Rethinking Evil

This innovative volume will be welcomed by moral and political philosophers, social scientists, and anyone who reflects seriously on the twentieth century's heavy burden of war, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other evidence of people's desire to harm one another. María Pía Lara brings together a provocative set of essays that reexamine evil in the context of a "postmetaphysical" world, a world that no longer equates natural and human evil and no longer believes in an omnipotent God. The question of how and why God permits evil events to occur is replaced by the question of how and why humans perform radically evil acts.

María Pía Lara is Professor of Philosophy at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Iztapalapa, Mexico.

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Contemporary Perspectives 1 María Pía Lara

Part One: A Critical Review of Evil
1. Is God Evil? Isabel Cabrera
2. What's the Problem of Evil? Susan Neiman
3. "Radical Finitude" and the Problem of Evil: Critical Comments on Wellmer's Reading of Jonas Peter Dews

Part Two: Evil and Moral Philosophy
4. Radical Evil: Kant at War with Himself, Richard J. Bernstein
5. Reflections on the Banality of (Radical) Evil: A Kantian Analysis, Henry E. Allison
6. The Polyhedron of Evil, Gustavo Leyva
7. An Evil Heart: Moral Evil and Moral Identity, Maeve Cooke
8. Understanding Evil: Arendt and the Final Solution, Robert Fine

Part Three: Postmetaphysical Approaches for a Theory of Evil
9. Toward a Sociology of Evil: Getting beyond Modernist Common Sense about the Alternative to "the Good," Jeffrey C. Alexander
10. The Evil That Men Do: A Meditation on Radical Evil from a Postmetaphysical Point of View Alessandro Ferrara
11. Major Offenders, Minor Offenders, Sergio Pérez
12. On Pain, the Suffering of Wrong, and Other Grievances: Responsibility, Manuel Cruz
13. Forgiveness and Oblivion: A New Form of Banality of Evil?, Carlos Pereda

Part Four: Narratives of Evil
14. "Happy Endings" hrs/hrs Unendings: Narratives of Evil, Carol L. Bernstein
15. Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment, María Pía Lara

Notes
List of Contributors
Index