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Calibrating Evil - School Essays

Calibrating Evil

In his article Calibrating Evil, Hillel Steiner discusses how evil acts should not be associated merely with wrong doing, but instead there should be different degrees, or different stages of evil. I will take the stance of defending Steiner’s argument that there should in fact be different degrees of evil, depending on the act and the conditions of how and when that act was carried out.

Steiner’s theory is that “Evil acts are wrong acts that are pleasurable for their doers, while supererogatory acts are right acts that are painful to perform” (p. 189). I should now take the time to clarify what a supererogatory act is; an act that goes beyond the call of duty, one that is ...

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if it is a nice sunny day and you want to go to the beach but you are scheduled to work that day, you could simply call into work and tell them you are sick. You may know that they do not really need you that day and it will not be hurting anybody if you do not go into work. However, you still lied to your employer, thus carrying out an evil act, although you did not hurt anybody. To move on to another level of evil, I will give this example: You need a 95% on a test in order to become class valedictorian, but you have been very busy with school work lately and have not had the time to study as much as you normally would, so you decide to cheat on the test. You are not hurting anybody else directly by doing this, however, since you got to be class valedictorian via cheating, you are hurting the person who did their work honestly and do not get to be valedictorian because you cheated. My point of these examples will be evident in the next paragraph when I discuss really ...

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PAPER DETAILS

Added: 4/4/2011 05:53:37 PM
Submitted By: ants96
Category: Philosophy
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 594
Pages: 3

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