In Eleonore Stump’s “Mirror of Evil”, she presents how the evil in the world acts as a mirror by telling us things about ourselves. Stump discerns between two types of evil that are found in the world, which are real wickedness and garden-variety moral evil. “Real wickedness” is explained as sharp and felt immediately, while “garden variety” evil is felt much less than this. For Stump all of us have a way to determine what is evil or not, and this is our moral faculty. Moral faculty allows us to know what evil is but also what true goodness is. Our moral faculty states that we know things are evil or truly good solely on our intuition, which is unaffected by our memory, reason or perception. Stump presents many good reasons to believe that …show more content…
She discusses that evil is something that has been around for many years and there is not one single part of this earth that is free of evil. To Stump, this evil presents us with a mirror that provides us the ability to reflect what is going on in our world and ultimately, showing us who we are. There are three different ways that Stump presents regarding how we react to evil which are, hiding away from it, focusing solely on this evil, and laboring at obliviousness (Stump 1994). She also presents the idea that there are people in the world that believe that there are ways to eliminate evil as a whole, these people can be known as Global Reformers and Good Samaritans (Powerpoint). Global Reformers work to remove the human defects found in the world, Stump is wary of these people, and then Good Samaritans that do what they can to help those in need. These are some of the few ways that Stump has pointed out on how people take evil in many different ways. A specific example of how evil can affect a person is presented with Phillip Hallie, he struggled with the inability to look away from the mirror of evil when studying the torture of Nazi doctors on Jewish Children. Evidently many of us would be affected by the horrendous act committed against these children but this leads to Stumps point on how do we know that this what these doctors are doing is evil. This all ties back to the idea of our moral faculty, which is the idea that our intuition is what is our main source of differentiating between evil and