Abstract

Philosopher Claudia Card sets out a theory of evil providing us with a valuable tool for examining solitary confinement and the harms it produces. She proposes a middle path between Kantian-Stoicism and Utilitarianism as a way to understand atrocities and cites three cases to illustrate her theory of evil. These are horrors on a grand scale. She focuses on three categories: mass rape, domestic violence, and atrocities of oppression. She is particularly concerned when victims are used to enable the oppression, as in the Holocaust and slavery. I will argue that solitary confinement falls in the third (oppressive) category of evil. Card’s approach is useful for this analysis. We will start with an overview of her theory.