`Our responsibility to history" President Bush told us in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks," is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil."

Indeed, President Bush has consistently used the language of good and evil to describe and denounce the terrorists and their attacks against the United States. "There is no question," Bush said in a recent press conference, that "the leader of Iraq is an evil man." Bin Lad is "the evil one."

In using such language, President Bush has cast the United States in the role of the champion of the good over the forces of evil throughout the world. "We're fighting evil. And these murderers have hijacked a great religion in order to justify their evil deeds and we cannot let it stand." In the subsequent weeks following the terrorist attacks, this language of evil has remained a constant theme in the rhetoric of President Bush and several other high level administrative officials, including Secretary Rumsfeld.

Such language ought to be used with caution for several reasons. First, President Bush's goal of ridding the world of evil is an unconscionably vague foreign policy goal -- as well as an unattainable goal. If we set out to rid the world of evil, where do we stop? When do we declare victory? To think in these terms is not only to establish the United States as the world's policeman, but also as its guardian angel. It would require intervention throughout the world in countless countries.

Even a more modest goal of ridding the world of terrorists -- and those who harbor and support them -- would result in numerous interventions. Where do we draw the line? Do we send in commandos to root out the IRA, surely a terrorist organization that has killed innocent women and children? Do we attack countries that provide financial support for terrorist organizations like the IRA? Do we send armed forces into Chiapas to round up guerrillas? Do we attempt to round up anti-Castro extremists and terrorists?

Obviously not. In practical terms, a policy of eradicating evil would simply be a policy of attacking those whose "evil" we don't like and cloaking our behavior under the mantle of the near-mythic language of a struggle between good and evil.

There is a second reason for using such language with great caution. The language of good and evil is precisely the language of the fundamentalist extremists who have attacked us. To many extreme fundamentalists, the United States is the embodiment of evil, and they see the future in terms of an on-going battle between good and evil.

In this respect, President Bush and the Taliban have one thing in common: both see the conflict between the United States and the terrorist guerrillas as a conflict between good and evil. Indeed, the Taliban's name for its secret police is Ministry of Enforcement of Virtue and Suppression of Vice. Both are seeing the world in terms of an epic battle between good and evil; they just disagree about which one is good and which is evil.

From the fictional character of Elmer Gantry onward, we are all familiar with the religious figure who preaches forcefully against evil and, in secret moments, engages in the very vices he denounces so harshly in public. Such individuals are split internally, unable to integrate what the psychologist Carl Jung called the shadow side of their personality into their public self. This splitting of the self is the final danger of seeing the world starkly in terms of good and evil: it is all too easy to see the other as purely evil and ourselves as goodness incarnate-and, in the process, to deceive ourselves about our own shortcomings.

There is a final, even more compelling reason for being suspicious of the rhetoric of evil: it is an invitation to give up on the quest for understanding the other. When we denounce the actions of bin Laden and others as evil, we absolve ourselves of any need to understand them, to uncover the factors -- including some of our own decisions and policies -- that played a role in shaping those actions.

In saying this, I am in no way trying to condone the terrorist actions or point the finger of blame at ourselves. Rather, I am simply pointing out that, by calling actions and people evil, we are unlikely to understand the ways in which their actions and character are part of a complex causal web of which we too are a part. Lacking such understanding, we can only turn to violence to change the situation. With such understanding, on the other hand, we can craft a nuanced and multifaceted response that is much more likely to effect lasting change.

Attention to this language of evil is important because words shape -- and sometimes distort -- policy. If we see our enemy as the devil incarnate, we will feel justified in taking extreme measures to rid the world of such a force. Furthermore, we will fail to understand what experiences and ideas led our enemies to their actions and their view of us.

Finally, seeing our enemy in these terms precludes the possibility of compromise, of attempting to craft a world in which we may coexist. Instead, we can only try to eradicate them from the world - - and this is precisely the mentality to attacks we so rightly decry. We can do better than to emulate our enemy's way of thinking.

Hinman is a professor of philosophy and Director of the Values Institute at the University of San Diego. He is the author of numerous articles and two books in ethics and edits the Web site Ethics Updates (http://ethics.sandiego.edu).

Credit: Hinman is a professor of philosophy and Director of the Values Institute at the University of San Diego.