LITERATURE + LECTURES

The Jung Center of Houston presents The Nature of Evil: The Untold Story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  Ethicist Daryl Koehn explores the way evil actions can grow out of seemingly logical decisions, not just evil motives.Thursday, January 20, 6 - 7:30 pm.

Do we intend to do evil? Or is some other dynamic at work, resulting in evil deeds? The author Robert Louis Stevenson argues for the second possibility. His tale depicting the life of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is far more nuanced than many readers have noticed, turning on complicated interactions among Dr. Jekyll, his professional friends, and the larger Victorian society in which Jekyll and others live out their unhappy lives.

The evil lies not so much in Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde but in the unfolding logic of these interactions and in our reluctance or unwillingness to acknowledge that logic. This story underscores the traditional ethical obligation to be vigilant about our motives, but it also highlights the need to attend to the internal logic of trajectories that easily enmesh us.

Daryl Koehn, PhD, is a full professor in the Ethics and Business Law Department at the University of St. Thomas, Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is the author of numerous books including The Ground of Professional Ethics, The Nature of Evil, and Living with the Dragon: Thinking and Acting Ethically in a World of Unintended Consequences. She has also published numerous journal articles on ethics. Her works have been translated into Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Bahasi.