The Nature of Evil

'Evil' is a powerful term. It has been applied to everything from windstorms to serial killers to the unreflective actions of bureaucratic systems. In this course, students will explore challenging content and themes including theories, psychology, and key historical instances of evil to better understand the idea of evil. We draw on TED talks, stories, reports, articles, future challenges, and students' discussions to build a greater understanding of this complex and challenging concept. Students will follow nuanced logical arguments, explore both complex psychological cases and convoluted organizational structures, write several short evaluative reflections on course themes, and deliver a comparative analysis group presentation. By the end of the course, students will have traced key definitions of, and approaches to 'evil'.