How should we understand "evil"? Is it personal depravity, or the result of social injustice?

This week's picks from QDaily's editor-in-chief.

This week, let's begin with the idea of "evil."

India's Supreme Court ordered the eviction of people living in the country's forests, displacing roughly 8 million of them across 17 states; Facebook obtained data on users' private activity through deals with mobile apps; Cardinal George Pell, the Vatican's third-ranking official and head of its Secretariat for the Economy, was found guilty of sexual assault by a court in Melbourne, Australia. Governments, companies, individuals — evil acts can come from anywhere.

Evil is always with us. Who bears responsibility for it? Two pieces this week take up that question.

In the 11th installment of QDaily's annual book recommendations, Hong Tao, a professor of political science at Fudan University, reviews Ordinary Vices, published in 1984 by the American political philosopher Judith Shklar. In it, Shklar tries to answer one question: what is the relationship between political institutions and individual morality?

After the Enlightenment, scholars began to admit the flaws in human nature and tried to curb them by reforming political institutions along better lines. Discussing the difference between Montaigne's thinking and Montesquieu's, Shklar points out that human cruelty grows out of misanthropy, and that Montesquieu went beyond Montaigne by developing an institutional political theory — what later became known as the separation of powers — to restrain that misanthropy and so prevent cruelty.

Enlightenment thinkers never treated individual morality and political institutions as two entirely separate, unrelated things. But in later practice, the separation of powers came to be seen as nothing more than a balance of interests. In the many popular books about the American political system published in China after 2000, the authors stress that the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary each represent a different class, and that through an interlocking system of checks they end up balancing individual interests.

That way of thinking overlooks what political institutions mean for individual morality. "The views on individual morality found in Montesquieu and in The Federalist Papers are not taken seriously by today's rulers and politicians. They regard them as mere moral relics, believing that once an institutionalized political system replaces the dictator, these moral views no longer matter." Shklar believed that dismissing individual morality this way is a mistake.

Her example is cruelty. As Hong Tao's analysis puts it, "People in the world care only about their own interests, with no regard for human feeling, and those who hold power will not hesitate to harm others merely to satisfy even their smallest whims."

The value of Shklar and Ordinary Vices lies in locating what each individual means to society as a whole. No one is merely a rational actor in a market, steered by an invisible hand toward eventual equilibrium. On the contrary, individual morality still shapes the rules by which a whole society runs, and so each person also owes duties and responsibilities to others and to society.

"We look for a kind of character in public figures and in the friends around us. This character is not a set of isolated, heroic, morally significant choices, but a disposition revealed over a lifetime of choices." That is one of the moral ideas Shklar puts forward in Ordinary Vices.

In some ways, Shklar and Ordinary Vices echo Ferdinand von Schirach, the writer who exposed the Nazis' second crime. Ferdinand von Schirach was born in 1964. His grandfather, Baldur von Schirach, was one of the 22 defendants tried as major Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, charged with indoctrinating German youth with Nazi ideology and carrying out the deportation of Jews.

In 2011, Schirach published the novel The Collini Case, which exposed the Nazis' second crime: only the top Nazi leaders were classified as "murderers," and everyone else counted merely as an "accessory" — and accessories were prosecuted under ordinary manslaughter law rather than murder law. That meant that from 1960 onward, the statute of limitations had run out on every crime committed during the Third Reich except murder.

In reflecting on Nazi crimes, Schirach offers a different moral view. He does not deny individual guilt in the Nazi years, and believes that, as the descendant of a war criminal, he too has to carry a sense of responsibility. But he also says: "Today's Federal Republic of Germany did not inherit the guilt of Nazi Germany, but this country does have a duty to carry forward that commitment: to keep fighting against war, and to keep exposing crimes. That's a more humane, more rational way of confronting history and guilt."

Going further, in a conversation with the writer A Yi, both men suggested that the wider social environment can shape how people behave morally. A Yi said: "Many criminals, or suspects, commit their crimes by accident... I think a lot of us today are like flammable objects — one chance event is enough to set us off, and we might not even know why we became criminals."

"Everyone is a mixture of good and bad — it's only a matter of degree," Schirach said. "If you spend a lot of time dealing with these criminals, you notice something they have in common: within their environment, they can't see any other way out. It's like walking down a long tunnel."

Seen this way, many evil acts — and many arguments too — can be understood as several sets of victims grinding each other down inside an unhealthy environment. After winning several Oscars, the film Bohemian Rhapsody announced it would open in mainland China on March 22, with roughly three minutes of content touching on homosexuality cut. Many people called for a boycott, arguing that the cuts disrespected Queen frontman Freddie Mercury. Some Queen fans called the boycotters irrational, and the two sides quickly fell into a heated argument — when what actually caused all of it was an unreasonable censorship system.

In fact, when it comes to "evil," no single ethical principle can help us make sense of everything. Every evil act is an interaction between a person and an environment. What we can do is first understand how an evil act came about; only then can we act on it with any precision.

Business is a major force in modern society, and every time a new business model appears, it changes the lives of a good many people.

City dwellers have basically accepted food delivery as a fact of life, but they know almost nothing about the restaurants that make the food. This new thing is called a "shared kitchen." It rents out a storefront of a few hundred square meters to several vendors at once — delivery-only brands like Manling Porridge Shop, and bigger names like Wangxiangyuan and Dicos. Almost none of them offer a dining area where customers can sit down and eat, and where one exists, it is tiny. In other words, they are kitchens that exist purely to fill delivery orders.

For restaurant brands, the appeal of a shared kitchen is the lower upfront investment. Liu Huai'an, brand manager of U-Ding Maocai, a sister brand of Haidilao, says that because a shared kitchen skips the time needed for renovation and permits, brands can open faster; rent runs about half what a standalone location costs, and labor costs drop by about half too. Other benefits shared-kitchen operators promise — customer retention, prize-draw marketing, supply chains, staff recruiting — have not fully materialized.

As food delivery becomes a habit for most consumers, small delivery-only shops like these are only going to spread. But the business's prospects still hang on many factors: rent and regulation, among others, could all affect how shared kitchens operate from here. The most important question is whether the restaurant brands they house can actually satisfy people's appetite for good food.

Compared with traditional gas-powered cars, electric vehicles are favored for being cleaner. Nine countries, China among them, have plans to phase out gas cars. But the EV supply chain looks nothing like the gas-car one — especially when it comes to sales.

Gas-car manufacturers typically sell their entire output to dealers. Dealers carry the pressure of holding inventory, but they profit from auto loans, insurance, maintenance, and repairs. Dealers also enjoy a huge used-car market, using used-car sales to attract customers who can't yet afford a new car — which expands the overall market for gas cars further still.

Because their batteries degrade, though, EVs hold almost no resale value. A battery electric car sells for less than 30% of its original price after three years. Gas cars, by comparison, can still fetch 50% to 60% after three years. That means a used-EV market barely exists, so dealers can't rely on it to make money. The traditional car sales network simply doesn't fit electric vehicles — and that could affect many countries' plans to replace gas cars with EVs.

Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, and other Chinese phone makers are trying to break into the European market. In 2018 alone, these Chinese brands sold a combined 60 million phones in Europe, taking 32% of the entire market. Through heavy marketing and an aggressive store-opening strategy, they have scored some early wins — but this market will not fall easily.

First, it is a split market. Western Europe means higher price points and stronger purchasing power; Eastern Europe is the opposite. Second, carriers remain the main channel through which Europeans buy phones. Whether a brand can build partnerships with local carriers, and what position it holds in carriers' future promotions, will shape how much it sells in Europe.

On top of that, they are up against Apple, Samsung, Google, and other companies that compete with Chinese phone brands worldwide. Even with a third of the market already in hand, Chinese phone makers still face fierce competition.

In the United States, since the rise of the internet, the porn industry has been dominated by one company, MindGeek. Backed by the strong user stickiness of its streaming site Pornhub, it has won outsize influence over the whole industry. But that dominance is now being broken by a site called OnlyFans.

On OnlyFans, users pay a monthly fee to models and influencers — usually US$5 to $20 — and in exchange get to see large numbers of photos too explicit to post on Instagram. Users can also message models and influencers directly, paying a "tip" for photos or videos made to their own taste. Compared with before, creators on OnlyFans can earn more money, and avoid being exploited so heavily along the way.

Interestingly, the people behind OnlyFans have deliberately kept themselves shrouded in mystery. A publicist hired by OnlyFans's parent company first refused to give a New York Times reporter any details. After the reporter dug up some information independently, the publicist replied: "Nice to see investigative journalism isn't dead."

The Oscars were the biggest entertainment story of the week. Best Picture winner Green Book is still the textbook "politically correct" film, but we think this year's Best Picture shortlist shows the Oscars losing the standard of judgment it once had. The nominees included European festival-circuit art films like Roma and BlacKkKlansman alongside a pure commercial blockbuster like Black Panther — a muddle of values.

The Oscars have been under pressure from all sides in recent years. They must answer to audiences and to the industry alike. They carry people's demands for social justice, and people's ideas about the art of film. That split identity has finally cost the Oscars control of their own fate, leaving them adrift among divided, even conflicting, goals.

Just as unsurprisingly, Green Book's win set off a huge argument. Critics say the plot sticks to a formula decades old: a kind-hearted, saintly Black man teaches a proud white man to accept other races. The most deeply rooted racial conflicts are breezed past as comedy — the film "reduces a long, brutal, ongoing history of racial discrimination to a puzzle, a formula, a dramatic equation that can be easily balanced and solved," and "lets white viewers set down some of the responsibility that comes with systemic racism."

BlacKkKlansman director Spike Lee's response: "Every time somebody is driving somebody, I lose." — At the 1989 Oscars, Lee's masterpiece Do the Right Thing lost Best Picture to Driving Miss Daisy.

Incidentally, Green Book opened in mainland China on March 1. Like Bohemian Rhapsody, it was cut for release.

Beyond the Oscars, it was a busy week for the film industry.

Martin Scorsese's new film The Irishman released a new trailer, and with a cast that includes Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, it may be the most star-studded gangster film of 2019.

After the success of Hereditary, horror director Ari Aster is planning a spiritual sequel. Midsommar is bound up with Swedish folklore. Midsummer is one of the country's traditional festivals, usually held on a Friday between June 19 and 25. The film is about how such a celebration goes wrong: a couple travels to the Swedish countryside to visit friends and joins a small town's legendary midsummer festival — but when a cult gets involved, the celebration turns strange and violent.

Alita: Battle Angel, produced by James Cameron and directed by Robert Rodriguez, is still in theaters. We spoke with the Mexican director about this $170 million production. He said the film was never meant to recreate the dystopian world of the original manga, Battle Angel Alita. Instead, "Alita is such an incredible character that we decided to focus more on her."

Following a tradition now nearly 40 years old, the 39th Golden Raspberry Awards were again announced the day before the Oscars. Gotti, Holmes & Watson, and The Happytime Murders tied for the lead with six nominations each; Johnny Depp picked up his fourth straight Worst Actor nomination, this time for Sherlock Gnomes; two documentaries about Donald Trump, Fahrenheit 11/9 and Death of a Nation, took six nominations between them, including one for Worst Actor. You can see the full list here, so you know what to avoid.

2019 is also an anniversary year for a number of masters.

It is the 100th anniversary of the death of the French Impressionist painter Renoir. Museums across France have launched a series of exhibitions to mark it. The Eau et Lumière Association, a group devoted to promoting Impressionist art, has declared this "the Year of Renoir" and mapped out a set of Renoir routes for visitors.

It is the 350th anniversary of the death of the Dutch portrait painter Rembrandt. The Rijksmuseum is currently holding an exhibition called All the Rembrandts, showing its entire Rembrandt holdings for the first time — 22 paintings, 60 drawings, and more than 300 prints, covering every period and style of his work. The show traces the whole arc of Rembrandt's creative life, including 17th-century prints that are rarely put on public display.

It is the 100th anniversary of the birth of the American writer J.D. Salinger. In his novel The Catcher in the Rye, he created Holden Caulfield. Like Peter Pan in the fairy tale, Holden refuses to grow up and has no trust at all in the phony, artificial world of adults. Literary critics were dismissive of him, but the many American readers who had just come through World War II felt a strong kinship with him. And not only in the America of 1951 — to this day, The Catcher in the Rye still sells about 200,000 copies a year and remains a bestseller around the world.

Finally, here is more news worth your attention:

Huawei unveiled its 5G folding phone, the Mate X, in Barcelona. Fully unfolded, the Mate X is a single 8-inch all-screen display with a resolution of 2480x2200. Bending that screen splits it into a front and a back display. Folded up, the front is a 6.6-inch all-screen display with a 19.5:9 aspect ratio and 2480x1148 resolution, and the back is a 6.4-inch screen.

The Canadian coffee chain Tim Hortons opened its first store in China, in Shanghai, on February 26, positioning itself as a "made-to-order warm-food coffee house." Tims is a chain founded in 1964 by the legendary hockey player Tim Horton; it started out selling only doughnuts and is now a fixture on Canadian streets. The Shanghai location is the brand's 4,850th store worldwide.

Civil service exam prep can be a business too. Offcn Education, which covers all 31 of China's provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions with 582 directly operated offline teaching sites, went public on the A-share market through a reverse merger. In the first four months of 2018 alone, the company brought in 1.45 billion yuan in revenue. Three business lines — national and local civil service exam prep, public-institution recruitment exam prep, and teacher qualification and recruitment exam prep — accounted for 90% of that revenue.

In 2018, L'Oréal grew faster in the Chinese market than at any point in the previous 14 years, with revenue up 33% for the year. Six L'Oréal brands now sell more than 1 billion yuan a year in China: L'Oréal Paris, Lancôme, Maybelline New York, Yves Saint Laurent Beauté, Giorgio Armani Beauty, and Kiehl's. China is now L'Oréal Group's second-largest market worldwide, after the United States, and for Lancôme, Helena Rubinstein, and L'Oréal Men Expert it is the single biggest source of revenue anywhere. Stéphane Rinderknech, CEO of L'Oréal China and a member of the group's executive committee, said he is confident China will become L'Oréal's largest market — "it's only a matter of time."

Lego is another brand for which the Chinese market matters a great deal. After its first sales decline in nearly a decade in 2017, Lego saw growth return across the board in 2018. That growth came mainly from the US and China. The global toy retail industry, in fact, had a rough year: according to the market research firm NPD, after four straight years of growth, global toy sales fell 2% in 2018. Lego held on to its growth mainly by expanding its sales channels.

Nike announced a four-year partnership with the League of Legends Pro League (LPL). From the start of the 2019 LPL season through 2022, Nike will supply the LPL with exclusive apparel and footwear, including designs for LPL league apparel and sneakers, LPL co-branded athletic products, and other related services. The value of the deal was not disclosed, but based on the LPL's earlier partnerships with brands like Mercedes-Benz, KFC, and L'Oréal, it is unlikely to be less than 50 million yuan a year.

Eileen Chang's novels are being reissued again. On the afternoon of February 24, Roland Soong, executor of Eileen Chang's literary estate, along with the scholar Zhi'an and the writer Di'an, took part in a salon in Beijing called "Eileen Chang: The Legend Continues." At the event, Soong said that beyond her already-published work, he plans to compile and publish a collection of letters between his parents and Chang in 2020.

The Irish writer Colm Tóibín offers a new way to read Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce. In his new book, Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce, Tóibín argues that all three writers had an inadequate father, and that this is precisely what made them Ireland's most representative writers. In reading these three that way, Tóibín offers another way of understanding Irish literature, and traces the birth of modern Irish identity.

Cai Guo-Qiang, the artist known for his gunpowder works, staged an art installation called Explosion Studio inside the ancient Roman amphitheater at Pompeii. Cai blew up replicas of sculptures held by the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, aiming to say something about the relationship between human civilization and the end of the world.

People usually assume elephants are a species that needs protecting. But Botswana, known as "Africa's last Eden," is struggling with too many of them. President Mokgweetsi Masisi, who took office last April, believes the growing elephant population threatens crop production on small farms — and even people's safety — while fighting poaching drains too much government money; he has pushed to lift the hunting ban. Conservationists dispute the government's account, pointing to a surge in elephant poaching in the country: the number of newly discovered elephant carcasses in the north is six times what it used to be.

In July 2018, the Ugandan government began taxing users who reach about 60 websites and social media apps from their phones. To use WhatsApp, Twitter, and Facebook, Ugandan internet users now have to pay roughly the equivalent of 10.6 yuan a month. Since Uganda is a poor country, the fee has pushed people away from the internet. According to the Uganda Communications Commission, the number of internet users fell by more than 2.5 million in the three months after the tax took effect.

A photography exhibition by the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk opened at the Yapı Kredi Cultural Center in Istanbul. Born in 1952, Pamuk is one of contemporary Europe's most distinguished novelists. His best-known works include My Name Is Red and The Museum of Innocence. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006. He had previously published a photo collection called Balcony, and the Istanbul caught by his lens has long been a subject of his writing.

Have a great weekend!

Cover image / The Silence of the Lambs