There’s an obvious, albeit slightly mangled, reference to one of the famous Socratic paradoxes in episode six (“Quid Pro Woe”) of the Netflix series, Wednesday. Ms Thornhill, the botany teacher and “dorm mom”, played by Christina Ricci, offers Wednesday Addams a beautiful hardback copy of Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus. This provides a surprising opportunity for the scriptwriters to touch upon some very radical philosophical ideas.
Saying that someone disguises their evil motives as good is, of course, not at all the same as saying that they have mistaken evil for good.
Wednesday, an aspiring writer, seems to know the book well and says Mary Shelley is one of her “literary heroes”. She then appears to cite the following quote from the text, or perhaps from another work by Mary Shelley.
No man chooses evil because it is evil. He only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.
Wednesday uses this to explain her belief that some people, including one of her main antagonists in the series, “do bad things under the guise of protecting the greater good.” That’s a disappointingly sloppy reading on her part. Saying that someone disguises their evil motives as good is, of course, not at all the same as saying that they have mistaken evil for good. Wednesday’s philosophical interpretation of the maxim, therefore, contains a rather egregious error. Nevertheless, it’s still great to see this reference to philosophy in a popular television series.
Mary Wollstonecraft not Mary Shelley
There appears to be another mistake in this scene, though. Wednesday (or the show’s scriptwriters) imply that this quote comes from Frankenstein. It is also attributed to Mary Shelley on Internet quotation sites, which are notoriously unreliable. These words appear nowhere in the novel, though.
They were written, in fact, by Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), a pioneering feminist philosopher. She died of septicaemia shortly after giving birth to her daughter, also called Mary Wollstonecraft, later Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley but better-known simply as Mary Shelley (1797–1851), the author of Frankenstein.
The words quoted by Wednesday can, it turns out, be traced to Mary Wollstonecraft’s pamphlet titled A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790).
It may be confidently asserted that no man chooses evil, because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks. And the desire of rectifying these mistakes, is the noble ambition of an enlightened understanding, the impulse of feelings that Philosophy invigorates.
This was certainly not an original idea. Although Mary Wollstonecraft doesn’t mention its source, it would have been very familiar to many of her educated readers at the time, in Georgian England.
Socrates and the Stoics
The notion that no man does evil willingly, but rather in error, is best-known as one of the famous paradoxes attributed to Socrates. For example, in Plato’s dialogue known as the Protagoras, Socrates is shown saying that wise men do not assume that others do evil willingly, or knowingly.
I am fairly sure of this — that none of the wise men considers that anybody ever willingly errs or willingly does base and evil deeds; they are well aware that all who do base and evil things do them unwillingly.— Protagoras, 345d-e
The Stoic philosophers also followed Socrates in this regard. For example, Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself:
If men do rightly what they do, we ought not to be displeased. But if they do not do right, it is plain that they do so involuntarily and in ignorance. For as every soul is unwillingly deprived of the truth, so also is it unwillingly deprived of the power of behaving to each man according to his deserts. — Meditations, 11.18
For Marcus, this way of thinking serves an important role as a cognitive (or thinking) strategy helpful in mastering our own anger.
People sometimes object to this idea by claiming that many individuals, such as criminals, appear to do bad things in full knowledge that they are wrong. Of course, Socrates and the Stoics also realized this — for them to have believed otherwise would have been extraordinarily naive. What they meant was more subtle: that such individuals are typically unable to define the good. That means they are acting in ignorance, in a sense, of what is right and wrong.
Most of us also know, moreover, what other people consider to be wrong. That’s not the same as agreeing with them or genuinely understanding what it means for something to be wrong. There are, in fact, many ways in which we can mistake evil for good, or simply mistake evil for what is morally indifferent. “I didn’t think it was a big deal”, is one common way, for instance, that people rationalize and justify wrongdoing.
Socrates and the Stoics realized that unless we believe that an individual understands the true nature of goodness, we have to view their failing to do good as the product of ignorance on their part. That also means that such wrongdoing cannot be considered completely voluntary, because we’re not really free to do good unless we know what to do and how to do it.
By coincidence, in the earlier animated movies, The Addams Family (2019) and The Addams Family 2 (2021), Wednesday has a pet octopus by the name of Socrates. (Although it goes by other names, including Aristotle, in other versions of the franchise.) I don’t think the show’s scriptwriters realized that the quote above derives ultimately from Greek philosophy, though. Nevertheless, I’m glad they included it, because it’s a powerful enough philosophical paradox to get people thinking more deeply, almost two and a half thousand years after it was first made famous by the original Socrates, as portrayed in Plato’s dialogues.