This book is good fun, but it's not the solid source I hoped. I agree with all of Shaw's conclusions (see below), but the arguments here aren't very strong and I have issues with that. I felt the logic wasn't always carefully worked out or worded well. And I was really bothered by her writing, occasionally, " But is it evil? I think not." That's a terrible tie-in to the book's overall theme. I resonate to her way of thinking because it chimes well with my own interest in the ‘moral’ quality of violence: when people who do bad things think they are doing the right thing, out of a sense that they are morally right. Morality explains a lot of the terrible things that we do to one another. This claim isn’t unique to Manne or to me, of course. Another book that could have ended up on my list is Virtuous Violence by Alan Fiske and Tage Rai which argues that a lot of violence is motivated by moral principles—it summarises a lot of interesting research in this area.

I think that enslaving someone is one of the worst things we can do to another human being, but calling slavery evil feels like letting slaveholders off the hook. It is greedy. It is selfish. It is harmful. But it's the result of broken systems and an individual's broken values rather than some fundamental and immutable aberration within the slaveholder. Here are some quotes from the first 10% that should have been a sign to slam this book shut and walk away. Russell begins with the observation that when the term evil is used as a description of moral horror and condemnation, it refers to some act or a person’s character that is in some important way normatively different from those standard cases of immoral acts and bad persons. To call someone or an action evil is not just to simply add an intensifier to the view that what we have is something very wrong. Further, it is not merely about the quantity of harm done or the nature of the motivation when acting. Instead, the term ‘evil’ seeks to capture something special, the particular horror and dreadful effects of some actions, and the incomprehensible and terrifying characters of people who behave in this way.

The best villains in literature

When we understand what leads to harm, we can begin to fight against it. This involves taking action to stop harm, fighting against our own urges to do harm, and helping people who have done harm to get better. And whatever we stand for, fight for, feel for, we must never dehumanise people. It's a useful example for Shaw to point out that there are countries in the world that still have a death penalty for homosexuality – most of us in the West see that while those who think of homosexuality as evil feel justified in throwing “offenders” from rooftops, they are very wrong. So, what are we wrong about here? Shaw basically says that there is no behaviour that anyone engages in that we are not all capable of, and it's more useful to talk about ways to improve society than throw around the label “evil”. For example, rapists are a product of rape culture:

It’s a controversial book, of course, and very provocative. Arendt explains her famous idea of the banality of evil in relation to Eichmann and what he said at his trial. She suggests that the Nazis, like Eichmann, who were responsible for such evil acts were stupid, short-sighted and ordinary. They were clownish. Rather than reflecting malevolence, their actions were unthinking and routine. But she also makes claims about the complicity of Jews and others working with the Nazis, some of whom may have thought they were doing the best they could to rescue people, others who were acting out of self-interest and personal gain. She thought many more could have been saved if they hadn’t played along with the Nazis. And she also fumed against the hypocrisy of the Israelis, as with their outrage against the Nuremberg Laws, when their own laws didn’t recognise a marriage between a non-Jew and a Jew. No wonder her book provoked such a furious reaction. But how typical was Eichmann? He was the arch-bureaucrat, sitting in his office, deciding how many ‘pieces’ (i.e. people) would be transferred to Auschwitz, on which train, on which day. That’s at quite a distance from the sorts of cruelty that were actually going on face-to-face in the camps. His evil might have been more banal because it was largely done at a distance.So its interest lies in the details that emerge in conversation, and about how the perpetrators understand what they have done. But surely much of that is a question of memory. It’s not as if he’s interviewing them as they come off the battlefield. The events they recount happened a long time in the past. Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein when she was only eighteen. At once a Gothic thriller, a passionate romance, and a cautionary tale about the dangers of science, Frankenstein tells the story of committed science student Victor Frankenstein. Obsessed with discovering the cause of generation and life and bestowing animation upon lifeless matter, Frankenstein assembles a human being from stolen body parts but; upon bringing it to life, he recoils in horror at the creature's hideousness. Tormented by isolation and loneliness, the once-innocent creature turns to evil and unleashes a campaign of murderous revenge against his creator, Frankenstein. It’s a predicament that Aziraphale, a somewhat fussy angel, and Crowley, a fast-living demon now finds themselves in. They’ve been living amongst Earth’s mortals since The Beginning and, truth be told, have grown rather fond of the lifestyle and, in all honesty, are not actually looking forward to the coming Apocalypse. Terry gets great traction from the Carrs "suspicious" deaths. But really, a dug addict who is trying to break into selling drugs getting killed is not really the stuff of Satanic Conspiracies. More like the plot of a cheap tv show. And I'm not arguing against that: slavery used to be normalised in the West and is still practised here by the “greedy” and “selfish” in the shadows; but can't "greedy" and "selfish" still be evil? It was more challenging for me (in a very large section on sexuality) to think of pedophilia as a sexual orientation instead of an active choice, and Shaw urges us to see it as natural (and unharmful if not acted on) so that pedophiles can feel safe to open up about their urges and seek help.

The late Iain Banks, pictured in 2013. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian The authors you suggested most often were John Fowles, Iain Banks and Stephen King Terry draws a line from Berkowitz to alleged friends of his named the Carrs who were involved in some sort of cult (and were murdered shortly after the Son of Sam murders) all the way to places as far-flung as North Dakota, Los Angeles and Houston - as well as Long Island, New York. Terry uses Berkowitz's interviews as more proof. I found the interviews to be entirely made up of leading questions and Berkowitz playing a terribly obvious game of GO FISH. His refusal to answer reads as ignorance and entertainment on his behalf, not scared hints. He does make that connection. The response to horror movies, and our response to the Holocaust, or to Nanking, are not entirely dissimilar. There are similar itches that are being scratched. One might be for recreation and one might be for scholarly study or concern about the future of humanity, but there is a lot of common ground.As a philosopher I’m always surprised how little actual acts of real evil are discussed by philosophers. Philosophers frequently discuss thought experiments or hypothetical situations. Jonathan Glover, in his book Humanity, is exceptional in his level of specificity about real history. But on the whole philosophers shy away from the facts. The Lucifer Effect explains how—and the myriad reasons why—we are all susceptible to the lure of “the dark side.” Drawing on examples from history as well as his own trailblazing research, Zimbardo details how situational forces and group dynamics can work in concert to make monsters out of decent men and women. This is a previously published edition of ISBN 9781619636071. An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here. Yes, definitely. But there are also the psychological issues of how it’s acquired, how it’s represented, and how people differ. Not everybody is equally misogynistic. Some people might show subtle implicit biases, others obvious and blatant ones. We may all be misogynists to some extent, but I’ve never strangled anybody, and I don’t think I ever would. There are all sorts of psychological questions that Manne, by choice, isn’t that interested in. That’s OK. It’s her book. When Terry is not "recreating" conversations between himself and police, himself and District Attorneys, or himself and other newspaper men, he is retyping prison letters from inside snitches.

Despite the bad rap the book gets from the skeptics - and the embracing of it by crazy fundies and crazy tin-foil hatters alike - Terry doesn't really focus hugely on so-called cults. While he refers to some (such as the notorious Process, the so-called Chingons, a cult centered around Yonkers, etc.) the book is more about dope than the Devil and if any cult is truly involved, it would appear to involve Scientology moreso than Satan.

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What surprised me is that, despite the ensuing years of seeing the above three groups fighting over this book, Terry's book is actually very lucid and down-to-earth for the most part. Exoskeleton by Shane Stadler makes the torture in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four seem like a stroll in the park on a sunny afternoon. After reading it you think: “Do I really know what is going on in this world?” gavernism The Rape of Nanjing by Iris Chang is still unfinished on my bookshelf. It is a well researched book that details the Japanese atrocities in Nanjing during the Sino-Japanese war but it is difficult to face the detailed descriptions of their inhumanity to fellow human beings and I had to put it aside. Maybe I will steel myself to finish it one day.” lwb48_zh Russell’s book is a complex philosophical text and will appeal more to those with philosophical training. However, he has recently written a shorter and more accessible book ( Being Evil, Oxford University Press, 2020) which offers the same arguments in a format accessible to the layperson. For those who want to follow Russell’s approach, this is the place to start before returning to his Evil: A Philosophical Investigation for the more extensive and detailed arguments. In Russell’s work, readers will find clarity, rigour, and a secular approach free of the much discredited metaphysical and religious worldviews. He offers us a clear and persuasive way to think about morally evil acts and persons, despite the recent natural and social scientific attempts to reject the term ‘evil’ as antiquated, unhelpful, and even dangerous. Russell provides a philosophical basis to show why it is still an important moral concept required to accurately describe a terrible part of our moral reality. In one fascinating set of experiments, he asked people to think about the worst thing that anyone has ever done to them, describe what happened, how they felt as victim of this, and so on. Then he asks people to think about the worst thing that they have ever done to someone else. The two get described in completely different terms. When evil is done to you, you see it as a terrible injustice, you see its effects as long-lasting. But when you describe something that you have done to someone else, there are always mitigating circumstances, explanations and justifications. The language is different. No matter how extreme the act of cruelty, the perpetrator’s story always introduces some factor that explains it: he was forced, or under great pressure, and besides, it wasn’t as serious as the victim says it is.