Why We Need the Word Evil - Jean Bethke Elshtain

"If we lose our ability to name it, we've lost a great deal"

Jean Bethke Elshtain, a political philosopher, is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at The University of Chicago.
She grew up in the small village of Timnath, Colorado (population 185). She received her Ph.D. from Brandeis University in Politics in 1973. She joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts/Amherst where she taught from 1973 to 1988. She joined the faculty of Vanderbilt University in 1988 as the first woman to hold an endowed professorship in the history of that institution. She was appointed to her current position at the University of Chicago in 1995. She has been a visiting professor at Oberlin College, Yale University, and Harvard University. She is the recipient of nine honorary degrees. Professor Elshtain was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996. She has published 13 books among them, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (1981); Women and War (1987); Just War Theory (1991); Democracy on Trial (1993), a CBC Massey Lecture ; Just War against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (2003); Sovereignty: God, State, Self (2008) (Recorded on November 05, 2008)

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[lou123654]

would you call abu graib and guantanamo as Evil, miss JB ?

[FAHayek89]

@walrusboyv2 Yet she never said that all things must be reduced to a binary existence of good and evil. She did not say that no shades of gray exist, but that some things are sufficiently evil to be called so. The gray may in some cases be dark enough to fade into a real black. We may notice discrepancies, but still call the project in Dachow, as a whole, evil.

[walrusboyv2]

It has disappeared from academic corridors because, as human history has progressed, people who actually think, instead of regurgitate their predecessors rhetoric, have noticed countless discrepancies in a binary analysis of the existence. To reduce your so called "creation" down to a pair of words like "good" and "evil" not only undersells the beauty and complexity of said "creation," but it exposes a well educated and free-thinking society to all sorts of civil and social ills.

[FluffyMittensFilms]

I love this lecture by Jean Bethke Elshtain! What a brilliant woman! We need more from her!

[xaymaca2020]

I love this series.;