How to explain evil

One neat trick

“If we as social scientists restrict our focus to actions that everyone, including the perpetrator, agrees are evil, we will have almost nothing to study.”

— Roy Baumeister

A few months ago, I attended an education conference in Boston and gave a presentation about the psychology of evil. Afterward, I went to a table to sign some of my books, and a woman came by to tell me that she enjoyed my talk, but she was curious about why I hadn’t discussed the war in Gaza.

You must have something to say about the atrocities committed by the Israelis—thousands of children have been killed! What drives them to murder so many innocent people?

She had her own ideas and was eager to share them with me. I listened for a while and then interrupted:

Is that also how you explain Hamas’s bombings of civilian sites in Israel?

She frowned and replied:

Why are you changing the topic? That’s not the same at all.

I had forgotten about the interaction until about a week ago, when I received an email from an Israeli who had watched my online course on the Moralities of Everyday Life. She had some interesting remarks about several points from the course, and then she asked about the October 7 attack. She was curious about how I would explain the atrocities done by Hamas—the slaughter of families, the murder of children, the rapes? What can make people so savage, so inhuman?

I’m not sure how to answer. But I might begin by asking her (and myself) the same question that the woman at the conference asked me, about Israel’s killing of children in Gaza.

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I am aware that this introduction will annoy some of you, so I want to be clear at the outset what I’m not arguing, just to be sure that people are pissed off for the right reasons.

I’m not saying that the events of October 7 and the subsequent war are morally equivalent. They’re not. Many people believe that one of them is much worse, although they may disagree about which one.

I’m also not saying that the events of October 7 and the subsequent war should be explained in the same way. Among other things, the October 7 attack was face-to-face, while most of the deaths in Gaza caused by Israel were at a distance. The psychologies here are different.

My point instead is a suggestion about how to think about evil—one neat trick, as the phrase goes. Building from the ideas of the psychologist Roy Baumeister and others, it goes like this:

When it comes to making sense of the awful things that other people have done to you, start by thinking about when you hurt people, when you acted in such a way that others wanted you to apologize and make amends. And when you want to make sense of other nations’ atrocities toward your country and its allies, think instead about the actions of your country that the people of other nations rage against.

So what does that buy you?

It’ll help guide you away from what Baumeister calls the myth of pure evil—the idea that evil is a mystical and terrible force, something alien to most of us. People who do evil acts are intentionally cruel, driven by malevolence, and desiring suffering for its own sake. Such acts can’t be explained through the same psychological processes and motivations that normal good people like you and me possess.

The myth of pure evil has many sources. One is what Steven Pinker calls “the moralization gap”—the tendency to diminish the severity of our own acts relative to those of others. In one study, Baumeister and his colleagues asked people to recall either an instance where they angered someone or one where they were angered by someone else. When people remembered incidents in which they were the perpetrator, they often described the harmful act as minor and done for good reasons. When they remembered incidents in which they were the victims, they were more likely to describe the action as significant, with long-lasting effects, and motivated by some combination of irrationality and sadism. Our own acts that upset others are innocent or forced; the acts that others do to upset us are crazy or cruel.

Once we give up on the myth of pure evil, we are in a better position to understand the terrible things that people do.

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Some people will answer with something like this:

I can’t understand the evil acts of others by thinking about my own acts because I’m not a bad person. Sure, I've done some things that I regret or that others blame me for. But these were hard choices, tough calls, honest mistakes. Same for what my comrades have done. There really was no choice. As for atrocities, most of what you hear is propaganda and lies; if not, well, those things were done by bad apples, totally unrepresentative of my group as a whole.

My response?

Exactly. Now, take the next step and realize that your enemies think exactly the same thing.

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Let me try this on myself.

I am not a fan of Donald Trump. He has repeatedly threatened to invade my country, and though it’s tempting to take it as a joke, I keep reading reports that he’s not kidding. He is acting to destroy the great universities of the United States, stripping away billions of dollars devoted to scientific research. He has shut down a successful Bush initiative that sent AIDS drugs to Africa, saving millions of lives—an article in Nature estimates that if funding is not restored, about 15 million Africans will die by 2040. He has targeted his domestic political enemies in savage ways and delights in bullying and humiliating people, such as, most recently, the president of Ukraine.

I could go on for a while. I have a low opinion of the man. In my podcasts with Robert Wright (here, for instance), I have referred to Trump as an asshole, a narcissistic bully, and Funny Hitler. (Credit where credit is due—Trump can be quite funny.)

Is what he’s doing evil? I think so. Is it pure evil, something inexplicable and alien?

It’s a tempting thought. And it’s tempting as well to think that those who voted for Trump—about half of the voting Americans—have decided to side with him because they are themselves evil, or at best ignorant.

But this is a lazy and self-serving way of thinking. I know people who support Trump, and I’ve been reading their posts on X. I’ve also been listening to an excellent series of podcast interviews that Ross Douthat conducted with Trump supporters, including Marc Andreessen, Steve Bannon, and Chris Rufo. I learned a lot about the specifics of the Trumpian worldview and the reasons why they support the man. I also got confirmation for what I should have already known, which is that Steve Bannon and the rest don’t think they’re the bad guys. They think that Biden, Harris, and the people who voted for them (like me) are the bad guys.

I’m not a moral relativist. Understanding is not refusing to judge. Just because I think that Steve Bannon’s views arise through psychological processes we all share doesn’t mean I have to agree with him, or even excuse him.

After all, these normal psychological processes include bias—we care far more about the ingroup than about everyone else. They include a desire for retribution and a drive toward harsh and unforgiving moral judgments. They include fear, jealousy, and envy. And they include a tendency to see the world in self-serving ways, rejecting information that portrays us in a bad light. Such psychological forces conspire to drive thoughts and actions that I’m comfortable describing as evil.

Given the symmetry here—Bannon and the rest think that my friends and I are the evil ones—I should show some humility and be receptive to the possibility that they might be right. But the mere presence of disagreement shouldn’t make one into a moral relativist. Consider a factual disagreement: Many people believe that COVID-19 had a zoonotic origin, while others think it leaked from a lab. Each side, of course, thinks the other side is mistaken. This doesn’t mean that there is no truth here!

Similarly, the existence of disagreement where both sides sincerely believe that they are right doesn’t preclude the possibility that one side—in my opinion, Steve Bannon’s side—is morally wrong.

People get confused about this. After Trump was elected to his first term in 2016, I wrote an article for Vox about people’s reluctance to think seriously about the motivations of those they hate.

The headline of an article at Slate reads, “They don’t deserve your empathy,” and the author, Jamelle Bouie, writes, “All the solicitude, outrage, and moral telepathy being deployed in defense of Trump supporters — who voted for a racist who promised racist outcomes — is perverse, bordering on abhorrent.” Save your empathy for those whom Trump has maligned, such as immigrants and Muslims.

… As a country, we’ve been here before — in a far, far more extreme context. Recall the 9/11 attacks … Many were eager to explore the terrorists’ mental states, trying to figure out why they did what they did, what role religious belief played, economic factors, and so on. Others were repelled by this, insisting that the mass murders were motivated by evil, pure and simple, and any explanation of more depth than “they hate our freedoms” is unpatriotic, even taboo.

I pushed back on this:

This was a mistake then, and it’s a mistake now. We should seek to understand those we disagree with, even those we hate — perhaps especially those we hate. … working on understanding does not lead us to moral relativism; you can appreciate why something was done and still see it as mistaken or cruel. (We can do this even when we reflect our own actions.) Understanding doesn’t involve selling your soul.

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Two caveats.

(1) I said that people don’t tend to see themselves as evil, and that they downplay the badness of their own acts relative to those of others, particularly relative to what their enemies do. But this doesn’t mean we always see ourselves as doing the right thing. Sometimes we act in ways that we know are wrong, as when we consciously choose to make others suffer to satisfy our selfish desires. The capacity for self-justification has its limits; every normal person can feel regret, guilt, and shame.

This has its consequences when it comes to moral disagreement. If someone comes up to me and says that my side is doing something terribly wrong, my natural impulse is to deny it angrily. But sometimes I know in my heart that my critic is right. In such cases, there is just the illusion of disagreement. Both sides really agree; it’s just that one side is reluctant to say it out loud.

(2) I’ll admit that the neat trick sometimes fails. In rare cases, the minds of other people work differently from our own. I think it’s important to understand the motivations of a paranoid schizophrenic who pushes someone in front of a train, or a sexual sadist who preys on children, or a serial killer like Ted Bundy. But you’re not going to get much purchase by thinking about the bad things you’ve done and assuming that their motivations are much the same. Their minds just don’t work like those of normal people.

But these are rare exceptions. Hamas is not a team of Ted Bundys. (A friend of mine, a strong supporter of Israel and a thoroughly decent person, told me that if he were a Palestinian under Israeli rule, he’d most likely join Hamas.) Donald Trump is not Ted Bundy. Benjamin Netanyahu is not Ted Bundy. Despite what Steve Bannon thinks, Joe Biden is not Ted Bundy. Neither am I—and, most likely, neither are you.