The nature of evil

Simon Baron-Cohen has spent 30 years researching the way our brains work. His study of autism led to The Essential Difference, which asked, ‘Are you an empathiser or a systemiser?’ The book was highly influential; its ‘male-brain’ and ‘female-brain’ definitions have entered common parlance. In Zero Degrees of Empathy he aims to move examination of the nature of evil ‘out of the realm of religion and into the realm of science.’ Will this project also prove persuasive?

‘Extremes of evil are typically relegated to the unanalysable,’ he says, but they shouldn’t be. Evil, he believes, is best understood as absence of empathy. We are all situated at some point on a bell-curve of empathy. Those at zero degrees are people who can treat another human being as merely an object — those who cut off a living finger to steal a ring, kill a stranger with a broken bottle, turn a Jew into a lampshade. Those at zero degrees fall into subgroups: psychopaths, narcissists, and people with ‘borderline personality disorder’.

Baron-Cohen writes convincingly about the ‘internal pot of gold’ provided by loving, attentive parents in our early years, that stock of positive emotions that allows us sufficient emotional resilience to extend sympathy and generosity to others. Adversity cannot, he says, completely destroy the wellbeing of the securely attached child. He calls empathy our most precious resource. Emotional abuse and neglect warp the structural development of infant brains; ‘evil’ people are made, as well as born.

But what of those who show ‘zero degrees of empathy’ yet remain harmless? Baron-Cohen is deservedly famous as a champion of autistic specialness; he refuses to see autism simply as a bundle of ‘deficits’. In this book he sections autists off from psychopaths, ‘borderlines’ and narcissists, calling them ‘zero-positive’.