Why Do We Love Evil? | Terry Eagleton, Susan Neiman, Stephen de Wijze
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Are we fascinated by evil, violent characters because they make life more exciting?
We may condemn tyrants and abhor serial killers, but we are obsessed with evil and violence. Our news and our entertainment focus on such material - one survey claimed the average American child has seen 8,000 fictional murders by adulthood. Yet none in real life. Are we fascinated by evil, violent characters because they make life more exciting? Or because they express our real nature? Should we look to end this morbid obsession, or accept it as a feature of humanity?
One of Britain's most influential cultural critics Terry Eagleton, and philosophers Susan Neiman and Stephen de Wijze get to the bottom of Evil's strange allure.
Terry Eagleton: Terry Eagleton is a Marxist literary critic and public intellectual, widely recognized as a mainstay of British academia. He has published over forty books on topics ranging from Samuel Richardson to banality of evil in his On Evil. His latest book, Radical Sacrifice, examines the concept of sacrifice, drawing on biblical sources and modern interpretations alike.
Susan Neiman: Susan Neiman is a moral philosopher, cultural commentator, essayist and is the Director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. She has written extensively on the juncture between Enlightenment and moral philosophy, politics and metaphysics. Her forthcoming book Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil builds on her previous work on evil entitled Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy.
Stephen de Wijze: Stephen de Wijze is a philosopher specialising in ethics, who has made substantial contributions to the problems of justice and evil. Based at the University of Manchester, he was co-editor for many years of the esteemed journal Representation, which co-ordinates thinking about representative democracy. He comes to HowTheLightGetsIn as his latest editorial venture, the Routledge Handbook on Evil, is forthcoming for 2019.
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