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Evil Within the Limits of Reason Alone

Author(s): Asim Mujkić
Subject(s): Ethics / Practical Philosophy, Early Modern Philosophy, Philosophy of Law
Published by: Akademija Nauka i Umjetnosti Bosne i Hercegovine
Keywords: evil; freedom; mind;
Summary/Abstract: In this text author starts with the question of explaining the appearance of ‘evil heart’ and diabolic person who develops maxim which cancels the moral law, who particularizes the categorical imperative based on which he or she proposes such a type of action which follows either some very personal gain or a gain for particular national, religious, or racially chosen group into which individual agent disintegrates. According to Kant, the acceptance of an evil maxim must be, in order to be morally relevant, an expression of individual freedom. It always comes down to either ‘yes’ or ‘no’, to either ‘this’ or ‘that’ direction of action when we are faced with a certain morally challenged situation. It is exactly in this concrete, every day’s possibility of acting of an individual lies the terrifying element of evil. By contextualizing, or emphasizing the social conditions for the occurrence of vice, which is the possibility opened by Kant’s insight, and further developed by Hannah Arendt, we are in position to take back the evil within the limits of reason alone and in such sway avoid its onto-theologization, or even worse, its naturalization.

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