We now see all over the world examples of social groups and individuals attempting to do what they have worked out is the right thing in the abstract, and hence doing it for the wrong reason – with catastrophic results. In the words of Sartre, ‘evil is the systematic substitution of the abstract for the concrete’.92 From atheistic totalitarian regimes to religious extremists to ‘social justice warriors’, the perpetrators of callous crimes comfort themselves that they are acting out of noble motives, but are blind to their own inhumanity.
