Analyzing evil.(The Roots of Evil)(Book review)

John Kekes The Roots of Evil. Cornell University Press, 261 pages, $29.95

Remarking on the exceptional lucidity of Bertrand Russell's prose, the philosopher Stuart Hampshire once described clarity of expression as almost a moral imperative:

  It's a question of never fudging the results,    never using  rhetoric to fill a gap, never using a    phrase which conveniently  straddles, as it    were, two or three notes and which leaves it  ambiguous which one you're hitting.... [I]n    Russell's  writing there's always this extraordinary    nakedness of clear  assertion. His doctrines    and arguments stand out in a hard,  

      
   Greek light which allows no vagueness.