If we accept Aristotle’s premise that human beings are essentially social animals, then what are we to make of subjective experience? Suffering and pain, both physical and spiritual, are experienced subjectively, by individuals, so the problem of evil in its natural and moral aspects would appear to be nonsocial. And yet evil in both its forms is indeed as social as the phenomenon of language. We cannot feel the suffering of others, but we can imagine it, for the imagination—the capacity to make present to the mind what is absent–is the mental faculty that enables us to be moral beings in the first place. Those human beings who lack a moral imagination, whether genetically as psychopaths, or through severe abuse or deprivation, as sociopaths, are the exceptions that prove the rule. As essentially social beings, we are parts of a whole—the homo sapiens species—and as a toothache disturbs not merely the tooth or the mouth but the entire body, so we can feel vicariously through our imagination the psychic or bodily pain of any human of which we are conscious. That we can do this, however, does not mean that we always do so. As social beings our moral capacity is inherent, but it must be nurtured and developed, and that is the educative job of the culture of our particular society, what the ancient Greeks called paideia. As individuals we tend to become what we behold, for we learn how to behave in society through imitating the behavior of the mature members, the elders. When the elders provide consistent images of moral virtue tempered by wisdom and experience, the young are “socialized” to become moral beings. If a society becomes dominated by elders whose primary desire is, like the Serpent’s apparent desire in the Garden of Eden, for power rather than justice, then the images they provide for imitation will tend to the degradation of the harmonious order (the Greek word for which is kosmos) that is the proper end of any society.
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