The problem of giving in to evil

Actively resisting evil is vital - and has been, well before Edmund Burke wrote what is generally now written along the lines of "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing". 

Since then others have written about the necessity of resisting evil, and massive acts of evil have shown what happens when we don't - World War Two  and the  Holocaust  are particularly egregious examples. 

Timothy  Snyder’s book ”On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” (pub. Vintage Publishing, 2017, ISBN 978-1847924889 [Amazon] ), and  Samantha  Power in her masterful book "A Problem from Hell" (Pub. Harper, 2010, ISBN 978-0007172993, Amazon) provide information on how we can fail to resist evil, and I’ve also touched on this topic here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Resisting evil is never easy: often we are so uncomfortable at what we are addressing that we wish it would all go away - a reaction perhaps clearest for most people if they think of the dread of having to help at a traffic accident, and the wish that it hadn’t happened where and when it would involve them. Resisting evil also requires us to make a clear commitment to its opposite - we cannot hide behind vagueness. 

Here in my home state, as with many other parts of the world, violent right wing extremism is raising its ugliness again (e.g., this), and we have decisions to make about how we will resist (there is no "if", if we wish to remain moral beings).

However, there is another aspect of resisting evil that I wish to touch on here: taking the easy way of persuading the evil to stand down by placating it. (This also crops up in the justice vs. "pragmatism" debate on how to deal with international despots - i.e., the "take them to court" view vs. "let's just get them out of the way" crew, who ignore the ongoing damage to victims of wrongdoing that has not been brought to justice [Geoffrey Robertson is very eloquent on this in several  of  his  books.)

That does not confront evil: it allows the evil to continue and fester, so that, like a fire that hasn’t been put out properly, it can flare up again later, taking advantage of our slackness. 

What prompted this article today was finding out that the UK’s abolition of slavery, which was based on moral horror and noble rhetoric, included compensating the evil doers. 

There is a massive cognitive dissonance in that: ban something on the basis that it is so obviously evil it should not be, and yet then undermine that by patting slavers on the hand and saying "there, there, its all too hard - don’t worry, we’ll pay you off for your losses". 

And the payment was so severe that the UK only finished paying it off a few years ago! 

You can read about this appalling sop to evil here, here, here, and here.

This is not a past problem: there are people who are proposing that coal mine owners, who have been ignoring evidence of the damage they are doing for decades (centuries, actually) to choose to continue their harm, be compensated. 

I understand the legal principles involved in that, and it may well be that compensation is compelled, but if so, that should come with such blistering criticism that no-one wants to be associated with the opprobrium of accepting that blood money. 

Perhaps closer to home are the decisions we each make everyday - decisions that can contribute to a moral soup of "turn a blind eye'-itis, or to a fierce and energetic atmosphere of care and responsibility, something dedicated to seeing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights achieved everywhere, for every sentient being.