ABSTRACT
“Hate of evil”, some translations have Aristotle saying in his Virtues and Vices , “belongs to righteousness” (VV 1250b, 20f.)—an idea that is echoed in Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae as “odire malum est laudabile”—“hating evil is praiseworthy” (ST I-II, q. 29, a. 1, 2). This does not seem to sit particularly well with standard modern moral sensitivities. Hatred does not strike us as a particularly ethical attitude. Though it seems righteous and praiseworthy to stand firmly against moral wrongs, “hating evil” takes the idea of moral sternness over the top. Moral condemnation of wrong is very different from hatred of evil. Moral condemnation may involve anger and indignation, but this is not hatred. In anger and indignation, we find ourselves pushed to punish and to compensate, which is o.k. and perhaps even required if it is done for the right cause and to the right degree. Hatred, by contrast, is not satisfied with that. It pushes towards annihilation and eradication. Hatred is absolute enmity—an enmity that does not open up a perspective of living together with the “evildoers” it targets. It is thus not a way of seeing the wrong we do and that is done to us “in the right way”. It is not part of the inventory of ethical attitudes. Hate does not recognize moral wrong as the evil it is. Rather, hatred makes evil. It is prominently claimed in modern moral theory that the very concept of “evil” and the inimical discourse thereof is an excrescence of hatred, where pure hatred ideologically distorts our concepts of true righteousness and justice and poisons our moral outlook with Ressentiment. In the phenomenological tradition, it is Max Scheler who followed this influential Nietzschean line most closely (Scheler 1912). Hatred not only tends to single out ever worse features in its target, but it also contributes to making it worse (Scheler 1913). In this view, hatred is not seen as the right answer to evil. Rather, it is argued that moral condemnation should ultimately be guided by love.
