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“Evil,” Professor Baumeister tells us, “is socially enacted and constructed. It does not reside in our genes or in our soul, but in the way we relate to other people” (p. 375).
What precisely is the evil to which Baumeister is referring? It is difficult to say, the author has a self-admitted proclivity (p. 7) to eschew precise definitions of the concepts he uses in this book; claiming only philosophers, not social scientists, require careful definitions of the terms they use. As a result, the author employs many of his terms in general and useless ways. For example, the behaviors he cites at one point or another as instances of evil, include not only the most horrific of actions against humanity, but also, just about everything that is wrong, annoying, and uncivil in daily life.
But, then, even the most vile of human experiences is only arbitrarily evil, according to one of the author's cardinal notions, because, he claims, evil is only in the eyes of the victim. No perpetrator, Baumeister argues, regards himself as evil. How can this be true? Those who are familiar with the incriminating statements of Jeffrey Dahmer, several of the defendants in the Nuremberg Trials, and many others accused of malevolent behavior may ask. Baumeister replies: Evil is usually simply a question of economics—someone acting in a way that he believes is to his advantage, with someone else getting harmed as a by-product of the perpetrator's opportunist behavior.
The author reports that he gained his ideas from reading a number of books and research reports about violent people. The absurdity of his instrumental notion that morality is always self-serving, and moral rectitude an anomaly among evildoers, therefore, is not a product of the author's direct knowledge of malevolent people.