Every act has a history, and the label marks the point where enquiry stopped

The argument

Proponents of this position argue that pure evil is not something found in the world but a verdict reached when explanation is given up. Wherever the circumstances of a terrible act have been examined closely, reasons have appeared: fear, grievance, humiliation, obedience to authority, a belief sincerely held and false, intoxication, an upbringing in which the conduct was ordinary, a mind working in ways the person did not choose and could not describe. The reasons are often squalid and never adequate, and they are reasons all the same. The argument is careful about what it is claiming. It is not that any of this excuses anything, and proponents of this position are usually as willing as anyone to hold people responsible. The issue is narrower: whether an act can be motiveless in the way the category requires. Every case examined in detail has yielded motives, however repellent, and proponents hold that a consistent record of finding them is a reason to expect them in cases not yet examined, rather than to conclude that those cases are of a different kind. They also offer an account of why the concept endures. It is consoling, because it places the worst conduct outside the human range and so outside what anyone present might have been capable of. It is simple, because it ends the enquiry at the moment the enquiry becomes uncomfortable. Proponents argue that both effects are costs rather than virtues, since understanding how ordinary people come to do terrible things is the only route to making it less likely, and a category that forecloses the question gets in the way of that.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Those who disagree reply that finding a motive is not the same as finding one that accounts for the act. A grievance explains resentment but not the decision to prolong a stranger's pain, and filling the gap with a sense of power or an enjoyment of suffering restates the thing to be explained rather than explaining it. They add that the argument's confidence rests on a promise about the unexamined cases, which assumes the conclusion it is offered to support.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Motives have been found, but finding a motive is not finding one that accounts for the act. A grievance explains resentment and not the decision to prolong a stranger's pain. [Rejecting P2] The expectation rests on a promise about cases not yet examined, which assumes the conclusion the premise is offered to support. [Rejecting P3] Where enquiry has stopped is sometimes where it has arrived. An agent who says plainly that they did it because they wanted to has supplied a motive, and the argument declines to accept the answer it was given. [Rejecting C] Recording the limit of an explanation and describing the act are not alternatives. The conclusion treats a claim about what was intended as though it were a claim about the state of research.