Systemic evil

Structural evil or systemic evil is evil which arises from structures within human society, rather than from individual wickedness or religious conceptions such as original sin. One example of Structural evil within a society would be slavery.

Structural evil arises within human societies because of the way humans act. Multiple individuals have commented and theorized on the subject of structural evil. Among these early thinkers are Rousseau and Robespierre. However, more modern thinkers on this subject are Thomas Nagel, Claudia Card, Cynthia D. Moe-Lobeda, and John Langan.

Rousseau proposed that the structures of human society were the main source of evil in his works such as the Discourse on Inequality (Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes). He believed that humans are good by nature, but are rendered corrupt by society. Rousseau's reasoning is as follows: if society is supposedly composed of entirely naturally good human beings, then how can evil come about? It must come about because of the structures that are present in human society. These ideas were influential upon French revolutionaries such as Robespierre.

Thomas Nagel is a modern philosopher who has argued that the great evils of the 20th century, such as genocide, required extensive structural support from the societies in which they occurred. He believes that while a few individuals have the capacity to hurt other individuals, the capacity needed to deliver the amount of destructiveness found in the great evils of the 20th century requires extensive organizational structure. Individuals, such as Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Pol Pot, he noted may have been able to influence a whole society; however, they achieved this through manipulation of a wider social structure.

Claudia Card is another modern theorist who has defined structural evil as being intolerable harm which results from the normal operation of social structures.^[4] Her list of such institutions is controversial as it includes marriage and motherhood.

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