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Judith N. Shklar

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Political Scientist

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“Most of us may intuitively agree about right and wrong, but we also, and far more significantly, differ enormously in the ways in which we rank the virtues and the vices. ... To put cruelty first is to disregard the idea of sin as it is understood by revealed religion. Sins are transgressions of a divine rule and offenses against God; pride - the rejection of God - must always be the worst one, which gives rise to all the others. However, cruelty - the willful inflicting of physical pain on a weaker being in order to cause anguish and fear - is a wrong done entirely to another creature. When it is marked as the supreme evil it is judged so in and of itself, and not because it signifies a denial of God or any other higher norm. It is a judgment made from within the world in which cruelty occurs as part of our normal private life and our daily public practices. By putting it unconditionally first, with nothing above us to excuse or to forgive acts of cruelty, one closes off any appeal to any order other than that of actuality. To hate cruelty with utmost intensity is perfectly compatible with Biblical religiosity, but to put it first does place one irrevocably outside the sphere of revealed religion. For it is a purely human verdict upon human conduct, and so puts religion at a certain distance. The decision to put cruelty first is not, however, prompted merely by religious skepticism. It emerges, rather, from the recognition that the habits of the faithful do not differ from those of the faithless in their brutalities, and that Machiavelli had triumphed before he had ever written a line. To put cruelty first therefore is to be at odds not only with religion but with normal politics as well.”

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Book:Ordinary Vices
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“Perhaps the extent of divinely sanctioned cruelty made it impossible to think of human cruelty as a distinct and unmitigated evil. Certainly those Christians who came to doubt the literal accounts of physical torment in hell also worried about the cruelty and vindictiveness ascribed to God. By the eighteenth century these were very common concerns, especially in England, where secular humanitarianism had begun its extraordinary career. It was never to be without its enemies. Religious rigor, the theory of the survival of the fittest, revolutionary radicalism, military atavism, masculine athleticism, and other causes hostile to humanitarianism never abated. Nevertheless, taking cruelty seriously became and remained an important part of Europe's accepted morality, even in the midst of unlimited massacres. Putting cruelty first is, however, a matter very different from mere humanness. To hate cruelty more than any other evil involves a radical rejection of both religious and political conventions. It dooms one to a life of skepticism, indecision, disgust, and often misanthropy. Putting cruelty first has therefore been tried only rarely, and it is not often discussed. It is too deep a threat to reason for most philosophers to contemplate it at all.”

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Book:Ordinary Vices
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