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 evil is, 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 many of…show more content… Evidently many of us would be affected by the horrendous act committed against these children, but this leads to Stumps to question how would Hallie know that what these doctors were doing was evil. Stump believes that the only way that Hallie would have known that this was evil is from an intuition unaffected by memory, reason or perception. 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 good. To furthermore back the idea of intuition Stump uses the example of prosopagnosia in which a person's memory, reason, and perception function completely fine, but they cannot simple ideas, such as a face, without prior knowledge or clues that would allow them to know who this person was (Stump 1994). She claims that this proves that we have cognitive functions that we rely without questioning. For Stump this applies to how we do not know much about what exactly evil is, but that there is something that allows to recognize what evil is which is our intuition. The problem that I see is that if everyone has an intuition that is unaffected by our memories, perception and reason how would a person be able to commit a horrendous crime and be okay with it. I…show more content… She believes that our intuition takes over to tell us what evil is because our reason, memory, and perception can only answer what evil is to a certain extent. I have proven in this paper that the idea that the perception of evil cannot be based solely on the fact that we have an underlying intuition. In the case of real wickedness we are presented with a sharp feeling that immediately hits us and we know that what has just been committed is evil, but when there is a person that is committing the evil where is this intuition that would tell the person that what they are doing is wrong. After we have been confronted with this real wickedness and are given the opportunity to reflect on what has happened, our reasons, memories and perception help give the person a concrete answer as to why what they just experienced was evil. There are many instances in which people differ on what could is the highest level of evil to them because our intuition is not the only factor that decides what is evil to them. In the arguments that I have provided in this essay, it is evident that the idea that Stump presented on our intuition is the main factor on determining how we know what evil is, is
