ABSTRACT
Rousseau’s interest in evil was – like his interest in most everything – practical rather than metaphysical. He wanted to understand where evil came from in order to understand how it could be overcome. He has little to offer to those interested in many of the formal questions that predominate in the academic literature on evil. He has little to contribute, for example, to those interested in distinguishing conceptually between evil and those lesser ills which might be described as bad or wrong but not as evil. He likewise was not preoccupied with identifying the necessary and/or sufficient conditions for evil action or evil character. Rousseau invoked evil (le mal) in its broad sense, and was little inclined to engage in the kind of specific questions of language that drive much of the contemporary philosophical inquiry into evil. Indeed, it was philosophers’ affinity for these kinds of questions that moved Rousseau to castigate philosophers for their preoccupation with “metaphysical quibbles and subtleties” (R, i:1018; viii:23). 1 Rousseau vowed instead to filter his inquiries through the lens of happiness. And when he finally agreed to write about moral and political questions – at the urging of his friend Denis Diderot and against his own professed better judgment – he did so on the grounds that he had finally encountered a question of urgent relevance to the problem of human happiness:
Here is one of the greatest and finest questions ever debated. This discourse is not concerned with those metaphysical subtleties that have prevailed in all parts of literature and from which the announcements of academic competitions are not always exempt; rather, it is concerned with one of those truths that pertain to human happiness.
(DAS, iii:6; ii:3)