TO TRY to understand the moral pathology of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who imprisoned and sexually enslaved his daughter for 24 years, is a deeply disagreeable task, and not one that can be done properly in a short format like this. Nevertheless, here are some preliminaries to the discussion that will inevitably occur about the nature of the moral enormity we call evil, and its lurking presence in human nature.
By “evil” one usually means a very great degree of wrong. It is a moral state that is consciously chosen, not the blind outcome of inadvertence or mental illness which deprives the perpetrator of agency. In this sense, the word “evil”…
