Ethics

Hi; I'm not sure this is a philosphical question, but nonetheless I would love to know, why is it that people do bad things even when they know they are bad things? Is there a philosopher or a philosophy that answers this question? Cheers Pasquale

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Dear Pasquale,

Yes, this is a question that exercised the earliest philosophers in Ancient Greece (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle). It is sometimes referred to as the problem of akrasia, which is the Greek term for weakness of will. Some of these early philosophers thought that ignorance is the key. People often do bad things because (basically) they don't know any better (or what counts as the good). A somewhat related view (taken up later by Augustine and Aquinas) is that when a person does something bad, he is actually (at least at the time of the act) pursuing something he believes (or he has deceived himself into believing) is actually justified or not wrong. So, on this view, a person might tell himself (and even tell the world) that he is only seeking justice, when in actuality he is a tyrant seeking revenge. Or, someone who in general thinks that adultery and stealing are wrong, gets himself to think that in these particular circumstances, the act is ok. Others, such as St. Paul in the New Testament, seem to affirm that one can do an act that one fully knows at the time is wrong. There is still debate on this view, though I myself suggest that the Augustinian proposal seems pretty intuitive. I suspect that even in the case of St. Paul, while he may know (deep down, so to speak) that what he is doing is wrong, on the surface to carry through with a wrong deed an agent has to (through perhaps self-deception) convince themselves that what they are doing is ok. Still, to be honest, it seems that lots of we human beings can be quite malevolent, irrational, and perhaps some evil we do is even without much thought (e.g. in obedience to an authority). For the classic early investigation of this problem, check out Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics 1152a25-27.

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