Wickedness

Today I have been haunted by this article, about a dog who was tied to the back of a Porsche and dragged along the road until dead.

The beagle collie cross died of terrible injuries after being pulled at speeds of up to 70mph along the A27 close to Brighton, East Sussex.

Its mangled body was eventually dumped in a lay-by and the brutal motorist drove off.

Officers found the battered corpse behind a Tesco store in Brighton, East Sussex, late on Sunday night.

Detectives believe the vile episode was deliberate.

The alarm was raised at 10pm on Sunday night, when a bystander dialled 999 after seeing the black Porsche 911 Carrera towing the terrified beagle through a car park at Devil's Dyke beauty spot.

Half an hour later, police received another call to say the driver was heading along a nearby dual carriageway, with the dog, now clearly dead, still attached to the car.

Yes, the article was found on the Daily Mail website, and yes, the Daily Mail have a shonky reputation when it comes to journalistic integrity. A quick search (via everyclick.com) brought up the story on several other news sites, including the Huffington Post. Comments in response are unsurprising and fairly contiguous across the board (but I guess we have to factor in the type of person who clicks on an article like that in the first place).

This is one of the most evil things I have heard of. But labelling something as evil tends to put a preemptive stop to any further examination. So, I have to ask myself, is it possible for me to understand the motivation of someone who would do this?  Some people have a lot of empathy for nonhumans, some have very little, and most are somewhere in the middle. For whatever reason, I feel pain when I hear about the pain of other beings, particularly vulnerable ones. On an imaginary sliding empathy scale, I am close to one end of it, where most people might be somewhere in the middle. I think that being right at either end of the scale would be deeply debilitating. For those who empathise with every creature’s pain; well, we are psychologically not set up to feel everybody’s anguish as deeply as we feel our own, we simply wouldn’t be able to function. If I was right at that end, I would probably live under my desk, pressing my face into the wall and making gurgling noises. Then there are those for whom the only meaningful pain is their own; other beings (including other humans) don’t feel pain, or if they do, it is irrelevant.

Does this make these people evil? Not necessarily. There are a lot of sociopaths out there who seem to get along fine, or fine-ish. There is a difference, however, between not empthasing with others, and actively enjoying their misery and hurt. I have a feeling that the person who did this heinous thing was not actually getting his kicks from the pain of the dog; he was trying to hurt the person, or people, who loved the dog. The people who torture and kill animals for the pleasure of it do it mainly in private, secret, insidious ways. This was a public broadcast. This was a human who wanted to hurt a human, and the best way to do that was through the torture of a dog, whose interests were entirely irrelevant.

In Wickedness, Mary Midgley (1984) asks us to think of evil not as a positive, but as a negative. Not as something extra that people have, but as something that they lack.

However great may be the force of the external pressures on people, we still need to understand the way in which those people respond to the pressures. Infection can bring on fever, but only in creatures with a suitable circulatory system. Like fever, spite, resentment, envy, avarice, cruelty, meanness, hatred and the rest are themselves complex states, and they produce complex activities. Outside events may indeed bring them on, but, like other malfunctions, they would not develop if we were not prone to them. Simpler, non-social creatures are not capable of these responses and do not show them. Neither do some defective humans. Emotionally, we are capable of these vices, because we are capable of states opposite to them, namely the virtues, and these virtues would be unreal if they did not have an opposite alternative. The vices are the defects of our qualities. Our nature provides for both. If it did not, we should not be free.

Last month Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature was published. In it, Pinker argues (apparently extremely convincingly) that human beings are less violent now than at any other time in our history. From what I understand, Pinker’s facts come only from the analysis of human-on-human violence and I suspect that human-on-animal violence would, through sheer numbers, tell the opposite story. But surely it gives us somewhere to start...