Abstract

Amélie Rorty has put together a wonderfully varied collection of writings, with a range in time of three thousand years and a range of style from sacred writings to fiction to analytical philosophy. There is nothing like it in print, and it will be an invaluable source for many of us. The writings she has collected are all about—well, I’m not sure that there is something that they are all about. The title suggests that the collection is about a phenomenon called Evil that has many faces: one underlying factor in human life, which can manifest itself in varied forms. In fact, the writings are about uncooperative behavior, sin, cruelty, lust, vice, impiety, indifference, and cynicism, among other things. All of these are bad; they impact on human life in many different deleterious ways. Some of the writings, for example the selection from the book of Genesis and the excerpt from Jean Hampton, assume that all immorality is of a kind and may be treated together. Others, for example the selections from Theophrastus and from Nietzsche, are trying to persuade us to see differences before disapproval clouds our vision.