2023
George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality
George Orwell is sometimes read as disinterested in (if not outright hostile) to philosophy. Yet a fair reading of Orwell’s work reveals an author whose work was deeply informed by philosophy and who often revealed his philosophical sympathies. Orwell’s written works are of ethical significance, but he also affirmed and defended substantive ethical claims about humanism, well-being, normative ethics, free will and moral responsibility, moral psychology, decency, equality, liberty, justice, and political morality.
In George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality, philosopher Peter Brian Barry avoids a narrow reading of Orwell that considers only a few of his best-known works and instead considers the entirety of Orwell’s corpus, including his fiction, journalism, essays, book reviews, diaries, and correspondence, contending that there are ethical commitments discernible throughout his work that ground some of his best-known pronouncements and positions.
I welcome Barry’s attempt to bring philosophy to bear in understanding Orwell and to draw on Orwell in order to enrich philosophical debates. …George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality is, no less importantly, an enjoyable book, and it has the twin virtues of offering interpretive insights to readers already familiar with Orwell’s work and being accessible to those without prior interest in Orwell’s thought.
–Iskra Fileva, University of Colorado-Boulder
“it should be read by all those who have an interest in the interface between philosophy, politics and literature.’’
–Tony Burns, Nottingham University
“there’s always an abundance of socio-politico food for thought where Orwell is concerned, especially where fresh and colourful assertions leap off the page… this is a truly terrific book, with humongous amount of forensic insight.“
–David Marx
2016
The Fiction of Evil
What makes someone an evil person? How are evil people different from merely bad people? Do evil people really exist? Can we make sense of evil people if we mythologize them? Do evil people take pleasure in the suffering of others? Can evil people be redeemed?
Peter Brian Barry answers these questions by examining a wide range of works from renowned authors, including works of literature by Kazuo Ishiguro, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Oscar Wilde alongside classic works of philosophy by Nietzsche and Aristotle. By considering great texts from literature and philosophy, Barry examines whether evil is merely a fiction.
The Fiction of Evil explores how the study of literature can contribute to the study of metaphysics and ethics and it is essential reading for those studying the concept of evil or philosophy of literature at undergraduate level.
Original cover artwork by Zach Whitehurst — see here.
2015
Evil and Moral Psychology
This book examines what makes someone an evil person and how evil people are different from merely bad people. Rather than focusing on the “problem of evil” that occupies philosophers of religion, Barry looks instead to moral psychology―the intersection of ethics and psychology. He provides both a philosophical account of what evil people are like and considers the implications of that account for social, legal, and criminal institutions. He also engages in traditional philosophical reasoning strongly informed by psychological research, especially abnormal and social psychology.
In response to the popularity of phrases like “the axis of evil” and the ease with which politicians and others describe their opponents as “evil,” Barry sets out to make clear just what it is to be an evil person.