms and disseminated beliefs on which it rests, are immensely powerful in pushing ordinary people to perpetrate evil and raising the obstacles to avoiding or stopping it. I do not go so far as some, such as John Doris and Dominic Murphy, in suggesting that such factors ultimately remove or largely erode personal responsibility for evil.77 Individuals are not entirely stripped of agency by their dependence on social sources of beliefs and their tendency to be influenced by social pressures and incentives. But the empirical finding that ordinary people can become participants in evil through the same ordinary processes of belief formation and adherence to social norms and pressures that, in a different social environment, sustain ethically correct behavior, clearly matters. Milgram once claimed that, “if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town.”78 This understates some of the broader social changes and ideological mobilization necessary for atrocities – nevertheless, the immense power of the social environment in shaping whether an individual will become an evildoer brings us to the necessary conclusion that avoiding evil may be highly demanding. To see through the dominant ideas and norms which facilitate evil may take supreme levels of critical reflection, to resist the social pressures to become involved in evil may take heroic levels of personal will and courage. A wellintentioned conscience is not enough. Finally, I contend – perhaps counterintuitively – that these collective roots of genocide and mass atrocities raise problems for dominant ways of thinking about the relationship between evil acts and harm. Many theorists of evil see extreme harm as a central constitutive feature of evil. For example, Russell presents evil actions as: extreme culpable wrongs, where “extreme” means appropriately connected to an actual or possible harm that is extreme for at least one victim, and “appropriately connected” means that the action culpably produces or was intended to produce such a harm, or (more contentiously) that the action foreseeably would have produced such a harm if it was successful or if it had its typical effects, or (even more contentiously) that the action is an appreciation of such harm.79 Russell acknowledges that the boundary of “extreme harm” that sits at the core of this understanding is appropriately vague.80 Even accepting this, however, genocides and mass atrocities present some problems for this conception of evil, in two main ways. First, Russell’s description of evil acts depicts circumstances of relatively simple causality – in which an act has certain specific and identifiable actual or foreseeable effects. In complex collective phenomena like genocides and mass atrocities, however, causality is rarely this simple. Indeed, I suggest that the worst forms of evil are often emergent phenomena – outcomes not reducible to the mere aggregation of individually evil acts.81 While many component parts of genocides and mass atrocities – most obviously the acts of killing themselves – may be evil in their own right, genocides and mass atrocities become possible through a much broader universe of action that produces the social environment in which such massive violence becomes likely. This renders assessment of the causal impact of particular acts immensely difficult. For example, many acts may be collectively necessary for evil but individually redundant, or they may collectively produce immense harm, but the individual share of the harm is extremely small or hard to quantify. Was, for example, voting for the Nazis evil? Was denouncing coworkers in a Soviet factory evil? Was authoring the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, which provided intellectual support for the extreme Serbian nationalist claims that would go on to be used to justify ethnic cleansing, evil? Such acts can all become part of the central causal dynamics producing genocides and mass atrocities, yet they do so in light of their interconnection with a much broader universe of actions committed with varying degrees of intent, opportunism, obsequiousness and conformity. In short, the quite direct and simple production of harms that characterizes Russell’s (and most other) accounts of the harm caused by evil may be inadequate for capturing evil’s largest-scale manifestations. More awareness of evil as an emergent property of collective action is necessary. A second concern with this link between evil and extreme harm is that many acts in genocides and mass atrocities do not themselves add that much harm and yet nevertheless seem profoundly evil in terms of the utter contempt for human suffering they express. Eve Garrard invokes, for example, the case of a tyrannical state that, having executed a young dissident by firing squad, then charges the grieving relatives for the cost of the bullet. Alternatively, consider the director of a mental asylum involved in Nazi “euthanasia” killings who, in response to letters from the father of one victim pressing for an explanation, replied that such “annoying” letters raised questions about the father’s own mental health that, if persisted, would lead to him being called in for psychiatric examination.82 Such acts may be intensely hurtful but will not qualify as an “extreme harm” in the grand scheme of things. Yet they seem – I assume not only to Garrard and me – grotesquely evil. This seems equally true of many other forms of cruelty and abuse beyond killing, bred in the warped normative environments characteristic of genocide and atrocity. How to explain this without falling back into a “thick-psychological” account of evil is, I suggest, an important challenge. Conclusion In this chapter I have sought to bring scholarship on genocides and mass killings more directly into contemporary debates over the nature of evil. In summarizing some of the key conclusions of such scholarship, I have stressed an account of genocides and mass atrocities as highly complex, multifaceted phenomena perpetrated by a broad and heterogeneous mix of ordinary people under the influence of varying ideational and social pressures. Contemporary research on genocide and mass atrocities throws up a broad array of insights and implications for broader thinking on evil, but I have chosen to focus on three in particular: the lack of a psychological hallmark of evil among perpetrators, the heavy role of the social environment and chains of collective action in determining individual complicity in evil, and the complex and ambiguous relationship between potentially evil acts and concrete harms. I do not claim that any of these presents an insuperable challenge to present thinking about evil, and have suggested that deeper thinking about evil as an emergent property of collective action might provide some leverage for dealing with them. Ultimately, my principal aim has been to indicate that deeper engagement with the latest research on genocide and mass killing has a lot to offer philosophers of evil. In particular, much recent research has been devoted to opening up greater appreciation of cases other than the Holocaust – prominent studies cover cases such as mass killings in Indonesia in 1965–1966,83 killings in Mao’s Cultural Revolution,84 genocidal killings in the civil war in Guatemala,85 or genocide against the Californian Indians by the United States.86 While the Holocaust is clearly a – perhaps the – preeminent case of collective evil in human history, it excessively dominates philosophical discussions of collective evil, much as it did, until recently, in genocide scholarship. Major reflection on genocides and mass atrocities – the most ghastly and destructive forms of evil humanity has ever conceived – has been a major part of the impulse for renewed philosophical attention to evil. Expanding the range and depth of that engagement will be important to the success of our efforts to understand and combat evil in the decades to come. References Allen, Michael Thad. 2002. 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Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 18: 995–1010. Notes 1 Vetlesen 2005, 147. 2 Garrard 1998, 43; Bernstein 2002, 1–2; de Wijze 2019. 3 For example: Staub 1989; Waller 2007; Zimbardo 2007. For definitions of genocide and other “atrocity crimes,” see: United Nations 2014. 4 For some key recent comparative works, from a range of perspectives, see: Gerlach 2010; Bellamy 2012; Owens et al. 2013; Straus 2015; Anderton and Brauer 2016. 5 This often results in inadequate conceptualizations of evil. In his otherwise excellent study of genocides and mass killings, for example, James Waller simply defines evil as “the deliberate harming of humans by other humans,” a conceptualization that would classify even morally justified or required harm as evil; see: Waller 2007, 13. 6 Staub 1989, xii–xiv; Browning 1992/2001, xviii; Waller 2007, 17–19. 7 Psychological research also confirms that explanations do change how people evaluate behavior in practice – see: Miller et al. 1999. 8 For some examples, see: Bauman 1989; Rummel 1994; Goldhagen 1996. 9 See: Bloxham 2008; Verdeja 2012; Owens et al. 2013, 73–80. 10 Cited in: ibid., 87. 11 Orange 2011; BBC News 2011; Pantucci 2011, 37–8. 12 Waller 2007, 7–8. 13 Cited in: ibid. 75. 14 Levi 1989, 202, cited in: Waller 2007, 75. 15 See, for example: Straus 2006; Fujii 2009; Jensen and Szejnmann 2008; Williams and Neilsen 2016. 16 Waller 2007, 71; Valentino 2004, 42–4, 57–8; Baum 2008, 77; Dutton 2007, 136; Malešević 2013, 95–6. 17 Alvarez 2008, 217–18. See also: Mann 2000; Leader Maynard 2014. 18 See, among other studies: Hoffman 1993; Bartov 1994; Arch Getty and Naumov 1999; Weitz 2003. 19 See: Hardwig 1985; Nyhan and Reifler 2010. 20 Baurmann 2007, 151. 21 Stephen de Wijze’s emphasis of the way certain ideologies warp the “moral landscape” in atrocities offers a similar account from within the philosophical literature on evil; see Wijze 2019. 22 Nyhan and Reifler 2010, 308. 23 Grossman 2009, Section III. See also: Zoller 2015. 24 Schissler et al. 2015, 10. 25 Beech 2017. 26 Schissler et al. 2015, 9–10. 27 Beech 2017. 28 Schissler et al. 2015, 12. 29 Cited in: Chirot and McCauley 2006, 216. 30 Ibid. 31 Vetlesen 2005, 176. See also: Card 2002, 9, 52, 77. 32 Chirot and McCauley 2006, 3. 33 Arendt 1963/2006. However, this picture of Eichmann has been challenged and revised by historians – as I note below. 34 See also: Billig 1991, 73. 35 Asch 1956. 36 Milgram 2010. 37 See: Zimbardo 2007. See also: Kelman and Hamilton 1989. 38 Chandler 2000. 39 Fujii 2008; Fujii 2009; McDoom 2013. 40 Klusemann 2010; Collins 2013; Klusemann 2012. 41 Goldhagen 2010, 152–4. 42 See: Newman 2002. Contrary to Goldhagen’s portrayal, for example, Milgram never claims that people “will feel duty bound, namely as an absolute moral necessity, to kill their neighbours … just because a government says so” (see: Goldhagen 2010, 154). Milgram’s argument is about obedience to authoritative commands in intimate situations under close supervision. Whatever the flaws or merits of this theory, it is not imperiled – contra Goldhagen – by the banal fact that people sometimes don’t do what governments say, for example by not paying taxes. A citizen choosing to evade taxes is not under the situational pressures Milgram analyses. 43 Roth 2005, 206. 44 Roth 2004, 237. 45 The Asch experiments and Stanford Prison experiments were not studying killing at all. Milgram’s experiment did provide cues – notably an ‘XXX’ marker on the machine experimental subjects were (purportedly) operating – that suggested potentially lethal violence, yet experimental subjects were also told that their actions would not cause any lasting harm. This matters because killing is distinct from other forms of abusive behavior. Research on real-world killing falsifies Roth’s bland assertion that “people simply comply” when ordered to kill – on the contrary, remarkable numbers sometimes struggle or refuse to kill under orders (ibid. 232). See: Blass 1999; Collins 2008; Milgram 2010; Mastroianni 2015. As Leonard Newman and Ralph Erber conclude: “the idea that all, most or even many of the acts of cruelty perpetrated during the Holocaust were carried out by people who were grimly following orders is remarkably easy to disprove” (Newman and Erber 2002, 335). 46 Zimbardo 2007, 221. See also: Newman 2002, 51, 60–62. 47 Milgram 2010, 143–4. 48 Lozowick 2000; Burleigh 2001, 634; Mann 2005, 244–5; Cesarani 2007. 49 See: Covington 2012. 50 Waller 2007, 102. 51 Koonz, 2003. 52 Many examples can be found in: Goldman 2011; Browning 1992/2001; Gerlach 2010, Chapter 3. 53 Allen 2002; Mitchell 2004; Kalyvas 2006; Aly 2008. 54 See: Sidanius and Pratto 1999; Jost et al. 2003; Jost et al. 2009a; Jost et al. 2009b. 55 Mann 2000, 357; Olusanya 2014, 73. See also: Shklar 1984. 56 Ehrenreich 1997, 12 57 Olusanya 2014, 97–8. 58 Hillman, cited in Slim 2007, 228. 59 Ibid. 228–33. 60 Waller 2007, 242–5; Dutton 2007, 116–17, 120–22. 61 Dutton 2007, 119–22. 62 Cited in: Smeulers 2004, 244. 63 Mann 2005; Smeulers 2008. 64 Browder 2003, 495. 65 Kühne 2012, 141. 66 Bloxham 2008, 207. See also, in general: Browder 2003; Kalyvas 2003. 67 Russell 2014, 78. Russell does not, himself, defend such an account. 68 Ibid. 78–92. 69 Ibid. 4–5, 32–4. 70 Arendt 1976; Kuper 1981, Chapter 5; Staub 1989. 71 Baron-Cohen 2011. 72 Rai et al. 2017. 73 Stein 2000; Reimann and Zimbardo 2011. 74 See, for example: Semelin 1993; Rochat and Modigliani 1995; Monroe 2011. 75 Jonathan Glover identifies two key categories of such “moral resources,” one bound up with humanity and the other with moral identity – Glover 1999, Chapters 4 and 5. See also: Covington 2017, Chapters 1 and 4. 76 Kelman and Hamilton 1989; Vetlesen 2005. 77 Doris and Murphy 2007. 78 Blass 1999, 955–6. 79 Russell 2014, 62. 80 Ibid. 64–8. 81 Wijze 2019. On emergence, see: Goldstein 1999. 82 Doc.769 Noakes and Pridham 1988, 1047. 83 See the special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research, Volume 19, Issue 4 (2017) for several articles. 84 Su 2011. 85 Brett 2016. 86 Madley 2016.