Part one of a three-part series from Ordered Empathy — a Thomistic framework for empathy that doesn’t collapse into either therapy-speak or cruelty.
Ordinary people commit terrible acts using ordinary motives. Here is the mechanism — and why the thing everyone assumes will stop them doesn’t.
Every time one of these stories surfaces — a mother, her own children, an act nobody can look at directly — the same sentence appears underneath it.
“I can’t imagine doing that. I don’t believe most mothers can either.”
It’s an honest sentence, and the person saying it is almost certainly right about herself. There is nothing foolish in it. I’ve said versions of it.
But a second claim is riding along inside it, and that one hasn’t been inspected. It’s the claim that underneath ordinary maternal love there is a floor, and the floor holds. Not usually holds. Holds.
I want to ask what the floor is made of.
What actually stops a person?
Ask around and people name real things. Conscience. Empathy. Maternal instinct. Basic human decency. Every one of those exists and every one matters enormously.
But notice what happens when you ask the follow-up — by what mechanism does it stop her? — and get nothing back but a firmer restatement. It just would. Surely something would.
That word surely is carrying the entire weight of the belief, and it isn’t attached to anything. Everything people name as a floor is real, and not one of them is a floor. They are all dispositions: strong, common, formed over years, and capable of failing, of never being formed, or of being taken apart one piece at a time.
Why nobody chooses evil as evil
There is a real limit on what a human being can choose, and Thomas Aquinas states it precisely. It’s just far narrower than the one people assume.
The will, he says, is not a blind force. It doesn’t lunge. It moves toward whatever the mind hands it labelled good. Nobody chooses evil while seeing it as evil — there is always something in view that looks, to the person choosing, like a good worth having. Sub ratione boni, he calls it: under the aspect of the good.
So there’s a genuine constraint. A person cannot pursue what he apprehends as purely and only evil.
Read that as reassurance and you’ve read it backwards.
Because if the will moves toward whatever the mind presents, then the mind decides where you go and the will is only the engine. That relocates the entire question. It was never how much does this person care. It’s is what they’re looking at real.
And here is the consequence that changes everything downstream. If love supplies force and judgment supplies direction, then love attached to a false judgment does not correct it.
It carries it further.
Devotion. Courage. Persistence. Willingness to be misunderstood. Willingness to do the hard thing nobody else has the stomach for. Every one of those is a multiplier, and multipliers have no opinion about what they multiply. A person who loves intensely and sees falsely is not safer than a person who loves weakly and sees falsely. She is more dangerous, and more dangerous in proportion to her love.
Love is not a floor. It’s an engine.
A descent in which nothing false is ever said
Follow this carefully, and check each line as it goes past.
Start with a mother who is not wicked and not mentally ill. She is exhausted, isolated, and something is going badly.
Their well-being depends on how I handle this. — True. She matters enormously to how their lives go.
I’m failing them. — True. Every parent fails their children in some respect, and she can name hers.
This isn’t a rough patch. This is damage. — Still not false. Some failures do leave marks.
It isn’t going to get better. — She has looked, and she cannot see a way through.
The problem isn’t my circumstances. The problem is me. I’m the danger here. — She has evidence. She can list it.
And if I’m the danger, what’s ahead of them is more of this.
They’d be spared it.
A mother who really loved them would do what’s needed — even the thing an ordinary mother is too frightened to do.
No one else sees how bad it is. If I wait for someone to agree with me, I’m abandoning them.
Hesitating now would be cowardice. It would be me protecting myself instead of them.
I’m saving my children.
Now go back to the top and find the lie.
There isn’t one
That’s the part worth sitting with. Read the sequence again looking for the false statement — the moment she believes something untrue — and you won’t find it. Every rung is a sentence that is, taken by itself, true.
What changed from step to step was never the truth of the sentence. It was the quiet disappearance of a limit.
- I’m failing them — in this respect, at this time.
- I’m the danger — under these conditions. When exhausted. When unwell. When alone.
- It isn’t going to get better — that I can presently imagine.
- Their future holds more of this — which is not something I have any way of knowing.
Every one of those qualifiers was true. Every one was there at the start. One by one they were deleted. Nothing was added. Something was removed.
What evil is, structurally
Aquinas has a formula for this that usually earns its keep only in the metaphysics seminar: malum est privatio boni debiti — evil is the absence of a good that ought to be present.
Evil isn’t a substance. It’s a hole. It has no positive existence of its own; it’s what’s left when something that should be there isn’t. Cold isn’t a thing, it’s the absence of heat. Darkness isn’t a thing, it’s the absence of light.
I had always taken that as a technical point about ontology. It isn’t. Here it is the literal mechanism of the descent.
The corruption never adds a falsehood. It removes an adjective.
This is also why the popular alternatives don’t quite land. Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” gets the tone right — the perpetrator is unremarkable, not demonic — but it leaves the impression that what’s missing is thought itself, that the person simply stopped thinking. That isn’t what the descent shows. She thinks constantly. Her reasoning is careful, sequential, and largely valid. What’s been removed isn’t her thinking. It’s four or five small words her thinking used to include.
So what is the floor made of?
The mother who says I can’t imagine doing that is telling the truth. She can’t. Neither can I.
But look at what she’s failing to imagine. She’s picturing herself as she is right now — rested, sane, loved, children asleep upstairs — and finding no path from here to there. Of course she doesn’t. There is no such path from here.
Nobody makes that jump. The distance she’s pricing is not the distance anyone travels. Each step is short, each step is defensible, and each completed step becomes evidence that the next one is survivable. She’s measuring the whole descent. The person at the bottom only ever had to take the last one.
So: is love a floor?
No. Love is what’s still standing when everything else has been renamed — which is exactly why it can be conscripted, and exactly why the conscription is invisible from outside. She loved her children and she killed her children are not, at the level of what was actually driving her, contradictory statements. The first is why the second was possible.
Which is the argument for ordering, and it isn’t a modest one. The empathy that needs governing is not weak empathy, or fake empathy, or the performed kind. It’s the real thing at full strength, pointed by a judgment nobody checked. Ordering isn’t a restriction placed on love. It’s the condition under which love can be trusted with power.
And it comes down to something smaller than any of this suggests. The descent runs on deleted qualifiers — in this respect, for now, under these conditions, as far as I can see. Those small words are not hedging. They are not weakness or a failure of conviction.
They’re the floor.
Part two asks the obvious next question: if every step of the descent is true, what do you actually say to someone who is on it? The answer is not to argue — You Cannot Argue With a True Sentence.