The Genetics of Evil
A compilation of the 50 most evil villains in literature by the UK’s newspaper, The Telegraph, listed the devil at the number one position on its list. The number two position was given to a fictional rat. Samuel Whiskers, from Beatrix Potter’s story, The Tale Of Samuel Whiskers, is certainly a bad fellow. He steals from the house in which he lives, and tries to make Tom Kitten into a dumpling:
But determining whether Samuel Whiskers is truly evil is difficult. According to most Western traditions, evil is the absence of good, and doesn’t have an independent identity. Other traditions, such as Buddhism, in which evil is an intrinsic element of existence, or Zoroastrianism and Star Wars, in which good and evil are opposing forces, have different definitions. Even if we stick with Western definitions, the question of Samuel Whiskers still is not clear. According to Thomas Aquinas, evil is the absence of goodness which should be found in our nature. A rat, which is an omnivore, may be acting in accord with its nature when it tries to eat a kitten (Tom Kitten survives, by the way, and learns to avoid rats in the future), and thus is not really evil. At best we could say that he seems to be participating in a metaphysical evil, in that nature can seem cruel and evil. As Woody Allen said, “To me, nature is… I dunno, spiders and bugs and big fish eating little fish. And plants eating plants and animals eating…It’s like an enormous restaurant.”
A well fed rat may not be evil per se, but cooking a live kitten in a dumpling probably is.
So let’s suppose that Tom Kitten and Samuel Whiskers are both people, or at least, sentient beings, and judging by their clothing (Tom Kitten had a nice blue jacket before being covered in dough), that is a reasonable assumption. In this case, most would agree that Samuel Whiskers was performing a moral evil by going against our accepted moral order. Sentient beings don’t cook each other for their puddings. Furthermore, Aquinas also suggests that as our world is not in itself bad, evil must exist within our actions, not in the effect. In this case, a well fed rat (the result of eating Tom Kitten) is not an evil thing, per se. Rats deserve to be fed. However, rolling a live kitten into a dumpling is evil.
Why Samuel Whiskers is evil is an even more difficult question than determining if he is evil. All rodents are not bad to Beatrix Potter, as her Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse clearly attests. Therefore the problem must be something specific to Samuel. Still following Aquinas, the root cause of evil is our free will, we have been given the freedom to make bad choices, and we frequently do so. Aquinas states that maybe sometimes the temptation to transgress can come from that villain at the number one slot on The Telegraph’s list (Satan), but often not, it’s just our choice. Current thinking, which largely discounts a role of Satan in clinical psychology, specifically posits social and economic factors as main factors in prompting our transgressions. Additionally, since the 1960’s a genetic cause for moral evilness has also been a contested but active area of research.