What is pure evil?
Contra Whac-A-Mole foreign policy
On Oct. 7, 2024, Kamala Harris planted a tree to honour the ~1,200 Israelis who were killed a year prior “in an act of pure evil,” as she put it. Joe Biden famously used the phrase immediately following Hamas’s attack. The most reasonable interpretation of Harris and Biden’s usage of the phrase “pure evil” is that of extreme moral condemnation.
But Biden and the American foreign policy establishment’s strategy for combatting Hamas lends credence to the idea that they really do view it as “pure evil,” in the explanatory sense not just the moral-condemnation sense. This is an important distinction. If your worldview presupposes some grand cosmic narrative in which there are Manichaean forces of good and evil that act upon people, making them do things, then you believe in evil as a theory for explaining human behaviour. I think this is wrong and unscientific, and it leads to bad implications: namely, ineffective foreign policy.1 Note that much the following discussion borrows on ideas that
has written and spoken about.2
Another word for the Pure Evil Theory of geopolitics is the Madman Theory. Richard Hanania discussed this theory in his 2020 article “Worse than Nothing: Why US Intervention Made Government Atrocities More Likely in Syria.”
Underlying the view that the US [didn’t intervene enough] in Syria is an implicit belief about what causes atrocities. Those who think the US should have done more in Syria argue for a model of the world in which bad men do bad things because they are evil or crazy. In this narrative, little can be done to stop such actors short of removing them from power [emphasis added]. Thus, even well-respected journalists and scholars call Assad a “madman,” “sadistic,” or “crazy.” He may be all these things. But this assumption leads to an unconstructive framing in which one cannot reason with such a person or change his incentives, and all that is required is the moral courage to face him down.
I agree with Hanania. When we limit our understanding to simplistic theories like “pure evil,” we also limit our possible policy solutions. When every problem in the world looks like the workings of a madman, the only solution is to destroy him. He who only sees moles can do nothing but whack.3
Why do bad things happen?
First, you don’t need to believe in Manichaean, explanatory evil to believe that there are bad, morally condemnable things, in the world. And you can probably still use the word “evil” in everyday speech to just mean “really bad.” I deny that evil is a force that can explain human behaviour and I still think it’s OK to call what Hamas did on Oct. 7 evil.4
I believe that human behaviour is influenced by many factors—like environment, upbringing, and material conditions—but not by ill-defined, all-encompassing forces like “pure evil.” In general, when we fail to explain some aberrance in human behaviour (or variation in data) by scientific, materialist means, we should suspend judgement and look for better theories, not toss up our hands and chalk it all up to some new metaphysical or supernatural substance (like pure evil).5 And in this specific case (Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack), when we can explain the “variation in the data” with better theories—theories based on psychology, history, and political science—we definitely shouldn’t resort to labeling things “pure evil.”
Better ways of explaining Hamas’s behaviour would look at it as motivated by retribution, religious ideology, geopolitics, and desperation. Let me be clear—explaining behaviour with respect to exogenous factors (like how Israel has treated the Palestinians and Saudi Arabia’s rapprochement with the West) does not morally justify it. As a materialist who believes that all particles in the universe, including the ones in our brains, behave according to the laws of physics, I think all human behaviour is probably entirely exogenously determined. And I still think moral condemnation is extremely useful and we should keep doing it.
Retribution
Israelis and Palestinians have been engaged in a classic ethnic conflict6 for the past ~100 years, where both groups have reasonable claims to the same piece of land and have been fighting each other over it. There have been massacres of both Jews and Arabs over and over again, with Oct. 7 and the ensuing war in Gaza just the latest examples. Due to in-group favouritism (i.e., a bias in favour of one’s ethnic group), parties in ethnic conflicts tend to be blind to their own side’s crimes and overemphasize the other side’s crimes. This is why people get so fixated on “who started it” and “who’s to blame for all the massacres.” It’s almost always the case that each side in such an ethnic conflict is convinced that the other side does more violence or is more blameworthy. It’s also the case that every ethnicity, nation, culture, and people has the capacity to do terrible, heinous things and wonderful, compassionate things—we’re all working with the same natural hardware and evolutionary instincts. In such conflicts, it’s usually the case that both sides have done highly morally condemnable things that have provoked further violence.
Due to attribution error, people tend to ascribe their enemies’ bad behaviour to their fundamental nature (much like pure evil) rather than to their circumstances and their enemies’ good behaviour to their circumstances rather than their nature. Attribution error also colours the way we explain our allies’ behaviour: when our friends do bad things, we ascribe it to circumstance rather than their nature, and when they do good things we ascribe it to their nature rather than circumstance. All this, plus the propaganda that young Gazan men have been shown their entire lives, I think does a very good job of explaining why Hamas invaded Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and killed lots of people. (It also does a great job of explaining why Israel engaged in a highly condemnable 15-month revenge operation in Gaza! Some people on the left seem to hold the opposite view of the Biden administration: they think that everything Israel does is motivated by pure malice, which is also unscientific and wrong.)
Religion
I tend to think that religion isn’t the source of people’s intentions but rather reinforces them by granting them the spiritual thumbs-up. Here I will shamelessly drop in what I wrote in a past blog post:
Believers pick and choose how to interpret their texts based on the material conditions they are faced with. Basically, if they see themselves in non-zero-sum (win-win) relationships with a given group of people, they’ll be generous and peaceful toward them. If they see themselves in a zero-sum, winner-take-all relationship, they’ll rely on the more horrific passages of their sacred texts.
As Robert Wright puts it in his book The Evolution of God:
When people see themselves in a zero-sum relationship with other people—see their fortunes as inversely correlated with the fortunes of other people, see the dynamic as win-lose—they tend to find a scriptural basis for intolerance or belligerence.
Bob goes on to provide much evidence for his argument in The Evolution of God, and it’s well worth a read.
The point is, Hamas fighters may have found it easier to justify to themselves the killing of innocents by reading between the lines (and sometimes just reading the lines)7 of the Quran, while ignoring the parts of the book that advocate peace and love.8
Geopolitics
Many analysts have pointed out that the Abraham Accords, a rapprochement between Israel and the Gulf States, could have been the catalyst for Hamas’s attack. Pre-Oct. 7, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had fallen off the international agenda. There hadn’t been a real push for a peace settlement since 2008, and the United States had given Israel the green-light to continue its apartheid and settlement project in the West Bank.
Recognition from Arab states like Saudi Arabia was traditionally meant to be the prize Israel would get for finally solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the United States and Israel were warming to Saudi Arabia anyway, effectively negating the need for Saudi Arabia to address the Palestinian question. The U.S.-backed dictatorship in Egypt and monarchy in Jordan had already normalized relations with Israel, eliminating any leverage they had over Tel-Aviv to address the Palestinian question. One of the last major Arab powers in the region that could plausibly exert some leverage was Saudia Arabia (though it had already been moving toward closer relations with Israel). However, the Palestinians were to be overlooked again. In September of 2023, Netanyahu said at the UN that Israel and Saudia Arabia were on the cusp of a historic peace deal. And the Biden administration and House of Saud had been cooking up a mutual defence treaty since before Oct. 7. I’ve written about this and how silly it is.
It seems quite reasonable to me that a lot of the reason Hamas did Oct. 7 was because they wanted to put their cause back on the map as it was slowly being shuffled under the rug. Further, Hamas perhaps thought that the Oct. 7 would be politically successful, that it would advance the Palestinian cause by putting pressure on Israel to grant Palestinians a state. I think this is obviously a mistaken view, but it plausibly motivated Hamas’s actions and clearly is distinct from the “pure evil” theory. I discuss this in the footnotes.9
Desperation
Gaza is underdeveloped and excluded from the rest of the world. Gazans generally cannot leave to see their family in Israel or the West Bank. Before Oct. 7, 2023, Gaza had a youth unemployment rate of 70%. The illegal 38-year Israeli occupation and subsequent economic blockade prevented Gaza from developing economically and created an environment of misery and anger. Gallup polling from November 2023 shows how poor, stressed, angry, and pessimistic Gazans were, even compared to their compatriots living under apatheid in the West Bank.10
Desperate and angry people who feel they have no prospects for the future (and who often have family members’ who’ve been killed or maimed by Israel) are probably more likely to engage in political violence.
The point I’m making is that there are lots of reasons that help explain why Hamas did the Oct. 7 attack; we don’t need to default to pure evil—in fact, asserting the existence of such a metaphysical substance as pure evil is super unparsimonious. We can explain the attack by relying on political reasoning, the effect of maleable religious doctrine, and human psychology.11 And strictly speaking, you don’t need to believe that Israel is to blame for Gazans’ plight to understand the point I’m trying to make (though I think Israel obviously holds much of the blame).12
But I don’t want to cognitively empathize with Hamas
It’s important to understand the true causes of people’s actions—or in other words, to use cognitive empathy to see how they view the world—because this allows us to optimize our responses to their actions. If there are reasons that motivate Hamas’s attacks, we can try to address those reasons to stop Hamas from doing attacks in the future. If we believe that Hamas’s actions are motivated by a nebulous, primordial Manichaean force called “pure evil,” it’s hard to figure out how to actually combat Hamas. And too often, the U.S. foreign policy establishment’s approach to combatting groups they view as being motivated by “pure evil” is to bomb them out of existence—which I think is highly ineffective because it reinforces the conditions and beliefs that lead to political violence in the first place.
Using cognitive empathy to see how others view the world shouldn’t necessarily give us more sympathy for them. I use cognitive empathy to try to understand how Hamas views the world while still holding very little sympathy for them—I think they’re awful. Having a richer understanding of why Hamas fighters attacked Israel on that day doesn’t really change the fact that I view their attack as very, very morally condemnable.
The U.S. (and Israeli) foreign policy blob often fails to put itself in the shoes of its opponents’, to see how they view the world. It’s so much easier and more satisfying to label your opponents as stupid or evil than to consider that you might be doing exactly what they’re doing if you were put in their place.
Relatedly, Connor Echols wrote an interesting column on America’s doomed quest for “total security.”
Bob’s been arguing against the concept of pure evil in foreign policy discourse for a long time. Here he is on Bush’s Axis of Evil: “And, of course, if you take the word “evil” really seriously, the ‘axis’ part follows; the various manifestations of evil are inherently coordinated, since they all have the same source. Iran and Iraq may hate each other, but they’re both on Satan’s team.”
I’ve also been workshopping a twist on an old classic: When everything looks like a nail, a hammer is the only appropriate tool.
Likewise, I think we can label much of the IDF’s behaviour since then evil in the same sense.
And we should not assume that our pet theory for how the world works applies without addressing the criteria for establishing causality! Very famous, influential people do this, and it’s bad.
It’s different from other ethnic conflicts mainly insofar as there’s an massive power imbalance.
Surah Al-Baqarah, 2:190-193.
Surah Al-Ma’idah, 5:32.
A majority of Palestinians think “armed attacks against civilians inside Israel” has helped achieve Palestinian rights. This belief seems almost certainly wrong to me, since Israel often responds to any kind of Palestinian attack with increased repression in the West Bank and a massively disproportionate response in Gaza, and such attacks can derail efforts to a achieve a peaceful resolution to the conflict.
My guess is that the view is born of the failure of the peace process. I discuss this dynamic in depth here:
In any case, this view certainly is problematic and ought to be confronted. I’m not really sure how to go about doing a public service campaign in Gaza and the West Bank to spread the message that “terrorism doesn’t work,”* but it does seem clear from past public opinion polling that Palestinians feel most hopeful and inclined toward peace when there’s an active peace process; this feeling diminishes and faith in terrorism increases when the peace process gets stalled. (However, faith in the peace process is orthogonal to the view that violence has achieved gains for the Palestinian cause, which was still supported by a majority of Palestinians in 2002, when large majorities of Palestinians supported the two-state solution and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.)
*Certainly not by bombing everyone!
“Pure evil” is, however, a fine way of morally condemning the attack.
Of course, if you refuse to hold Israel responsible for any of this catastrophe then you probably think everything can be blamed on Hamas (or on the Palestinians writ large), rendering them “pure evil.” This position basically only makes sense if you think that specific ethnicities can inherently have much stronger proclivities for violence and evil than others (i.e. you have to be really racist). I kinda doubt I can convince you of anything at this point if you hold such an ahistorical and unscientific worldview.