Berkley Center

Michael Gillespie, professor of Political Science at Duke University, presented the paper "Where Did All the Evils Go?" at the Georgetown Political Theory Colloquium. Gillespie pointed to the intense debate surrounding Hitler as exemplary of the broader debate surrounding humanity's ability to identify, categorize, and constrain evil--if it even exists. He argued that the modern ambiguity of evil stems from the theological and moral transformation of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. Gillespie then explored the scholastic idea of evil, the notion of divine indifference, humanist individualism, Manicheanism in the Reformation, and the pursuit of goods. He closed by suggesting that a view of human free will which acknowledges the capacity for both good and evil is the most helpful for understanding the source of "everyday" evils, as well as the "radical" evil of Hitler.