A COMMENT ON ADAMS AND BALFOUR: DIGNITY VIOLATIONS,AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW OF ‘ADMINISTRATIVE EVIL’

The major focus of Adams and Balfour’s article in this volume is on what they call ‘administrative evil’ where ‘evil’ is not intended but somehow inherent in modern ‘technical rationality’. Adams and Balfour draw inspiration from Bauman’s (1989) work and, further, use the interesting metaphor that administrative evil is ‘masked’. This means it is difficult to recognize – unlike intentional evil which is ‘unmasked’, that is, readily recognized. Common to both forms is that ‘evil’ implies ‘depriving of humanity’ or to ‘make someone suffer’, and there is no reason to question this. A basic aim of the article is thus to draw attention to ‘masked evil’, phenomena Adams and Balfour believe are insufficiently attended to. There is a broad variety of problems which Adams and Balfour do not touch on but which more or less appropriately can be subsumed under the label ‘masked evil’. Adams and Balfour mention a continuum according to degree of deliberation on consequences. There are, however, no examples given of acts which do not occur at any extreme of deliberation. A related point is that there are historical and cultural determinants of whether (and to what extent) we regard some forms of suffering as ‘evil’ or not.