Our Political Opponents Aren’t So Stupid or Monstrous After All
Jim Sias in his office in East College, home of the Department of Philosophy. Photo by Dan Loh.
Office Hours: Associate Professor of Philosophy Jim Sias
by Tony Moore
Associate Professor of Philosophy Jim Sias earned his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. In his first book, The Meaning of Evil, he examines the psychologies of people commonly regarded as evil. His ongoing research focuses primarily on the significance of mental illness in and to the moral community, with a current emphasis on schizophrenia and psychosis.
Philosophy has a reputation as the discipline that asks questions nobody can answer—which, to be fair, is part (all?) of the appeal. But you work at the intersection of ethics and moral psychology, where the questions feel pretty urgent right now. What does a Dickinson philosophy education give students that they might not get somewhere else?
I’m generally optimistic that these questions do have answers, and that an appropriately careful, critical and intellectually humble seeker can find them. Questions in ethics and moral psychology may seem unanswerable because people expect (or maybe just hope) the answers to breed consensus, as is typical in other fields, or because the people pretending to seek answers to these questions are ultimately only interested in confirming beliefs they already hold.
Seeking answers to difficult questions requires that you first understand how to ask the questions well, and our department does an exceptional job training students to do this. From there, it helps to familiarize yourself with important and influential answers in historical and contemporary work. And for a relatively small department—only five full-time members—I think we’re nonetheless able to offer an unusually large and diverse curriculum in philosophy, from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge interdisciplinary work connecting philosophy with neuroscience, psychology, religion and even data analytics. We’re also one of very few liberal-arts colleges to offer a standalone minor in ethics, which students at Dickinson can pair with any major.
We live in an era when people seem more certain than ever about who's good (themselves) and who's evil (everyone else), and less capable than ever of explaining why. (Maybe not less capable, but definitely less capable of taking a long look in the mirror every now and then and understanding that there’s a slim chance that they’re wrong.) Is that a crisis for moral philosophy, or is it basically a golden age of job security?
It sure seems to be a crisis for politics, and maybe also for those conscientious and open-minded folks who enjoy ideological diversity in their social circles. But this is precisely why the study of moral psychology is so important! In PHIL 257: Moral Psychology, we look into the neurobiology and psychology of moral judgment—where do our moral beliefs come from?—and use this as a springboard into the study of the psychological differences between liberals and conservatives. As it turns out, our political opponents aren’t so stupid or monstrous after all, even if they do process moral information differently.
We also study the psychology of moral character and learn (perhaps uncomfortably) that people’s behaviors may not be as indicative of moral virtue or vice as we’d sometimes like to think. And in PHIL 261: Evil, at several junctures and in different ways, we’re reminded that a capacity for evil probably exists to some degree in all of us. I think moral psychology is the most effective antidote to this “I’m good/they’re bad” divisiveness.
You wrote an entire book about evil. Not wrongdoing, not bad behavior—evil, specifically. At what point in your career did you think, "Yeah, I'm going to be the evil guy," and what convinced you the concept deserved that kind of serious treatment?
I was teaching a course in moral psychology, and we were preparing to start a unit on the moral judgment of psychopaths. So, as a kind of discussion starter, I ended a class meeting by having the students write their answers to these questions: “Can a person be genuinely morally evil? If no, why not? And if yes, what would it take for someone to count as genuinely morally evil?”
All but two of the students in the class answered that there is no such thing as an evil person. And of the two who answered that there can be a genuinely evil person, one set the bar so high for counting as evil that I’m not sure even paradigm figures—like Hitler, Stalin or Bundy—would count. I thought this was stunning. And when I told my colleague, [Professor of Philosophy] Chauncey Maher, his first words were, “You should write a book about this.” So I did.
I never considered writing a book about evil prior to this, but almost immediately, it made sense. I’d spent a lot of time researching moral judgment and moral character in highly interdisciplinary ways. And for the most part, the book is just an application of this research to the topic of evil.
Check out more faculty stories.
TAKE THE NEXT STEPS
Published July 14, 2026