Dean Moyar | Can the Rational Will be Evil?

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Dean Moyar is Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, where he has worked since completing his PhD in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in 2002. He has published extensively on classical German philosophy, especially Hegel, and is the author of Hegel's Value: Justice as the Living Good and Hegel's Conscience. He is currently editing a volume on Moby-Dick for the Oxford Studies in Philosophy and Literature series.
Can the Rational Will be Evil?
Evil deeds are a familiar part of human life, yet we struggle to make sense of evil as the activity of a rational being. This is a variant of the problem that Plato addressed in the thesis that no one ever does bad actions willingly. If we judge rationally and we only employ our will when we follow our judgment, we are not really ourselves when we perform evil deeds. This issue became especially pressing for the classical German philosophers who defined the rational will in terms of freedom or autonomy. Immanuel Kant had to modify his original claim that only the moral will is free, for that left him no way to account for our responsibility for evil deeds. J.G. Fichte’s idealism appears to follow Plato’s line more closely, appearing to deny outright the possibility of a consciously evil will. G.W.F. Hegel opens the door to the self-conscious evil will by aligning evil with the general human capacity for interiority and subjective freedom. I argue that his ability to account for the phenomenon counts in favor of his revolutionary view of rationality, but that it also heralds a crisis for the modern subject. His view tends towards a deflationary account of evil, yet he also shows how modern life tends to place the individual in a position in which they are unable to see their own misdeeds and hypocrisy.
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The lecture was organized in the framework of the project Hegel's Political Metaphysics and the Faculty of Arts of University of Ljubljana, with funding provided by the Slovenian Research Agency.