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Earthquakes, viruses, chimpanzees, and some children often cause excessive harm to innocent
others, at least if the focus is on numbers and the way in which death arises. The earthquake that reached
a magnitude of 7.0 on the Richter scale and demolished the capital of Haiti in 2010 took the lives of
approximately 200,000 people, all innocent and undeserving of this natural disaster. This is excess
beyond what any psychopath has ever achieved. The Spanish Flu found its way into the bodies of
innocent people from the Arctic to the Pacific Islands from 1918 to 1920, and killed over 50 million
people — a death toll that is at least four times higher than what Hitler caused during his reign, and
comparable to that achieved by Mao Ze-Dong during his. As noted in chapter 1, chimpanzees kill at a
rate that approximates many hunter-gatherer groups. When they kill, the frenzied attacks are over the top,
involving gruesome dismemberment of their victims by biting into the face, ripping off testicles and
dislocating limbs. By the age of 15 years, Willie James Bosket Jr had committed some 200 armed
robberies, stabbed 25 innocent victims, kicked a boy off of a roof to his death, and killed two men
following a failed robbery, all “for the experience.” At the level of outcomes, these are all horrific cases
of lives lost, with some excessive in terms of numbers and others in terms of means.
We can eliminate earthquakes and other natural disasters from the list of evildoers by noting that
they don’t have, as their goal or as a foreseen consequence, the elimination of lives, innocent or not. They
don’t have goals at all. This also eliminates them from the class of victims, assuming the day comes when
scientists can kill off earthquakes, cyclones, hurricanes, blizzards and so on before they pick up enough
steam to cause great harm. One might think that viruses, and their virulent partners the parasites, lack
goals because they lack brains. This intuition is correct anatomically, but incorrect conceptually. As the
American philosopher Daniel Dennett has noted, the beauty of Darwin’s theory of natural selection is that
it provided a way of giving nature competence without comprehension. Thus, viruses and parasites have
goals without understanding at all. To survive and reproduce, they have evolved exquisite chemical and
electrical machines that harvest all of their host’s resources. And if making a living requires killing the
host, so be it. They do so without shedding a tear. No guilt, no remorse. Chimpanzees, on the other hand,
have goals and brains that represent them. When chimpanzees kill, their goal is not food. Their brutal
attacks are motivated by a desire to outcompete their rivals and absorb additional resources; no one
knows if they feel guilt or remorse. Willie Bosket’s goal was to rob two men, but when he failed, he
turned to gratuitous violence, for the experience. Bosket certainly could, as a human, feel guilt and
remorse, but all reports indicate he didn’t.
We can eliminate parasites and viruses from the list of evildoers and evilreceivers by noting that
they lack an understanding of right and wrong, and are incapable of suffering. Chimpanzees are a harder
case. They live in societies with norms and respond aggressively to norm transgressions, as occurs when a
high ranking male beats a lower ranking male for trying to steal food or a mating opportunity.
Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 87
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