Wickedness

Introduction

In Wickedness: A Philosophical Essay (1984) Midgley argues against two modern habits: explaining evil away as a product of society, and treating it as an incomprehensible force outside human nature. Taking up the old idea, familiar from Augustine, that evil is a privation, a lack of good, she shows how it grows out of ordinary motives such as fear, aggression, ambition or envy when these are not checked and people fail to attend to what they are doing. She discusses psychological and ethological accounts of aggression and insists that understanding the roots of wickedness in our own nature is a condition for taking responsibility for it.

More works by Mary Midgley

• 1978Beast and Man