Confronting evil, embracing life
The manhunt for a bombing suspect shut down the Boston area on Friday. With Harvard temporarily closed, a pair of two-day scholarly conferences had to be compressed into Saturday alone. But by chance, both provided perspective on the area’s brush with terror. “Confronting Evil: Interdisciplinary Perspectives,” sponsored by the Mahindra Humanities Center, was about the rhetoric and psychology of evil, what it is like to witness it, and how society should respond to it. Scheduled months ago, the conference of international scholars at Emerson Hall — interrupted by real-life terror — acquired a sudden, local immediacy. During the morning, in a presentation about the cognitive neuroscience of morality, behavioral psychologist Joshua Greene, Harvard’s John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, referred to what can seem like “the badness of others and the goodness of us.” In the afternoon, Jacqueline Bhabha, University adviser on human rights, introduced a panel on witnessing...