Making sense of evil in a secular age

Rashid, Tahir (2023) Making sense of evil in a secular age. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

For many people the concept and indeed utterance of the word ‘evil’ has a common-sense intelligibility. This is usually identified with an outdated worldview signified by the religious. Evil is therefore interpreted as a supernatural or spiritual force that causes suffering and is responsible for making the world unintelligible. What I hope to show during the course of this thesis is the intelligibility and meaning of evil is neither uncontested nor stable and has in fact undergone significant intellectual transformations. That is the intelligibility of evil is shaped as much by the experience of evil as the concepts and ideas we use to make evil intelligible. In this regard, evil in a secular age is also tied to the secularisation of evil that enunciates the intelligibility of evil through the absence of God. The secular age enshrines an expectation that evil can be comprehended naturalistically and anthropocentrically. Firstly, evil is intelligible through the utilisation of concepts derived through reason and experience. And secondly, the main agent for evil are human beings and as such is comprehensible through understanding moral freedom. However, recent criticism of the secularisation narrative and the philosophy of secularism more generally, also raises questions over the extent of secularisation of evil that is possible. Therefore, we are also interested in whether the division of reality into ‘religion’ and ‘secular’ leaves us short when trying to comprehend evil. In particular whether a purely secular conceptualisation of evil is one that always draws upon the religious to comprehend evil.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2023 Tahir Rashid
Library of Congress subject classification:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > B Philosophy (General) B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BJ Ethics B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BL Religion
Sets:	Departments > European Institute
Supervisor:	Glendinning, Simon and Ozyurek, Esra and Garibay Petersen, Cristobal
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4883

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