TO TRY to understand the moral pathology of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who imprisoned and sexually enslaved his daughter for 24 years, is a deeply disagreeable task, and not one that can be done properly in a short format like this. Nevertheless, here are some preliminaries to the discussion that will inevitably occur about the nature of the moral enormity we call evil, and its lurking presence in human nature.
By 鈥渆vil鈥� one usually means a very great degree of wrong. It is a moral state that is consciously chosen, not the blind outcome of inadvertence or mental illness which deprives the perpetrator of agency. In this sense, the word 鈥渆vil鈥� correctly describes both Fritzl and what he did.
But in another sense, the word is insufficient to give us a grip on where a person like Fritzl really belongs on the moral scale of things. Describing someone as evil can be a distraction; too often it ends the conversation instead of opening a fuller exploration of what it actually involves.
Advertisement
鈥淭he word 鈥榚vil鈥� is insufficient to give us a grip on Fritzl鈥檚 place on the moral scale鈥�
The Fritzl case belongs in the realm of moral pathology occupied by the likes of the British couple Frederick and Rosemary West, who sexually abused and murdered their own daughter and many other girls, burying the bodies at their property in Gloucester. If we are to learn anything from such cases, this degree of evil requires a more accurate description.
Contemplate what must have passed through Fritzl鈥檚 mind as he spent years planning and building his dungeon, before imprisoning his 18-year-old daughter there and ignoring or enduring her agonies as prisoner and victim. He went on to deal with the births of seven children, inventing stories for those he brought into the light and raised in his seemingly normal upstairs life. All this threatens to overwhelm one鈥檚 imagination, not least because the hideousness of it involves such a calculating and conscious disjunction between the outer and inner nature of this man鈥檚 life.
I think a term that better describes people like the Wests and Fritzl is 鈥渕oral insanity鈥�. By this I do not mean insanity in the standard sense of psychosis or mania. Fritzl is no madman, and if he escapes the law鈥檚 sanctions by claiming to be one it would be a travesty. He is not mad because his carefully planned actions 鈥� and their successful continuance over so many years 鈥� reveal the aware intelligence of sanity, yet without a trace of moral scruple.
Moral insanity is the refusal to act according to important moral dictates that the agent fully understands. If Fritzl was not aware that what he was doing was wrong, he would not have taken such elaborate steps to conceal it. If he did not have considerable powers of logic and foresight, he would neither have been able to plan his crime so well nor sustain it so long. He is an example of the clear-minded rejection, by choice and intention, of the premises of moral normality.
Sadly, although the enormity of Fritzl鈥檚 crime is almost beyond comprehension, this case is not as special as we might like to think. In the Congo right now, women and children are being systematically raped. At Auschwitz-Birkenau today, tourists are gazing at the piles of hair and spectacles collected from Holocaust victims. Moral insanity in just this sense runs through humanity like a stain.
If there is a crumb of comfort anywhere it is that we are appalled by Fritzl. That is a big change from just a few centuries ago, when fairly similar behaviour on the part of slave-owners or conquering soldiers and the like was regarded as acceptable. Our degree of outrage is a measure of how far we have come in attitudes to that stain of moral insanity: it says that we are no longer prepared to accept it as ineradicable.