Some acts are done for the sake of the suffering, and that is a distinct kind of act

The argument

Proponents of this position take the definition the question supplies and argue that acts answering to it occur. The definition is an act that causes suffering and is performed for the sake of causing it. The cases proponents point to are those in which cruelty continues after whatever goal it might have served has been secured, in which harm is done to someone who could not possibly have threatened or obstructed the person doing it, and in which pain is prolonged for no reason that can be given except that prolonging it was the object. The claim is that this is a difference in kind rather than in degree. An act done for gain, out of fear, in rage, or in obedience to a belief however false is intelligible in terms the agent could state: there is something they were after, and the suffering was the route to it. When the suffering is itself the destination, that chain stops at the suffering, and proponents hold this to be a different structure rather than a worse instance of the same one. Severity is not what the category tracks. Proponents add that ordinary moral vocabulary already marks the distinction. People distinguish between someone who hurt them in order to get something and someone who hurt them because hurting them was enjoyable, and they respond to the two quite differently: the first invites negotiation, restitution and sometimes understanding, and the second invites none of these. If the distinction is firm enough to govern how people deal with one another, proponents conclude, it is firm enough to be named, and pure evil is the name it has long had.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Opponents reply that the examples are cases in which the further end is unknown rather than absent. Cruelty prolonged past its apparent purpose typically serves something: a sense of power, a grievance, the approval of a group, a pleasure with its own history. They add that the argument moves from an inability to explain to the claim that there is nothing to explain, and that the whole record of understanding why people do terrible things runs in the other direction.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The definition is stipulated at the outset and then does the work of the argument. Whether any act answers to it is the question at issue, and sharpening the term does not show that it applies to anything. [Rejecting P2] The examples are cases in which the further end is unknown rather than shown to be absent. Cruelty continued past its apparent purpose typically serves a sense of power, a grievance, or a pleasure with its own history. [Rejecting P3] Intelligible in terms the agent could state is too demanding a test for ordinary motives and too generous to the contrast. Few people can state why they did what they did, which does not place their acts outside explanation. [Rejecting C] A distinct category is inferred from a gap in what is known about certain acts, which is a fact about the observer rather than about the structure of the act.