Definitions of ‘social evil’

What is meant by a ‘social evil’, and how does it differ from the more familiar and less dramatic concept of a ‘social problem’? A working definition might be that a ‘social problem’ suggests an undesirable state of affairs for which people hope to find a practical cure. A ‘social evil’, by contrast, suggests something more complex, menacing and indefinable, and may imply a degree of scepticism, realism or despair about whether any remedy can be found. In everyday speech, both terms are often used rhetorically and interchangeably. At a deeper, more technical level, however, the language of social problems may be seen as linked to the Anglo-French ‘positivist’ tradition, endorsed over the past century by many prominent British social reformers. The language of social evils is more difficult to pin down. But it is used by people from a variety of traditions – radical and conservative, secular and theological – who see individual and social action as, in some sense, shaped and constrained by moral, natural or transcendental laws.

Questions also arise about the meaning of the term ‘social’. For much of the 19th century, ‘social’ responsibilities in Britain were largely thought of as civic, voluntary or ‘associational’ ties, to be discharged by local agencies of the Poor Law, by charity or by self-governing friendly societies that insured their members against sickness, old age and death. It was only in the early 20th century that social evils and the responsibility for dealing with them came to be identified as ‘national’. A hundred years later, that perspective has shifted again, as social relations, obligations and the mysterious entity of ‘society’ itself are increasingly reconceived as cross-national, or even ‘global’, in their scope. A further complication arises from the fact that some perceived social evils of the present time were seen in the past as quintessentially private. Thus, addiction to opium (casually smoked by Sherlock Holmes), supplying cocaine (sold over the counter by Edwardian pharmacists) and the physical chastisement of children (a routine adjunct of parenting) were scarcely viewed as social offences at all, let alone as criminal.

Likewise, most 19th-century economists believed that ‘artificial’ public strategies to counteract unemployment, however well intentioned, would inevitably exacerbate the social evil they were trying to prevent.