"The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding"
About this Quote
Camus lobs a cold splash of water on the comforting story that the world is divided into villains and heroes. The line doesn’t flatter “good people”; it indicts them. Evil, he argues, is often less a satanic impulse than a failure of perception: not knowing, not seeing, not wanting to know. That’s a brutal downgrade of moral drama into epistemology, and it’s exactly the point. If harm is frequently born from ignorance, then righteousness becomes dangerous when it’s confident and incurious.
The sharpest move is pairing “good intentions” with “malevolence” as equal-risk forces. Camus isn’t excusing cruelty; he’s attacking the moral alibi that intention provides. A person can mean well and still bulldoze others, because intent doesn’t automatically include comprehension of consequences, power, or complexity. The subtext is political as much as personal: grand projects, reforms, revolutions, “civilizing” missions, even technocratic fixes can become machines for suffering when they treat humans as abstractions and mistakes as acceptable collateral.
Contextually, Camus is writing in the shadow of the 20th century’s ideological slaughters, when utopian certainty and bureaucratic distance made killing feel like administration. As a thinker of the absurd and a critic of totalizing ideologies, he’s wary of any morality that doesn’t begin with limits: humility about what we know, and restraint about what we’re willing to do in the name of the good. The sentence works because it turns ethics into a demand for understanding, not a badge of purity.
The sharpest move is pairing “good intentions” with “malevolence” as equal-risk forces. Camus isn’t excusing cruelty; he’s attacking the moral alibi that intention provides. A person can mean well and still bulldoze others, because intent doesn’t automatically include comprehension of consequences, power, or complexity. The subtext is political as much as personal: grand projects, reforms, revolutions, “civilizing” missions, even technocratic fixes can become machines for suffering when they treat humans as abstractions and mistakes as acceptable collateral.
Contextually, Camus is writing in the shadow of the 20th century’s ideological slaughters, when utopian certainty and bureaucratic distance made killing feel like administration. As a thinker of the absurd and a critic of totalizing ideologies, he’s wary of any morality that doesn’t begin with limits: humility about what we know, and restraint about what we’re willing to do in the name of the good. The sentence works because it turns ethics into a demand for understanding, not a badge of purity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
|---|
More Quotes by Albert
Add to List
