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Evil, Privation, Depression and Dread
Author(s) -
Robson Mark Ian Thomas
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
new blackfriars
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1741-2005
pISSN - 0028-4289
DOI - 10.1111/j.1741-2005.2012.01516.x
Subject(s) - privation , argument (complex analysis) , economic justice , set (abstract data type) , revelation , feeling , depression (economics) , psychology , political ponerology , philosophy , psychoanalysis , moral evil , criminology , epistemology , theology , law , political science , psychiatry , economics , medicine , cognition , sleep deprivation , computer science , programming language , macroeconomics
In this essay I examine the idea that evil is to be understood as a kind of absence or a privation. I put forward two arguments against this idea. The first claims that if evil is an absence it becomes causally powerless, which seems strongly contradicted by experience and revelation. The other argument says that the idea that evil is an absence cannot do justice to the evil of depression. Depression is a set of feelings which are all too real, and so cannot be understood as literally identical with a set of absences.