Charles Mathewes, speaking here on the delicate topic of “understanding” the evil perpetrated by terrorists, but with much broader application:

Consider a simple question. What does it mean to seek to “understand” evil? Initially I suspect the decent mind recoils from such an undertaking. If “understanding evil” means to render it intelligible in the sense of excusable or even rational, then such “understanding” is, I would argue, intellectually delusionary, psychologically futile, and morally hazardous. But this question can be taken in another, deeper, sense: here understanding is simply the project of depicting evil as something within the realm of human behavior, as something that we could conceivably do.

It is probably impossible not to feel the tug of the first form of understanding. Yet we should resist it as strongly as we can. That we could be like these “others” in different circumstances does not mean that we are in fact relevantly similar to them, and hence lacking any standing to judge them. Judging requires both sufficient proximity to secure a good sense of the matter at hand and sufficient distance to ensure that one is not improperly confusing one’s own interests and concerns with the situation.

The question is important because we need to know “the enemy” precisely in their enmity to us—their rationale for why they do what they do. To do this we must resist the all-too-human reflex to alienate them as “the enemy,” to see them as fundamentally different from us, fundamentally nonhuman. (This is not to deny others' sole responsibility for their particular acts of malice; it simply identifies the disquieting fact that this behavior is, in some way, done by creatures inescapably, disquietingly like us.) Yet we must also resist the counterreflex to depict (and tacitly excuse) them as “just misunderstood.” Instead we have to see them as continuous enough with us to be recognizably human, but take no comfort in the fact of their bare “humanity” as somehow securing them from the possibility of being, paradoxically, monstrous.