Dokumen - Pub The Routledge Handbook of The Philosophy of Evil 1138931799 9781138931794

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF THE
PHILOSOPHY OF EVIL
Why ought we concern ourselves with understanding a concept of evil? It is an elusive and
politically charged concept which critics argue has no explanatory power and is a relic of a
superstitious and primitive religious past. Yet its widespread use persists today: we find it
invoked by politicians, judges, journalists, and many others to express the view that certain
actions, persons, institutions, or ideologies are not just morally problematic but require a spe-
cial signifier to mark them out from the ordinary and commonplace. Therefore, the question
of what a concept of evil could mean and how it fits into our moral vocabulary remains an
important and pressing concern.
The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evil provides an outstanding overview and explo-
ration of these issues and more, bringing together an international team of scholars working on
the concept of evil. Its 27 chapters cover the crucial discussions and arguments, both historical
and contemporary, that are needed to properly understand the historical development and com-
plexity of the concept of evil. The Handbook is divided into three parts:
•• Historical explorations of evil

•• Recent secular explorations of evil
•• Evil and other issues.
The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evil is essential reading for students and researchers
in the fields of ethics and philosophy of psychology. It also provides important insights and
background for anyone exploring the concept of evil in related subjects such as literature,
politics, and religion.
Thomas Nys is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, the

Netherlands.
Stephen de Wijze is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Manchester, UK.
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THE ROUTLEDGE
HANDBOOK OF THE
PHILOSOPHY OF EVIL
Edited by Thomas Nys and Stephen de Wijze

First published 2019
by Routledge
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 2019 selection and editorial matter, Thomas Nys and Stephen de
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Nys, Thomas, editor.
Title: The Routledge handbook of the philosophy of evil / edited
by Thomas Nys and Stephen de Wijze.
Description: 1 [edition]. | New York : Routledge, 2019. |
Series: Routledge handbooks in philosophy | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018059258| ISBN 9781138931794 (hardback :
alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315679518 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Good and evil.
Classification: LCC BJ1401 .R68 2019 | DDC 170—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018059258
ISBN: 978-1-138-93179-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-67951-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK
CONTENTS
Notes on contributors viii

Acknowledgments xii
Introduction 1
Thomas Nys and Stephen de Wijze
PART I
Historical explorations of evil 13
1 Plato on evil 15
Alina Scudieri
2 Augustine on evil 30
Phillip Cary
3 Aquinas on evil 42
W. Matthews Grant
4 Machiavelli: The drama of politics and its inherent evil 55

Giovanni Giorgini
5 Hobbes on evil 70
Laurens van Apeldoorn
6 Leibniz on evil: God’s justice in the best of all possible worlds 83

Agustín Echavarría
v
Contents
7 Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the origin and nature of evil 97

Jason Neidleman
8 Kant: The evil in all of us 109

Matthé Scholten
9 Sade: Mushroom clouds and silver linings 122

Thomas Nys
10 Nietzsche’s critique of morality and his effort to create an

evaluation “beyond good and evil” 135
Paul van Tongeren
11 Hannah Arendt’s double account of evil: Political superfluousness

and moral thoughtlessness 148
Peg Birmingham
12 After the fall: Camus on evil 163

Matthew Sharpe
PART II
Recent secular explorations of evil 175
13 Deliver us from evil: The case for skepticism 177

Phillip Cole
14 Does the term “evil” have any explanatory power? 189

Eve Garrard
15 Defining the concept of evil: Insights from our pre-cognitive responses 203
Stephen de Wijze
16 Evil and wrongdoing 218

Todd Calder
17 Evil characters 234

Peter Brian Barry
18 Defining evil actions: Different approaches 245

Luke Russell
19 Different substantive conceptions of evil actions 256

Paul Formosa
vi
Contents
PART III
Evil and other issues 267
20 Evil and punishment 269

Leo Zaibert
21 Evil and forgiveness 282

Kathryn J. Norlock
22 Evil and freedom 294

Lars Fr. H. Svendsen
23 Evil and power 306

Simona Forti
24 Evil and childhood 317

Gideon Calder
25 Evil’s diachronic characteristics 328

Zachary J. Goldberg
26 Evil, genocide, and mass atrocities 342

Jonathan Leader Maynard
27 Evil: A comparative overview 360

Michiel Leezenberg
Index 381
vii
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Laurens van Apeldoorn is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and a member of the Centre
for Political Philosophy at Leiden University, the Netherlands. His research has appeared
in journals including Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, History of European Ideas, and
Hobbes Studies.
Peter Brian Barry is the Finkbeiner Endowed Chair in Ethics at Saginaw Valley State
University. He is the author of Evil and Moral Psychology (2012) and The Fiction of Evil (2016), as
well as multiple papers in ethics and social and legal philosophy.
Peg Birmingham is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. She is the author of

Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility (2006), coeditor
(with Philippe van Haute) of Dissensus Communis: Between Ethics and Politics (1996), and coedi-
tor (with Anna Yeatman) of Aporia of Rights: Citizenship in an Era of Human Rights (2014). She
is the editor of Philosophy Today.
Gideon Calder is Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences and Social Policy at Swansea University,
UK. He is author or editor of ten books, most recently The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy
of Childhood and Children, coedited with Anca Gheaus and Jurgen De Wispelaere (2018), and
coedits the journal Ethics and Social Welfare.
Todd Calder is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at Saint Mary’s

University in Nova Scotia, Canada. He specializes in ethics and social philosophy with special
interests in evil and moral responsibility.
Phillip Cary is Professor of Philosophy at Eastern University near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

(USA), where he is also scholar-in-residence at the Templeton Honors College. He is the
author of several books on Augustine.
Phillip Cole teaches politics and international relations at the University of the West of England,
Bristol. He is author of The Myth of Evil, published in 2006.
viii
Notes on contributors
Agustín Echavarría is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the
University of Navarra (Spain), where he teaches ontology and philosophical theology. He has
published several papers on the fields of philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and medieval and
early modern philosophy, with special focus on Aquinas, Leibniz, and the problem of evil.
Paul Formosa is a senior lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Macquarie University,

Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Kantian Ethics, Dignity and Perfection (2017) and has pub-
lished many articles on topics in moral and political philosophy and moral psychology.
Simona Forti is Professor of Political Philosophy at Università del Piemonte; part-time faculty
at the Department of Philosophy, the New School for Social Research, New York; and a pro-
fessor in the PhD program in philosophy at Western Consortium, Italy. She has been a visiting
professor in Philosophy and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, NY (2017) and
the New School for Social Research, NY (2012–2016), and Fulbright distinguished chair pro-
fessor at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL (2014).
Eve Garrard is a moral philosopher who is currently an honorary research fellow at the
University of Manchester. Her research interests are in moral theory, bioethics, and issues aris-
ing out of the concepts of evil and forgiveness. As well as a number of papers on these topics,
she is coeditor (with Geoffrey Scarre) of Moral Philosophy and the Holocaust (2003). She has also
coedited (with Stephen de Wijze) Thinking towards Humanity: Themes from Norman Geras (2012).
Giovanni Giorgini is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Bologna and

adjunct professor of political science at Columbia University. He is the author of three books
and many essays; most recently he coedited The Roots of Respect (2017).
Zachary J. Goldberg is currently principal investigator of the DFG Research Grant

“Components of Evil: An Analysis of Secular Moral Evil and its Normative and Social
Implications” in the Department of Philosophy at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
W. Matthews Grant is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of

St. Thomas (St. Paul, MN). Most of his work has focused on Aquinas and philosophy of
God, and he is the author of Free Will and God’s Universal Causality: The Dual Sources Account
(forthcoming).
Michiel Leezenberg studied classical philology, philosophy, and general linguistics. Currently,
he teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. His research
focuses on the history and philosophy of the humanities and on the intellectual history of the
early modern Islamic world.
Jonathan Leader Maynard is a departmental lecturer in international relations at the University

of Oxford and a research associate of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict.
His research focuses on the role of ideology in political violence, genocide, atrocities, and armed
conflict, and he is currently writing a monograph on Ideology and Mass Killing. He has published
in scholarly journals including the British Journal of Political Science, Terrorism and Political Violence,
Ethics, and Genocide Studies and Prevention, as well as for news media including The Independent
and The New Statesman.
ix
Jason Neidleman is Professor of Political Science at the University of La Verne. He is the

author most recently of Rousseau’s Ethics of Truth (2017). An example of his current research on
politics and storytelling can be found in Adam Smith and Rousseau (2018).
Kathryn J. Norlock is the Kenneth Mark Drain Chair in Ethics at Trent University in
Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. She is the author of Forgiveness from a Feminist Perspective, the
editor of The Moral Psychology of Forgiveness, and a cofounder of Feminist Philosophy Quarterly.
Thomas Nys is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. He has writ-
ten on a wide variety of topics in moral and political philosophy and has published in journals
such as Philosophical Explorations, Political Studies, and the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy.
Luke Russell is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Sydney. He works in

the domain of moral philosophy and has published numerous papers on the nature of evil, for-
giveness, virtue, and vice. In his book Evil: A Philosophical Investigation (2014), Luke provides
a secular account of the concept of evil in contemporary moral thought.
Matthé Scholten is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Medical Ethics and History
of Medicine of the Ruhr University Bochum. He received a PhD in philosophy from the
University of Amsterdam. His paper Schizophrenia and Moral Responsibility: A Kantian Essay
appeared in Philosophia.
Alina Scudieri is Adjunct Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Political

and Social Sciences of the University of Bologna, where she is also a tutor in the history of
political thought. She has published on Machiavelli, the Renaissance, and Baroque polit-
ical thought, as well as on contemporary liberal theory. Her current book project is on
Costantino Mortati and the influence of classical political thought and twentieth-century
Italian legal theory.
Matthew Sharpe teaches philosophy at Deakin University in Australia. He is the author

of Camus, Philosophe (2015) and articles on Camus, critical theory, politics, and the history
of ideas.
Lars Fr. H. Svendsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bergen, Norway. Among
his publications are: A Philosophy of Boredom (2005), Fashion: A Philosophy (2006), A Philosophy
of Fear (2008), Work (2008), A Philosophy of Evil (2010), A Philosophy of Freedom (2014), A
Philosophy of Loneliness (2017), and Understanding Animals (2019). His books have been translated
into 28 languages.
Paul van Tongeren was Professor of Moral Philosophy at Radboud University Nijmegen,
the Netherlands, and Special Professor for Ethics at KU Leuven, Belgium, until his retirement
in 2015; he is still an associate researcher of the University of Pretoria, South Africa. For pub-
lications, see: www.paulvantongeren.nl.
x
Stephen de Wijze is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Manchester.

Among his recent publications on secular accounts of evil are “Defining Evil: Insights from the
Problem of Dirty Hands” in The Monist (2002), “Recalibrating Steiner on Evil” in Hillel Steiner
and the Anatomy of Justice (2009), “Evil” in Oxford Bibliographies in Philosophy (coauthored with
Eve Garrard), “Small-Scale Evil” in The Journal of Value Inquiry (2017), and “Political Evil” in
Moral Evil in Practical Ethics (2019).
Leo Zaibert is Professor of Philosophy at Union College (New York). He specializes in phi-
losophy of law and ethics, with a special focus on punishment and forgiveness. His Rethinking
Punishment appeared early in 2018.
xi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This volume took much longer than expected. As a result, we truly tested the patience of all
involved. Therefore, we would like to give special and heartfelt thanks to the following people.
Rebecca Shillabeer, our first contact person at Routledge; Gabrielle Coakley, who supported
us during the bulk of the process; and, finally, Adam Johnson, who guided us through the final
stages. They were all extremely understanding although schedules and deadlines were pushed
back several times. We would also like to thank all of our contributing authors, who uncom-
plainingly waited long stretches of time for their essays to finally be published in the Handbook
and for meeting the deadlines we set for submission of their chapters. It has been a privilege to
work with them all and it is their input that has produced this excellent collection of essays on
a difficult and important topic.
We would also like to thank the participants to the “Understanding Evil” conference held
in Amsterdam in 2016. This conference would not have been possible without the financial
support of ASCA (University of Amsterdam) and the Manchester Centre for Political Theory
(MANCEPT) in the Politics Department at the University of Manchester. We also want to
thank all the (former) colleagues of the Philosophy and Public Affairs group in Amsterdam,
and especially Beate Roessler, Gijs van Donselaar, Henri Wijsbek, and Laurens van Apeldoorn
for undying support and encouragement. Finally, we also want to thank our colleagues in
Manchester, especially Francesca Gains, Miriam Ronzoni, Christian Schemmel, Richard Child,
Liam Shields, James Pattison, Nicola Mulkeen, Stephanie Collins, and Stephen Hood for their
encouragement and support.
xii
INTRODUCTION
Why ought we to concern ourselves with understanding a concept of evil? It is elusive,

politically and religiously charged, and a deeply controversial and puzzling notion. Critics insist
that it is at best unhelpful (it has no explanatory power) but, worse still, the idea of evil is archaic
and a relic of a problematic superstitious and primitive religious past. The term is sometimes
simply used as a way of referring to bad events. Natural evils are those situations where great
harm or destruction occurs – earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, and so on. It is also used as a part
of our moral vocabulary. Moral evil refers to those acts, persons, or institutions which engage in
deeply immoral activities. However, as many recent scholars have sought to argue, the evoca-
tion of moral evil very often leads to polarization, demonization, and confusion.
Despite this, the continual use of the term, both in religious and secular contexts, strongly
suggests that it is a concept that plays an important part in our understanding of the world and
our place in it. It is especially significant when considering the ethical or moral sphere. We
find it used by politicians, judges, journalists, and many others to express their view that certain
actions or state of affairs, persons, institutions, or ideologies are not just morally problematic but
require a special signifier to mark them out from the ordinary and commonplace. When faced
with moral evil we find a particular set of responses such as horror, incomprehension, and sense
of defilement.
Historical accounts of evil

The concern with understanding and making clear a notion of evil has been with us for mil-
lennia. In both the Western and Eastern traditions of philosophy, and among all religious
doctrines, there has been much debate over what exactly is entailed by the term “evil” even
if it was not used explicitly. We find it discussed among the Chinese Confucian and Daoist
traditions, and Hindu and Buddhist concerns with evil can be traced to several centuries BCE
(see Chapter 27 on “Evil: A comparative overview”). Within the Western tradition we find a
discussion of evil in the work of Plato, where it is a “privative” concept specifying the absence
of good and a special type of imperfection and decline (see Chapter 1 on “Plato on evil”).
The combination of ancient Greek philosophy (primarily Plato and Aristotle) combined with
Christian theology (Augustine and Aquinas) dominated the philosophical discussions of evil
for a considerable time. The concept of evil as an absence of good was put in the service of
1
answering theological puzzles, such as the question of how God’s creation could be all-good
while still allowing for evil. Apart from natural and metaphysical evil, emphasis is also put on
human beings committing sin out of their own free will. However, from the 1500s onward,
with the work of Machiavelli and Hobbes, the focus on evil began to change and take a new
direction. The question of political authority and its relation to divine law and sin gathered
urgency. Does not politics – under the guidance of a good statesman – require “dirty hands”?
And how does obedience to an absolute sovereign (this “mortal god”) square with the obe-
dience that is due to the supreme divine lawgiver? In 1755, on All Saints’ Day, Lisbon was
struck by an earthquake killing thousands of religious people. For thinkers such as Voltaire,
any rationalistic defense of God in light of such undeserved and horrendous suffering is quite
simply unbearable. To maintain, as Leibniz had done in his famous Theodicy of 1710, that this
is the “best of all possible worlds” sounds cynical and absurd. In hindsight we could say that
the Lisbon events, at least in Europe, inaugurate the gradual retreat of God from the realm
of human affairs, leaving us with the – if not even more daunting – task of coming to grips
with human evil in the absence of God (see here the work of Sade and Nietzsche). The mass
atrocities of the first half of the twentieth century make it necessary to reconsider or recalibrate
the notion of evil once again. First, what is the nature of this unspeakable and large-scale evil?
It seems that, in light of such events, these actions being called “very, very wrong” does not
fully capture their wrongness. Yet, if so, then what sets evil apart from ordinary wrongdoing?
Second, what is the relation between such evil and politics or ideology? What institutional or
political design fosters or enables such evil? And, finally, what kind of perpetrator need we
presuppose to understand and explain these genocides and mass killings? Are perhaps ordinary
people capable of unordinary, off-the-scale wrongdoing? Some believe that in the decades
after World War II the interest in evil slowly waned (although there was no shortage of events
similar to those who rekindled the debate. . .), but that it reappeared, once more, after the
events of 9/11,1 perhaps as a piece of strategic political rhetoric meant to justify outrageous
actions of “retribution,” or perhaps as a mere expression of our most forceful moral condem-
nation of a certain type of human actions.
Thinking about evil – the recent secular approach

Since World War II two strong yet opposing views on how best to think about the concept
of evil have gained traction. Firstly, the increasing influence of the social and natural sciences
in explaining human behavior seemed to make the concept itself redundant at best. Human
behavior is most accurately explained through understanding a combination of social (environ-
mental) and genetic factors. If we better comprehend these influences on and causes of human
behavior, the use of an outmoded and opaque concept such as evil can be dismissed as a relic
of a religious and ignorant past. Psychopaths, for example, are not evil but driven by a defect in
their neurobiology: rapists, murderers, and thieves are appropriately and properly understood
as reacting to environmental factors such as a deprived and brutal childhood combined with
a predisposition to aggression due to genetic factors. Evil, if this term means anything at all,
is best seen as something like an “empathy deficit” that results from knowable biological and
social factors.2
In the unprecedented secular milieu of the last 50 years, in many Western societies the sci-
ences, both natural and social, have raised considerable doubts if not outright dismissal of many
earlier claims made by religious doctrines. This in turn, as mentioned above, generated a strong
skepticism about the plausibility and need for such a concept at all. Furthermore, even if we
push the skepticism aside, we face the problem that the term “evil” is ambiguous and varies
2
Introduction
in different contexts or with the intended purpose for which it is used. This serves to confuse
rather than clarify our understanding of contemporary secular accounts of evil.
To give a flavor of this confusion, we find that the term evil is sometimes used synonymously
with the concept of wrongdoing. Claiming that an action or person is evil is merely to state that
that action or person was wrong. Furthermore, the term “evil” is used to refer to catastrophic
natural disasters such as earthquakes or volcanoes, where the focus is on the immense suffer-
ing that these events caused. Evil also has a rich and lengthy history within religious discourse,
where it refers to those who engage in certain kinds of sin against God. This is prevalent even
in largely secular societies, where the historical legacy of the term is still used and understood
by significant numbers in the society. Here evil picks out supernatural monsters and devils who
seek to undermine God’s commandments and goodness in general. People can be monstrous
and for some there are malevolent independent forces in the world trying to undermine the
natural order and/or lead human beings astray.
Secondly, evil is used in contemporary secular societies to refer to cases of moral evil,
either as an intensifier to capture particularly severe forms of wrongdoing and/or to point to
a concerning normative qualitative difference from mere wrongdoing. Evil actions or persons
provoke a special kind of response, a moral horror that marks out the distinct properties of evil in
our moral landscape. This use of the term evil has led to a conviction that has recently gained
traction: that the notion of evil is a necessary and valuable part of our moral vocabulary and
that it must be rehabilitated from the prejudices and errors that plagues this term given its reli-
gious baggage of the past. The catastrophe of World War II, where the Nazi ideology enabled
the attempted genocide of the Jews and others, combined with the savagery of the fighting
(especially on the Eastern Front), revived a concern that a proper ethical discussion of such
events required a term such as evil. Without it, the events experienced, and the subsequent
horrors of the second half of the twentieth century and the early part of the twenty-first cen-
tury such as the Rwandan genocide3 of Tutsis, the murderous regime of the Khmer Rouge,
and the events of 9/11 in the USA (to mention just three), cannot be adequately described in
simple normative terms. To say such events were merely wrong or even very wrong fails to
capture a qualitatively different aspect of our moral reality. What is more, in societies where
the influence of religious authorities has diminished considerably or is very weak, the general
population, understand, and respond to, the term evil when it is used to describe particularly
egregious actions of individuals or groups. Serial killers, rapists, pedophiles, corrupt officials,
and organized crime bosses are described as evil without this term evoking any religious con-
notations or assumptions. The secular account of evil fills this gap in ethical discourse when
particularly egregious acts call out for an adequate description which fits with our feelings
about it. Evil indicates a case of wrongdoing which crosses a certain threshold – either quanti-
tatively (the amount of wrongdoing is enormous) or because it has a qualitatively different set
of characteristics (from the standard cases of mere wrongdoing). Evil persons engage in behav-
iors that are both quantitatively and qualitatively different from wrongdoing and, to signal this,
evil is a necessary, useful, and explanatory concept in our vocabulary, one that enables us to
properly describe our moral reality.
Given these competing trends, the last several decades have seen a resurgence of work on
the concept of evil by philosophers seeking to develop a coherent secular account of evil. As
already mentioned, the central goal is to rehabilitate the notion of evil without evoking the
historical and discredited religious and metaphysical accounts from the past but nevertheless
addressing many of the concerns these past accounts explored. The development of a secular
account of evil must take into account our deeply held intuitions and recent social and sci-
entific insights concerning human behavior and character, and engage in a careful conceptual
3
analysis of the concept using a method of “reflective equilibrium.”4 The arguments between
contemporary philosophers on the efficacy and need for this very aim is instructive. Evil
skeptics5 argue that a rehabilitation of the concept is both not necessary and politically danger-
ous. The concept of evil offers no explanatory insights and its use in secular contexts is almost
always by powerful groups or persons who marginalize and exclude opponents for their own
advantage. For example, Cole argues that President George W. Bush’s usage of the term the
“Axis of Evil” in his State of the Union address in January 2002 to refer to the nations of
Iran, Iraq, and North Korea was intended to demonize these countries, paving the way for
the future illegal invasion of Iraq. Similarly, when the police and judge in the Jamie Bulger
case referred to his killers as evil and their actions as “unparalleled evil and barbarity,” this
served to demonize and distinguish them from the rest of humanity.6 Evil skeptics take to heart
Dostoevsky’s claim that “Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more dif-
ficult than to understand him.”7
However, this kind of evil skepticism faces problems of its own. As Delbanco points out,
we live in a world where there are so many terrible things happening that a proper normative
description and evaluation of such events and persons call for a special term.
The repertoire of evil has never been richer. Yet never have our responses been so
weak. We have no language for connecting our inner lives with the horrors that pass
before our eyes in the outer world.8
Seeking a scientific or psychological term to replace evil leave us trying, for example, to explain
why individuals engaged in mass murder or genocide have a mental disorder where we vitiate
their responsibility for the most heinous, cruel, and sadistic acts. Rejecting a normative notion
of evil for a scientific explanation such as an “empathy deficit” or a “mental disorder” leaves
us unable to properly express an important and difficult part of our moral reality. Yet, if the
concept of evil remains tied to the old religious accounts and is treated as out of date metaphor,
we become unable to express an important aspect of our moral world. Hence the new wave of
philosophical examination of the concept by those who have been labeled as “evil revivalists.”
These theorists seek to renew our understanding of evil but through rigorously secular eyes and
draw on the best philosophical, artistic, social, and natural scientific knowledge we have about
persons and society. This is coupled with a trenchant conceptual analysis in order to find a
comprehensive and persuasive conception of evil which is both plausible and fits with our best
intuitions and experiences. Certain terrible deeds committed by individuals, groups, and nations
are rightly described as evil, but framed by a theory and guided by clear principles which do
not rely on discredited religious and/or metaphysical world views of the past. Evil, here, simply
signifies a particularly egregious or horrendous act or person for which the usual negative judg-
mental and condemnatory moral labels are not adequate.
The purpose and structure of the Handbook

If the evil revivalists are correct, what can we learn from historical accounts of evil offered
by the great thinkers and philosophers of the past? And does the existence of a viable secular
conception of evil have important implications for a range of other issues of great concern?
For example, if we can identify evil persons, how does this affect our understanding of pun-
ishment and forgiveness? Both of these concepts have been developed with ordinary cases of
moral wrongdoing in mind. Evildoing, with its qualitative difference from mere wrongdo-
ing, shakes the very foundational assumptions underlying these notions. Can one forgive evil?
4
Introduction
What is an appropriate way to punish those who have engaged in evil actions or who pos-
sess an evil character? The answers to these questions are far from obvious and illustrate how
the effects of evil infiltrate into the efficacy of other concepts and institutional practices in
certain circumstances.
Given all the above concerns and issues, a handbook on evil ought to fulfill a number of
criteria. First, it needs to provide the reader with a solid and wide-ranging set of reflections on
the notion of evil. Given the enormous range of historical and contemporary writings on this
subject, it was necessary to select those topics which are most salient to understanding its history,
contemporary developments, and wide impact on different moral, social, and political issues.
Second, the handbook needs to offer the reader an insight into the rich heritage of analysis of the
concept of evil within the Western canon of philosophical thought.9 We begin with Plato, who
wrote in circa 430 BCE, and follow this discussion until the end of the first half of the twentieth
century with Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus. This provides the background and context
within which the secular theories of the last 30 years have been developed. The third criterion
for a handbook is that it provides the reader with current debates on the topic and especially
those which have taken a new and interesting turn, namely how the recent secular conceptions
of evil disturb our previous understanding of moral and social ideas, for example notions such as
power and freedom. The fourth and final criterion for a handbook is to provide readers with a
view outside of the usual parameters of the Western canon and offer a glimpse of the views of
evil in other non-Western traditions.
This Handbook on evil seeks to fulfill all four criteria. It is divided into three sections:
1 Historical accounts of evil

2 Secular accounts of evil
3 Issues: philosophical, political, and social (these reoccur from historical accounts but within
the context of contemporary work done on these topics).
As already pointed out, the historical section covers almost 2,500 years of thought from Plato
to Camus. To give an exhaustive account of the debate over this period is clearly impossible
and, as such, choosing which historical thinkers to focus upon is necessarily highly selective and
open to much debate. The choices made for this Handbook were based on a judgment of which
thinkers made significant or paradigm-shifting arguments concerning the concept of evil that
either subsumed the place of the previous status quo or forced a serious rethinking of many key
ideas. Alternatively, some of these thinkers extended the notion of evil to cover new political
and social events which had previously not been the focus of evil scholarship. All the historical
figures, then, are outstanding philosophers on the topic of evil and had considerable influence
for our understanding of this concept within the Western canon. For example, it is possible to
see the deep influence of religion, specifically Christianity, in the accounts of evil offered by
Augustine and Aquinas but also the awareness of the deep inconsistencies and difficulties with
these views. The wide-ranging concerns and insights these great thinkers identified and puz-
zled over inevitably find their way into contemporary theorizing. And we can clearly see this in
the contemporary secular discussions which have blossomed over the last several decades. The
essays in this Handbook also seek to bring the different historical accounts to life and facilitate
the process of engaging with a historical set of ideas and issues in new and interesting ways not
previously done in this field.
The second section, focusing on recent secular accounts, gives an overview of, and fur-
ther develops, the scholarship in this area. It covers the issues of whether there is a need for
such scholarship as well as some of the key debates among the evil revivalists themselves.
5
This section covers the methodological questions about the study of evil and also offers
cutting-edge commentary on the different competing substantive conceptions, providing
the reader with a clear overview of the debate to date. The final section in this Handbook
examines topics which we need to rethink in the light of a revival and renewing of a plausi-
ble conception of moral evil. The concepts of power, freedom, forgiveness, and punishment
and the understanding of terrible phenomena such as genocide, are of fundamental philo-
sophical and practical importance and thinking about them through the lens of a conception
of evil provides new and interesting insights. The final essay in the Handbook alerts readers
to the enormously rich tradition of scholarship on evil outside the Western canon. These
accounts arise from long and venerable traditions which have delved deeply into the human
experience and illustrate just how rich and varied a discussion on evil must be to capture its
universal and timeless set of human experiences. The Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and Judaic
traditions have much to offer and their insights usefully challenge the Christian-dominated
Western orthodoxy, prompting the need to continually rethink the issues and problems that
the problem of evil provokes.
It is useful to outline and highlight the contribution of each of the essays in the Handbook.
Beginning with the historical section, Alina Scudieri (Chapter 1) reconstructs Plato’s thinking
about evil as essentially disorder, whether in its cosmological (metaphysical), political, or moral
dimensions. The universe is a “kosmos” ordered by a divine force; the good state is similarly well
ordered by the Philosopher King; and there is balance in the soul of a good individual. Scudieri’s
chapter both outlines and illustrates the novelty and radicalism of Plato’s ideas, thereby setting
up a view of evil which deeply influences many later thinkers on this topic.
Phillip Cary (Chapter 2) carefully explains Augustine’s metaphysical optimism and moral
pessimism, and pays heed to the tremendous influence of Augustine’s ideas. Created by God,
all being is good. Evil is therefore a lack of being, an absence of good (privatio boni). However,
all being (save God) is corruptible and, in the case of mankind, corrupted by the Fall of Adam.
W. Matthews Grant (Chapter 3) discusses Thomas Aquinas’s development of ideas taken from
Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, showing us, for example, how the project of theodicy (the jus-
tification of the ways of God to man) fits poorly within Aquinas’s thought. Moral accountability
requires being under some moral law, which does not apply to God, who is the ultimate rule-
giver. With Machiavelli we return to the relation between evil and the political already marked
out by Plato. Giovanni Giorgini (Chapter 4) argues that Machiavelli, contrary to a long-held
view, is not a “teacher of evil” seeking to subvert the moral labels of good and evil. Instead,
Machiavelli emphasized the different moral obligations and virtues required of good effective
statesmen. Politics is the realm of necessity and Machiavelli’s original contribution is his claim
that statesmen are often forced to choose between evil alternatives. For the sake of a noble and
desired political end, Machiavelli argues that politicians will necessarily act in ways that collide
with moral and religious imperatives. They will need to commit evil in order to bring about a
strong and thriving state.
The theme of sin, consisting in the trespassing of God’s laws, becomes an object of intel-
lectual debate and dexterity within Hobbes’s political theory. Laurens van Apeldoorn
(Chapter 5) explains how Hobbes is able to hold that sin is essentially man’s violation of the
rule of law, laid down by the civil sovereign (and not God), while at the same time holding
that God, though the cause of evil in the world, can never sin, for that would indeed require –
as Aquinas argued – a higher law. This becomes especially interesting vis-à-vis a non-Christian
sovereign, in which case Hobbes urges martyrdom (eternal damnation being worse than death)
or outward conformity with inner disobedience.
6
Introduction
The term “theodicy” was coined by Leibniz and finds its most famous, modern description
within his work. The theodicy problem is essentially how to explain the existence of evil in
the world when we have an all-powerful and good God. Why does God allow for this state
of affairs? Leibniz’s answer also provides us with the well-known and much-used distinction
between different kinds of evil: metaphysical (imperfection), physical (suffering), and moral (sin)
evil. Agustín Echavarría (Chapter 6) explains Leibniz’s view on how evil is characterized,
harking back to Augustine’s view as dissonance and privation, but with these interpretations
being “updated,” as it were, to the new scientific standards of his day. Most importantly,
Leibniz’s statement that God “calculates” and that such calculation cannot involve the impos-
sible considers “possible worlds” while choosing (i.e., freely actualizing) the best of all among
them. God therefore does not produce or will the evils of our world, but only (in willing the
good) permits them. Although perhaps most well known for its alleged absurdity, we now get a
careful and honest reconstruction of Leibniz’s thought that resists easy or facile characterizations
or dismissals of Leibniz’s account.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as Jason Neidleman (Chapter 7) explains, has a more “practical”
approach to the problem of evil: focusing on what obstructs human happiness, and how to over-
come this condition. Rousseau’s well-known answer is that these causes of our unhappiness are
social, not natural (or metaphysical), which makes us both responsible yet also able to overcome,
or at least address, the problem of evil. The root of all evil lies in self-love’s comparative nature
(amour propre): esteem of oneself based on the opinions of others. Although not necessarily bad,
Rousseau believed that his days were marked by an inflamed type of such comparative self-love.
But this comparison might also be the key to our salvation (even though we are unable to undo
the fall of man), as it makes morality possible, i.e., to see what unites us, what we share, rather
than proving our superiority by degrading the other.
Immanuel Kant introduced another term that has become prominent in the literature on
evil, namely “radical evil.” With this, Kant did not intend to describe something over and
above ordinary wrongdoing, but instead he used the term “radical” to indicate the innate
rootedness of wrongdoing in mankind. However, to say that this propensity is a flaw in human
nature would be incorrect. Our inclination toward evil is as much innate as it is freely endorsed.
Human desires, as such, are not bad or evil; it is our willingness to give the fulfillment of them
(our self-love) priority and precedence over the moral law. Matthé Scholten (Chapter 8)
explains how the possibility (and prevalence) of immoral actions poses a challenge for the
Kantian system, and how this leads Kant to his theory of radical evil. Scholten also reminds us
of Kant’s three “stages” in the development of this propensity: frailty (weakness of the will),
impurity, and depravity, while also defending Kant in arguing that diabolical evil – evil for
evil’s sake – is an impossibility.
This term, evil for evil’s sake, is often associated with Marquis de Sade. Sadism – the type
of behavior to which Sade has lent his name - is characterized by the desire to inflict harm or
suffering upon others. Sadists desire and deliberately intend to hurt and harm others for the
sake of their own sexual satisfaction. Although this shows that sadism is not performed for evil’s
sake, it does constitute a very worrisome type of wrongdoing. Thomas Nys (Chapter 9) argues
that Sade’s sadism is essentially unjustifiable and hence a problem for Sade himself and that his
recognition of this failure is precisely what gives his project its exuberant and frantic character.
Nietzsche is most famous for considering the evil of evil. He explored the use and purpose
of the qualifications “good” and “evil," and in his genealogical reconstruction argued that such
labels are the invention of the downtrodden, perverting the original notions of good (strong,
beautiful, healthy, wealthy. . .) and bad (as defective, not living up to the standards of the good).
7
Evil is a notion born out of resentment. However, in rejecting the absolute character of good
and evil, Nietzsche is also faced with a challenge: on what grounds is this critique of morality
itself possible? Paul van Tongeren (Chapter 10) shows us the remarkable and perhaps sur-
prising attempt by Nietzsche to move beyond judgment, beyond accusation: the only vantage
point from which his original accusations against Christianity make sense. He seeks to explore a
cogent and convincing attempt on Nietzsche’s part to indeed meet this challenge.
Peg Birmingham (Chapter 11) brings together two of the most striking innovations or
insights by Hannah Arendt concerning the concept of evil. First, evil – and what Arendt calls
the “radical” evil of the Holocaust – consists of the production of superfluousness, of men
made redundant, a process of which the culmination (and by no means the beginning) was
to be found eventually in the annihilation and extermination within the death camps. This
extreme evil is produced by impersonal institutional systems lacking demonic intentions nor-
mally associated with such extreme evil. This is what connects Arendt’s account of radical evil
with her second innovation: her famous report on the Eichmann trail about the purported
“banality” of evil. Eichmann, at least in Arendt’s view, did not have demonic characteristics.
He was a diligent bureaucrat, painfully normal in his ordinary ambition of being a decent
citizen and a good pater familias. His vice was thoughtlessness: an unwillingness to further
question his actions.
Matthew Sharpe’s chapter (Chapter 12) explains how Albert Camus addresses the problem
of evil on ontological, political, and psychological levels. The first level engages with the secu-
lar age’s struggles with the problem of theodicy. The second level wrestles with the injustice of
natural and moral evil. For Camus, political evil consists in the idea of justified murder (harm,
cruelty), a justification that can only “succeed” through flawed paralogical “leaps.” Finally,
Camus considers the question of motivation, of why people engage in evil. According to him,
our personal shortcoming in the realm of virtue (our own limitations and moral shortcomings)
lead us into another questionable “leap” by considering everybody guilty, bringing everybody
down to a base level.
Camus’s work brings us to the contemporary secular theorizing about evil. Section two
of the Handbook begins with a strong rejection of the very project that the subsequent essays
seek to set out and justify. Phillip Cole’s chapter (Chapter 13) makes a stringent and heartfelt
case for not needing a concept of evil and warns of the political and social dangers in adopting
such a term. There is no need for a concept of “evil” since we can describe and judge events
and persons far more accurately and sensibly with contemporary scientific language and ideas.
Furthermore, while Cole is not skeptical that the concept of evil exists, since it clearly does, he
argues that the contemporary accounts developed by philosophers with all their subtlety and
nuance have no, or very little, resonance within public discourses. In this fraught arena, the term
is used to demonize and exclude the other for nefarious and unjustifiable political purposes. We
are better off without it. Consequently, Cole is offering us an anti-theory of evil, one that calls
for its abolition.
Eve Garrard (Chapter 14) strongly disagrees and pushes back against Cole’s evil skepticism.
She argues that evil has explanatory power, is an essential part of our moral vocabulary, and
is very much needed for a full explanation of certain horrific behaviors and types of persons.
Garrard carefully sets out how, and to what extent, a secular concept of evil provides such
important insights and illustrates this by using extant contemporary secular accounts. Stephen
de Wijze (Chapter 15) endorses Garrard’s rejection of Cole’s anti-theory, arguing that there
is a concept of evil which is near universal and describes an aspect of our moral reality which
is qualitatively different from mere cases of moral wrongdoing. He explores the concept of
evil (as distinguished from the many different conceptions to which the concept gives rise)
8
Introduction
by exploring our pre-cognitive responses to this phenomenon. The phenomenology of evil,

captured by a sense of moral horror and defilement, reveals that this concept recognizes a
certain kind of moral inversion or obliteration of the very boundaries of moral discourse; one
that would make any tolerable social coexistence impossible. Further, de Wijze argues that,
by understanding the concept of evil in this way, it has a necessary part to play in our moral
vocabulary and demonstrates that evil is qualitatively different from wrongdoing.
Todd Calder’s chapter (Chapter 16) focuses on what he calls the “qualitative differ-
ence thesis” (QDT). This is an issue much debated among secular theorists of evil and it is
concerned with whether there is a qualitative difference between evil and ordinary wrong-
doing. This is an important issue for three reasons. First, if evil is not qualitatively different
from wrongdoing, then a good case can be made to abandon the use of this term altogether,
reinforcing Cole’s anti-theory. Second, if indeed there is a qualitative difference between evil
and wrongdoing, then those conceptions of evil that do not reflect this fact can be summarily
dismissed. Third, it is important to care about the QDT as doing so will help avoid the con-
ceptual confusion that this issue provokes. Calder takes a different approach to resolving the
QDT from de Wijze’s analysis of the pre-cognitive reactions. He offers four interpretations
of how evil is qualitatively different and argues for what he calls the “moderate version”: the
case where the concept of evil and the concept of wrongdoing differ as they do not share all
of the same essential properties.
The next three chapters, by Peter Brian Barry, Luke Russell, and Paul Formosa
(Chapters 17, 18, and 19 respectively) explore the different emphases of substantive concep-
tions of evil which have developed in the recent secular wave of scholarship. Barry carefully
explores what it means to claim that a person, as opposed to an action, is evil. He argues that
to do this we need to explore the sort of mental state dispositions constitutive of evil character.
To this end, Barry skillfully discusses and evaluates five different possible answers, those which
offer action-based, absence-based, affective, hybrid, and extremity accounts of evil character. Russell,
in contrast, focuses on evil actions. He points out that strong philosophical disagreement over
the nature of evil have resulted in numerous competing and plausible definitions. However,
our widely shared folk judgments and intuitions about evil lead to contradictory conceptions.
Russell distinguishes between psychologically thin accounts of evil, where actions are simply
extreme culpable wrongs, and thick accounts, which identify the relevant subclasses of the cat-
egory of extremely wrong actions that make an action evil. Our best intuitions about evil seem
unable to settle the matter of which definition is correct. Consequently, Russell argues that
perhaps the best way to deal with this impasse is to adopt a pluralist approach. This would enable
different definitions of evil actions to be applicable and relevant depending on the particular case
under scrutiny. Finally, Formosa explores what a plausible substantive conception of evil ought
to offer. He argues that there are four different types of substantive conceptions of evil actions,
each focusing on a different aspect of the action: its effect on victims, the motives of the perpe-
trator, the reactions of the spectator, and a mixed approach involving all three. Formosa argues
that the mixed approach is the most plausible and he sets out his own combination theory of evil
as an example of a credible and comprehensive conception of evil actions.
The third and final section in the Handbook explores the impact a secular account of evil has
on a number of important philosophical concepts as well as political and social issues. The first
of these concerns our understanding of the institution of punishment in society. Leo Zaibert
(Chapter 20) argues that if the notion of evil is indeed qualitatively different from the merely
bad or immoral then it is not clear how punishment properly captures this qualitative differ-
ence. Zaibert cites horrendous events, such as the Holocaust, to locate the qualitative difference
of mass evil, which challenges the usual justifications for punishment and what would be a
9
proportional response. Our legal systems seem incapable of making a distinction for purposes
of imposing punishment between those who do very wrong and those who engage in evil acts.
How does the punishment of a murderer differ from the appropriate and proportionate punish-
ment of an evil mass murderer? Zaibert demonstrates this concern with an exploration of several
prominent accounts of evil where he clearly shows that full and systematic answers to the puzzle
of punishing evildoers remain complex and elusive.
If the concept of evil raises difficulties for how we are to understand punishment, it is no less
the case for the notion of forgiveness. Kathryn Norlock (Chapter 21) notes that in the past
25 years more has been written on both evil and forgiveness than in the many previous centuries
combined. Evil and forgiveness share a short history in recent philosophical literature but, as
Norlock makes clear, there is a cluster of difficult questions that recur in philosophical discus-
sions of this relationship. Is evil unforgivable? If it is, does forgiveness entail reconciliation with
the evildoer? Norlock examines these and other questions in order to provide the reader with a
synopsis of the complicated terrain upon which evil and forgiveness interact.
Lars Svendsen (Chapter 22) explores a longstanding and very complex issue which any
examination of evil needs to address. The very possibility of moral evil presupposes the exist-
ence of free will. All moral concepts, and evil is no exception, can only be properly ascribed
to acts and persons if agents are autonomous and can choose between different possible courses
of action unimpeded by external forces. To have a free will is to be subject to concepts of
responsibility such as guilt and praise. We don’t ascribe moral accountability to creatures
who are unable to understand moral principles or who are not in control of their actions.
However, recent studies in psychology and neuroscience make the assumption that we have a
free will highly questionable. If these studies are correct, we would need to give up, or radi-
cally rethink, our views about moral responsibility and with it the notion of moral evil. A
world without freedom would still contain an enormous amount of suffering, but it would not
be due to moral evil. Svendsen argues that despite these recent studies we have little reason to
give up on the existence of moral evil. The scientific data is not convincing and lacks sufficient
evidence to ask us to reject a notion of free will with its massive implications for ourselves,
other bearers of responsibility, and the efficacy of the social and political institutions which are
the bedrock of our civilization.
Simona Forti (Chapter 23) explores the concept of power, yet another key philosophical
issue that has enormous implications for our understanding of evil, specifically political evil. She
reconstructs the philosophical and conceptual history of this relationship in order to clarify its
hermeneutic horizon. Political evil has been standardly conceptualized in the twentieth century
through a particular dominant paradigm. Forti argues that we need to question whether the
conceptual assumptions upon which this paradigm was built are sound. And, more importantly,
is this paradigm still relevant today or rendered obsolete with new pathologies within power
relationships? Inspired by the work of Primo Levi, Forti contends that we need to think about
the relationship between evil and power in terms of a so-called “gray zone”: a moral domain
where strategies of power and counterpower, conformism and resistance, cooption and disobe-
dience defy absolutist positions.
Gideon Calder (Chapter 24) focuses on the issue of childhood, arguing that it raises spe-
cific questions about evil which demand attention in their own right. Understanding whether
children can be evil or commit evil acts provides insights which help provide clarity about the
notion of evil itself. Calder raises a number of interesting questions, among which are whether
children can indeed be evil. If this is possible, then are the vilest kinds of human actions mor-
ally worse when committed by a child? And is this evil inclination something with which they
were born, or did they learn it? While these questions might appear to be narrower, more
10
Introduction
targeted versions of generalized themes in philosophical debates, Calder argues that they also
offer insights which do not arise elsewhere. Consequently, any conception of evil which does
not consider its applicability to children would be incomplete amid its wider scheme.
Zachary J. Goldberg (Chapter 25) argues for a shift within the philosophy of evil literature,
moving from time-slice synchronic accounts to a genuine diachronic understanding of evil. The
moral history of the victim (e.g., having been an evildoer before) as well as the relation between
victim and perpetrator (an asymmetrical power relation characterized by the exploitation of cer-
tain vulnerabilities) matters, a feature often overlooked by these synchronic accounts. According
to Goldberg, “evil” as retribution to former evildoers does not amount to evil, precisely because
of this broader diachronic perspective that incorporates the history of both perpetrator and victim.
Although often taken as a simple point of reference in the literature on evil, Jonathan
Leader Maynard (Chapter 26) reminds us of the complexity in explaining the evil of genocides
and mass killings. He points out that the philosophical literature on evil and the research on gen-
ocides remain disconnected. Philosophers pay little attention to the recent research on genocides
and mass atrocities, while scholars of genocide display little interest in philosophical discussions
of evil. Maynard’s chapter seeks to address this lacuna in the literature and argues that empirical
studies on why and how mass violence occurs carry important normative implications for the
evaluation and interpretation of such violence and our understanding of the concept of evil.
Finally, Michiel Leezenberg (Chapter 27) presents an overview and comparative analysis
of some of the most influential accounts of evil in the Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and Judaic
philosophical traditions. He seeks to illustrate that there are important areas of overlap as well
as distinctive differences between and within these traditions. Leezenberg notes that there has
been surprisingly little sustained attention to these comparative or intercultural philosophical
views on evil by academic philosophers in the West. His chapter seeks to begin the process of
addressing this gap by summarizing some of the important literature in non-Western traditions
and thereby sets out the groundwork for future possible comparative analyses. The hope is that
this overview will spark further interest in the reader to examine these non-Western traditions
in more detail.
There are, to be sure, many more historical figures and topics that could have usefully been
added to this Handbook. None of the essays individually, nor even the entire collection of
chapters in this book, can be expected to comprehensively cover all the important issues and
debates on a topic as difficult and longstanding as the problem of evil. But every chapter in this
Handbook does seek to offer the curious reader essential background information combined with
a clear analysis of a particular interpretation or aspect of the problem of evil by engaging with
the arguments and controversies they face. In particular, each chapter provides a new and fresh
examination of the subject of evil and we hope this will provide the reader with a great deal of
food for thought.
Notes
1 See Shafer-Landau, Russ. 2004. Whatever Happened to Good and Evil? New York: Oxford University Press.
2 See Baron-Cohen, S. 2011. Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty. London: Allen Lane.
3 For overview of causes for this genocide see Nikuze, D. 2014. “The Genocide against the Tutsi in
Rwanda: Origins, Causes, Implementation, Consequences, and the Post-Genocide Era.” International
Journal of Development and Sustainability 3(5): 1086–98.
4 “‘Reflective equilibrium’ is the end-point of a deliberative process in which we reflect on and revise our
beliefs about an area of inquiry, moral or non-moral.” See Daniels, Norman. “Reflective Equilibrium.”
In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.
stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/reflective-equilibrium.
11
5 See Russell 2006 for an overview and analysis of the evil revivalism versus evil skepticism debate.
6 See Pilkington 1993.
7 Quote attributed to Fyodor Dostoevsky, Russian novelist (1821–1881).
8 See Delbanco 1995: 3.
9 We do examine a number of competing traditions from the Middle and Far East but, given that the
recent wave of secular accounts emerge from a Western and largely Christian background and worldview,
this is the primary focus of the Handbook.
References
Delbanco, A. 1995. The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux.
Pilkington, E. 1993. “Boys Guilty of Bulger Murder - Detention without Limit for ‘Unparalleled Evil’”
The Guardian, November 25. www.theguardian.com/uk/1993/nov/25.
Russell, L. 2006. “Evil-Revivalism Versus Evil-Skepticism.” Journal of Value Inquiry 40: 89–105.
12
PART I
Historical explorations of evil

1
PLATO ON EVIL
Alina Scudieri
Plato’s contribution to philosophy can hardly be overstated: he invented it. He took a

burgeoning activity which had been practiced for almost a century – the critical investigation
of reality – and gave it a method (dialectics), a purpose (the search for truth about the most
important matters for a human being), an epistemological status (wisdom, namely objective
knowledge of reality, which can be accounted for and distinguished from lesser forms of
knowledge), and a literary style (the dialogical form, which enables the reader to learn the
proper way to achieve truth). Philosophy for Plato had a moral and normative role. By know-
ing the truth about the world we live in, we are able to make the correct life choices and, in
the very common case for an Athenian citizen also having a public role, it is instrumental in
creating a good political community. For Plato, only those who know what is really good for
their fellow citizens can be good politicians. Finally, philosophy does not eschew the problem
of the existence and role of the gods in the universe and therefore is the only activity which
can safely claim to save our soul.1
A discourse on evil is part of the search for the truth about reality which characterizes
philosophy. This is a metaphysical question, with cosmic import (it affects the entire uni-
verse): Plato believed that the universe had been molded by a supremely good god; from this
premise he tried to explain the existence of imperfection and evil in the world. It also has a
political side, because associated human life follows and imitates the rhythm of the universe,
characterized by ages of divine supervision alternated by ages of human self-determination.
The philosopher’s discovery enables him (or her, because Plato came to the unprecedented
conclusion that women have the same intellectual abilities as men) to identify the problem
and seek out a solution. This will always be a provisional solution because evil in the world
consists of the imperfection that penetrates the universe and renders every human endeavor
provisional. In this chapter, we will follow Plato’s investigation of the problem of evil, which
is explored in different, albeit closely intertwined, realms. There is a metaphysical level,
which includes the problem of theodicy, or how to reconcile the existence of God with the
presence of evil in the world; then a political level, namely discord and civil strife in the city,
which are the emblem of political evil and pave the way to tyranny (the worst political evil);
and, finally, a moral level, connected to the problem of free will and the individual choice
of good over evil (or vice versa). The key to understanding Plato’s notion of evil consists of
realizing that evil is never a self-standing metaphysical principle. In the realms of metaphysics,
15
Alina Scudieri
ethics and politics the foundational principle is the good; evil is a derivative concept as it is
conceived as absence of good, a kind of imperfection and decline determined by the necessary
circumstances present in our universe.
Metaphysics: evil and the structure of the universe

Human life and human action happen in a world which is not a human creation. It is the result
of the ordering activity of a divine entity which Plato calls the Demiurge, or Craftsman, on
the preexisting matter. Plato never arrived at a creationist view of the origin of the universe,
for he believed that both the ideas – the forms of reality – and matter were eternal, and the
Demiurge’s activity consisted in putting order in the disorderly original matter.2 This explains
why ours is both the best possible world and an imperfect world:3 if a better world were pos-
sible, God would have formed it, because God is the epitome of everything that is good; on
the other hand, the inevitable presence of matter in this world and the circumstances in which
the Demiurge works make it imperfect. This is the lesson we learn from the Timaeus, whose
account Plato’s describes as an eikos mythos, a “truthful discourse and not a fanciful myth.”4
Before examining Plato’s cosmology, we should recall two important facts. First, the ori-
gin and nature of the universe was an ancient and fundamental topic. One of the first literary
documents of Greek civilization, Hesiod’s Theogony, was an account of the origin of the world
presented as the successive appearance of gods in it.5 The heavenly bodies were conceived as
gods and therefore the secular, empirical study of the sky and the planets was seen with sus-
picion in many quarters: this fact explains a decree the Athenian assembly passed in 432 bce,
named after its proponent, the soothsayer Diopeithes, that forbade the study of the heavenly
bodies.6 Second, astronomy was a very important topic for Plato, having a conspicuous role in
the curriculum of the prospective philosopher in the Republic: astronomy forces our soul to look
high in the sky and drives our soul up there (Rep. VII, 529a–b). Plato’s general view about the
universe is summed up by a statement in the Gorgias:
The wise men say, Callicles, that both heaven and earth, and gods and humans, are
bound by communion, friendship, orderliness, temperance and justice; and that is
why they call this whole an order [kosmos] and not a disorder [akosmia] or unrestraint
[akolasia].7
In the Timaeus,8 through the speech of the Pythagorean philosopher Timaeus of Locri and in
an evocative language, Plato distinguishes “what always is, without generation,” which can
be apprehended by the intellect through reasoning, from “what always becomes, without ever
being,” which is the object of opinion and sensation. The world belongs to the second kind
of entities. This universe, the only and the best of all possible worlds (29a, 31b), is a “living
being endowed with soul and reasoning,” molded by the Demiurge according to the image
of the eternal gods (37c), endowed with a body and a soul: the cosmos is thus “a movable
image of eternity” (37d). The god who ordered the universe was good and as such he was
not envious of his creation. He “wanted that everything be like him as much as possible”
(29e).9 However, like everything that has been generated, the world cannot be immortal or
completely indestructible (41b); indeed, because of its bodily, material nature and the cir-
cumstances in which the Demiurge works, “necessity” (ananke) is present in it together with
“intelligence” (nous): necessity is dominated by intelligence and persuaded to “conduct to the
best end the most part of the things coming into existence” (48a). Plato is careful to empha-
size in many passages that the ordering activity of the Demiurge never succeeds in completely
16
Plato on evil
overcoming necessity, also called “the errant cause” (48a), but only as much as possible.10 The
universe molded by the Demiurge, being endowed with a body, must have a spatial location:
this is a three-dimensional field, which Plato calls the “receptacle” (49a) and the “region”
(chora 52a–d). This second definition leads us to believe that this concept identifies the nec-
essary circumstances in which the Demiurge’s action takes place. The Demiurge is absolute
goodness and the good is the principle of the universe; however, imperfection and evil are
present in the world because of the “region,” the circumstances in which goodness operates.
The Demiurge is like a carpenter who, while working on a piece of wood, finds a node which
hampers his action: the execution is inevitably affected. Timaeus concludes that this world
is thus “a perceptible god made in the image of the intelligible” (92c) but is imperfect, more
specifically since “the production of non-uniformity is perpetually maintained, it brings about
unceasingly, both now and for the future, the perpetual motion of these bodies [the bod-
ies existing in the universe]” (58c). It is therefore because of a necessity intrinsic in the very
nature of our universe that nothing in it can be perfect or remain forever and everything is
subject to the law of change. Imperfection, disorder, and decline are the destiny of all bodily
entities; they are inherent in the physis of the universe: this is the necessary evil in the universe
and human beings have no way to intervene on this cosmic element.
When we turn to the Politicus, we find a similar notion of evil, identified as imperfection and
change due to the specific circumstances and arrangement of our universe. The central character
of the Politicus, a philosopher described as a Stranger from Elea (the native city of Parmenides),
reasserts the notion that “absolute and perpetual immutability is a property of only the most
divine things of all, and body does not belong to this class” (269d).11 Change for bodies etc. is
thus inborn in our universe, but this does not mean that it always has to be for the worse. In
fact, from this dialogue we learn that our universe is characterized by two rotation movements:
there is an age in which it is accompanied by God along its path, and there is another age in
which it is left to itself and thus devoid of divine guidance.12 This is narrated in the form of a
myth and the Stranger insists on this alternation between divine guidance and autarchy of the
universe, and excludes other possibilities such as permanent self-rotation, contrary rotations
effected by one god, or contrary rotations by two different gods (269e–270a). Plato wants to
make clear that there is only one divine cause in the universe.13 There is only one god, who,
being good, is the cause of everything that is good in the universe and is the creator of order in
the kosmos.14 Plato rules out all explanations of evil and becoming in the universe which imply
contradiction or imperfection in the divine nature as well as the existence ab aeterno of two
antithetical principles of good and evil – as in Empedocles’ cosmology, for instance. This idea
was also put forth in the Republic, where he has Socrates point out that God is the cause of all
the goods in the universe, whereas one should look elsewhere for the cause of evil.15 The age
in which the universe was under divine guidance is called the age of Chronos: in it everything
was generated spontaneously, including human beings, who blossomed from the earth old and
became younger through time, living their lives in a retrograde motion. All the parts of the
universe were presided over by minor gods and human beings were assisted by demons (lesser
gods); there were no political arrangements or private property with respect to material goods,
women, and children (271d–e). As a consequence (Plato always conceived of private property
as one of the roots of political evil), there were no wars or civil strife. We might surmise that
human beings were happier then, but we should resist this conclusion. For the age of Chronos
is characterized by the absence of eros, politics, and philosophy, which are fundamental ingre-
dients of human happiness. Human beings then enjoyed a kind of natural, primitive happiness
and they lived in communion with other animals. They were characterized by euetheia, a sim-
ple, spontaneous form of virtue which is unsuited and impossible in our time of complexity.16
17
Alina Scudieri
The myth of the Politicus does not transmit any sense of nostalgia, of longing for a bygone
original condition of happiness and virtue. On the contrary, it shows that our epoch, the age of
Zeus, is the real age of mankind, for in it we can enjoy everything that is typically human and
enables human happiness – especially through philosophy.
In the Politicus Plato describes the moment of change between the epoch of Chronos and that
of Zeus and stresses the differences between them. What is constant, however, is divine care for
the human race. Even in our age, when God is not at the helm of the universe, he never loses
sight of his “creature” and prevents it from annihilation in “the boundless sea of dissimilarity”
(273d). Even when the gods let the universe go without direct assistance, they still take care of
human beings and give them “the so-called gifts of the gods” (274c) – fire and the arts. Plato
maintains that it is because of an innate affection (pathos), the presence of a bodily element,
that the universe experiences change: imperfection and decline are characteristic of our age
and increase with estrangement from the origin. Plato uses the notions of “disharmony” and
“dissimilarity” to depict the estrangement from the original paradeigma and from the sameness
that is typical of what is eternal and divine; our age marks the prevalence of that principle of
indeterminacy and multiplicity which Plato had identified in the Timaeus. Evil, to be conceived
of as imperfection and change, is situated in this context of philosophy of history, characterized
by the cyclical alternation of epochs with opposite features. The age of Chronos will return,
but the real age of mankind is ours, the age of Zeus. We should note that, although change and
decline characterize our age (because of the progressive estrangement from the origin), ours is
not just an age of decadence. For instance, there is progress in the arts (a gift from the gods left
to mankind for their improvement); the creation of political arrangements, the art of legisla-
tion, and, finally, the emergence of philosophy mark a progress from the original condition of
mankind.17 Even if we do not go as far as Stanley Rosen in maintaining that our epoch is the
real Golden Age,18 we notice that Plato’s description leaves the impression that divine guidance
and the consequent absence of evil in the age of Chronos. This stripped the universe of what
is most typically human: discrimination and choice between good and evil and, consequently,
morality. Indeed, it is exactly because the gods have relinquished control of it that the world is
open to human action. Ours is the age of human self-determination (274a) and herein lies all our
hope for possible happiness. The Politicus myth is not conducive to resignation and the nostalgic
remembrance of an age of perfection; on the contrary, it spurs us to action. Human beings, and
especially the philosopher, are required to act to bring society back to its divine paradigm. We
notice here Plato’s emphasis on the resemblance between the philosopher and God, a similitude
which is present in many dialogues.
This metaphysical structure of the universe is restated in Plato’s last work, the Laws. Two fun-
damental ideas in this dialogue have a special relevance to our topic. First, Plato here puts forth
a depiction of the original condition of mankind which integrates that of the Politicus. In Book 3
of the Laws, the main character, described as an Athenian Stranger, gives an account of the evo-
lution of mankind after a huge flood which is one of the catastrophic events which periodically
affect the world and all but extinguish the human race. In Plato’s picture, the few survivors “must
have been mostly herdsmen of the hills, scanty embers of the human race preserved somewhere
on the mountain-tops” (III, 677b). They were unskilled (apeiroi) in the arts but in a condition
of primeval simplicity and ingenuity (euetheia): lack of arts and instruments was matched by
absence of wars and conflicts. We are told again that, since gold and silver were wanting in that
primeval condition, wealth and poverty were absent too: as a consequence, war and civil strife,
always the result of inequality, were also absent (III, 678e–679c). The naïve simplicity of the
survivors made them believe that everything they were told was true, especially concerning the
gods. The ability to distinguish lie from truth comes at a price in our age of moral complexity.
18
Plato on evil
In fact, the development of civilization brought about “all the things we possess now: cities and
political regimes and arts and laws, and much wickedness – but much virtue as well” (III, 678a).
It is evident that one cannot have virtue without the presence of evil in the world: it is choice,
connected to wisdom and knowledge of good and evil, which makes morality possible. And in
morality resides our true humanity which, in a somewhat paradoxical manner, Plato identifies
with “becoming like a god”: the purpose of life for a human being consists of considering God as
a target for imitation, endeavoring to use one’s mind to reach the truth about the most important
things and acting upon that knowledge. In the Laws too, we get the message that this is the age
of human action. In the age of Chronos, the god,
who was a friend of humanity, set over us the better species of demons, who super-
vised us in a way that provided much ease both for them and for us. They provided
peace and awe and good laws [eunomia] and justice without stint. Thus they made it so
that the races of men were without civil strife [astasiasta], and happy.
( Laws IV, 713e)
The lesson we should draw from this account is that “there can be no rest from evils and toils
for those cities in which some mortal rules rather than a god.” We should strive to imitate by
all means the life in the times of Chronos: man’s salvation and the survival of political arrange-
ments is placed in the imitation of God and the philosopher is the person who made this the
purpose of his/her life.19
The second fundamental notion in the Laws for our topic is Plato’s explicit confrontation
with the problem of theodicy, the issue of the justice of God in a world rife with evil. We may
recall that Plato invented the word theologia, which appears for the first time in Greek in Republic
II, 379a: theology, the discourse about God, is also a discourse about divine justice and a search
for an explanation for the presence of evil in the world. In the Politicus Plato had ruled out the
possibility that God could be the cause of evil in the universe: imperfection and evil in the world
were explained away as estrangement from the original divine guidance. In the Laws, a work in
which the divine has a very prominent part, Plato seems to maintain the existence of two souls.
One is good, “full of prudence and virtue,” and drives the universe on an ordered path, being
thus responsible for the revolution of the heavenly bodies, which are themselves divine, while
the other soul is evil and moves the universe “in a mad and disordered way.” It is responsible
for the disorder and evil in the universe (X, 897c–e). This dualism never appears in any previ-
ous Platonic dialogue; indeed, it is explicitly ruled out. It is therefore very interesting that we
seem to find it in Plato’s last work. It is as if, at the end of his life, Plato had realized that the
magnitude of evil in the world requires a supernatural cause and explanation. We should, how-
ever, resist this conclusion. Plato’s views here are better considered as a merely counterfactual
hypothesis: our world is ruled by a beneficent soul and evil in it is the result of the imperfection
generated by the bodily part and of the necessary circumstances of the soul’s action.20 Never did
Plato postulate evil as a self-standing principle in the universe; it always refers to goodness and
the idea of the good. In this work, Plato is also intent in showing that there is a teleology in the
universe, which it is not ruled by chance (Tyche) or necessity (Ananke), but this teleology leaves
room for human action. In a very important and revealing passage, Plato states:
Since we have agreed among ourselves that the heaven is full of many good things,
but also of their opposites, and that there are more of those which are not good, such
a battle, we say, is immortal and requires an extraordinary vigilance; and the gods
and daemons are our allies, and we in turn are the possession of gods and daemons.
19
Alina Scudieri
And what corrupts us is injustice [adikia] and arrogance [hybris] together with folly
[aphrosune]; and what preserves us is justice [dikaiosyne] and moderation [sophrosyne]
together with wisdom [phronesis], these residing in the ensouled powers of the gods,
though one can see clearly a small portion also dwelling here in us.
(Laws X, 906a2-b3)
We should note that Plato is here saying that there are more evil than good things in the uni-
verse. If we read these statements in light of the Politicus’s myth, we may argue that this situation
only applies in our cosmic age, in which God is no longer at the helm of the universe.
I hope that from this account it emerges clearly that Plato labored throughout his life
with finding an overarching explanation to the existence of evil in the world. In an intel-
lectual career which spanned over 50 years and saw many revisions of important concepts,
Plato never conceptualized evil as a self-standing ontological principle of reality: he always
conceived it as derivative from the good. This applies also to Plato’s latest metaphysical views,
encapsulated in the so-called “unwritten doctrines,” which have been the object of heated
scholarly dispute in the last two centuries.21 Since their existence is testified by many ancient
authors, including Plato’s pupil Aristotle, who mentions them nine times (once using the
explicit expression “as Plato says in the so-called unwritten doctrines”),22 I think the contro-
versy should be confined to the exact significance of the doctrine, while its existence should
be accepted. It seems that in his final years Plato had identified two metaphysical principles
as constitutive of reality: the One and the Indefinite Dyad, the former being the principle of
good and the latter that of evil. Again, it is important to stress that Plato’s emphasis is on the
Good, identified with the One, the principle of unity, which makes each thing determinate.
Evil is derivative; it is the principle of multiplicity, which ensues from the dissolution of unity
and makes things indeterminate.
Evil in politics: civil strife and tyranny

The metaphysical frame that we have just depicted represents the background for human agency
in the universe. Our epoch, the age of Zeus, is a time for human action because the gods have
relinquished their control over the universe. We cannot expect the gods to act in this age,
although they still care for human beings and, most important of all, by knowing their existence
we can use them as a standard for action. Politics is a very important sphere of human action
because it is responsible for preparing the conditions for human flourishing; however, it is not
the most important sphere because Plato is adamant in maintaining that only the philosophical
life can give the greatest and purest pleasures to human beings. This premise would already have
appeared surprising, almost shocking, to most of Plato’s contemporaries. For it was a common
assumption for ancient Greek citizens, especially if they lived in a democracy, that men real-
ized their most typical potentialities in the public realm, namely by participating in the political
activity of their city. This is what was expected of them; philosophy, on the contrary, was seen
as an extravagant, somewhat weird activity.23 Beside the unconventional premise, Plato’s politi-
cal proposal was stunning and incredibly bold, even for his contemporaries endowed with a
strong political imagination. To put it in one word, it amounted to nothing less than a complete
overturn of the ordinary meaning of “politics.” Especially in democracy, the political realm
was typically conceived as something common (koinon): a common space in which existed a
law (nomos) that applied to everyone. It was a realm of equality before the law (isonomia), even
though there existed inequalities in wealth, social standing, and so on. This ideal of equality was
20
Plato on evil
translated into the idea of equal participation of all (free, male, adult) citizens to the political
process: anyone who wished could wake up at the crack of dawn and participate in the works of
the Assembly, or could try to be appointed to one of the many offices in Athens. Instead, Plato’s
vision of the perfect city conspicuously features the absence of a gathering place for the people
and hence of the Assembly: general political participation is not conducive to the best decisions,
for people who lack knowledge will not give good advice; all public matters are instead man-
aged by those who know – the philosophers. The rule of philosophers, the union of knowledge
and power, is the best political arrangement. The reason is that it truly pursues the common
good; all citizens are able to reach a level of happiness which is adequate and corresponds to
their nature. Conversely, all other political regimes are wrong because they are characterized by
the rule of one part of the population for its sole advantage. Finally, the absolute rule of someone
who lacks political science is the worst political regime because no one benefits from it but the
sole ruler: enter the tyrant (and Plato will argue that not even the tyrant benefits from it). Evil
in politics is thus to be identified with ignorance in the rulers, which brings about civil strife
and misery for everyone.
In his political masterpiece, the Republic, Plato embarks on the search for the best political
arrangement built on the truth, which he understands as based on the reality of human nature.
Plato’s challenge is to design a city where all citizens, presupposed as characterized by differ-
ent drives, flourish and realize their image of happiness. The main feature of this city – called
Kallipolis, “the beautiful city” – is its unity, its being “one” notwithstanding the diversity of its
citizens. Plato deems this quality of unity to be present only in the best political arrangement;
all other existing regimes are characterized by the rule of one class over, and against, the other:
common people against aristocrats, rich against poor, the tyrant against all. This is the picture
painted by the sophist Thrasymachus in Republic I, which represents the foundation for the sub-
sequent search for the best regime. It is based on the observation of the reality of actual regimes
in Greek cities and Thrasymachus offers his famous statement that “justice is the advantage of
the stronger” (Rep. I, 338c–339a), which is inevitably the viewpoint of the established govern-
ment. In every political arrangement the ruling class makes laws to its own advantage, regardless
of the number of the rulers: democracy makes laws which favor the people, oligarchy for the
noble and wealthy and the tyrant for himself and his family. This situation, which is present in
all cities, is like an ailment for the body politic: stasis, civil strife, which can issue in outright war,
is the emblem of evil in politics. In all existing political arrangements, characterized by stasis,
there is no pursuit of the common good: rulers pursue what they believe is good for their faction
to the detriment of the rest of the city. We must note here that, by accepting Thrasymachus’
conclusion, Plato was not exaggerating his own case. He knew Thucydides’ depiction of the
horrors caused by civil strife in Corcyra and was certainly aware of the oath that the oligarchs
pronounced, in which they swore to hate the demos and hurt it with all their forces.24 Factional
strife, typically between the oligarchs and the democrats, if not plain civil war, was a typical
feature of Greek cities in Plato’s time. It is from this observation that the entire project of the
Republic, the search for the best regime, starts.
In the Republic Plato puts forth a famous analogy between the city and the human soul,25
or, more specifically, between specific political regimes and the arrangement of the parts of the
soul. He observes that every city is composed of people who are diverse, being characterized
by different images of happiness: these fall into three main headings. Most people love material
pleasures and place their happiness in wealth, owning beautiful houses, enjoying special food
and expensive wine, and so on. Some others, such as warriors and athletes, are driven by love
of honor and glory and see their happiness in the recognition of their merits and achievements.
21
Alina Scudieri
Finally, a few love the immaterial pleasure which comes with the search for the truth about the
most important things for a human being. This kind of intellectual activity is unique in making
human beings transcend their limits as humans: they approximate themselves to God when they
use their reason. Plato explains the existence of these three strata (or, less correctly, classes) in the
city by the prevalence of one part over the others in the individual soul of the citizens: the soul
itself must therefore be conceived as tripartite.26 One part (the biggest) is characterized by love
of gain and material possessions (philokerdos); another by love of victory, glory, and recognition
(philonikon, philotimos); the third part is distinguished by love of wisdom and the incessant search
for knowledge (philosophos). The prevalence of one of these parts, that is, the prevalence of a
specific kind of desires, is responsible for what a human being is: a farmer, a trader, or anyone
engaged in ordinary jobs; a soldier, a public man of some sort, or an athlete; finally a philoso-
pher. Care of the soul is thus an all-important task and the Republic is, among other things, an
extraordinary educational project aimed at creating citizens endowed with well-balanced souls.
The sound soul is characterized by its “unity,” by the fact that the three elements in it are har-
moniously balanced by moderation (sophrosyne) and the rational part is in charge. And, Plato
adds, “he who has a good soul is good” (Rep. III, 409c).
On the political level this translates into the view that those who made the search for knowl-
edge the purpose of their lives – the philosophers – are the only persons entitled to rule the city,
because they know what is really good for their fellow countrymen. Plato restates the value of
truth in politics, which had been denied by the Sophists. In politics, the only good political
arrangement is that in which power and knowledge coincide. Only in such a regime do the rul-
ers pursue the common good of the city. In all the other regimes there exists the same dynamic
of oppressor and oppressed, of a part ruling against another part well depicted by Thrasymachus.
This ideal of union of knowledge and power can be implemented in two different ways. Either
the true philosophers become rulers of a city, going against their natural attitude to devote
themselves only to theoretical activity,27 or, if “by a divine inspiration” the children of existing
kings and dynasts were taken by true love of philosophy, they would rule according to knowl-
edge and pursue the common good.28 Plato is unhesitant in stating more than once that such an
enterprise is difficult but not impossible – a sign that he conceived of his political works as pos-
sessing a practical nature, being both a blueprint of the best regime and a persuasive argument
about the reasons for its implementation.29
The features of the government of the philosophers in Plato’s perfect city are so famous that
I will concentrate only on a few points which are vital for my argument. First, it is impossible
to overemphasize Plato’s bold imagination and his daring in making such a proposal, especially
considering its details. Not only were the philosophers typically considered useless or even dan-
gerous people when it came to politics, but Plato dares to argue for equality of men and women
in the capacity to rule: something unprecedented, which was implemented in Western society
only in the twentieth century ad. Underlying this shocking proposal is Plato’s conviction that
women are capable to be virtuous in all fields just like men because they share the same soul
structure. Virtue and political capacity are not differentiated or limited by gender. For a con-
trast, it is barely necessary to recall that Plato’s most brilliant student – Aristotle – maintained
in all earnest that women are defective men because they lack deliberative capacity.30 Second,
Plato believed that through laws and a very specific educational system the philosophers would
be able to select the best ruling class and to enable all citizens to be happy according to their
image of happiness. They would create harmony and political friendship in the city, instilling
moderation (sophrosyne) in all citizens, which would preserve the unity of the city. The rule of
reason is conducive to all political goods. Conversely, evil in politics is to be identified with
what dissolves the political unity of the city and this is ignorance which creates factional strife
22
Plato on evil
(stasis), which, in turn, brings disunion and the pursuit or private interest. Plato was persuaded
that difference in wealth was the source of many political evils and civil unrest; he therefore
argued that the ruling class of philosophers should hold nothing privately and should have
everything in common: not only material goods such as money and houses but also women,
men, and children. Factional strife arises when the rulers cease to care for the common good
and start thinking in terms of “mine” and “yours”; then, harmony in the city ends and “dis-
similarity and anomaly” enter the city, and with them civil strife (Rep. VIII, 547a–b). With an
evocative image, Plato states that, when private property creeps even into the best regime, the
city becomes divided; namely, there arises a city of the rich and a city of the poor in constant
mutual war.31 There follows a progressive decline in the form of government, which gives rise
to progressively worse regimes: a mixed government which Plato calls “timocracy” (it is mixed
because the rulers are torn between philosophical pursuits, desire for honor and material inter-
ests), followed by oligarchy, democracy, and finally tyranny, the worst possible form of govern-
ment. Plato states clearly (see e.g. Rep. VIII, 552e) that the decline in the political regime is
caused by ignorance, bad education, and the form of government. This decline is accompanied
by a parallel decrease in the quality of the soul of the citizens: this shows that Plato had already
reached the conclusion that the quality of the political regime molds the character of its citizens;
hence the importance of creating a good form of government, which could mold good citizens.
Tyranny is caused by stasis and is the emblem of evil in politics and, as such, is worth a closer
examination. When Plato wrote about tyranny and the tyrant in the Republic, there had been
a debate about this form of government in Greece for at least 150 years. The tyrant emerged
as an ambiguous figure: on the one hand, he was despised and considered the worst possible
ruler, often compared to a wolf and considered the enemy of the political community.32 On
the other hand, because of the enormous and absolute power he held, the tyrant was seen as
a demigod, the most blessed human being because he could do whatever he so wished. This
image, evidently based on a sentiment existing also in democratic Athens, is present also in
Plato. Polus and Callicles in the Gorgias and Thrasymachus in the Republic take the tyrant to be
the most powerful and hence happiest human being. Plato’s first concern is therefore to show to
his readers that, far from being the most powerful and happiest human being, the tyrant lives a
miserable life of solitude: devoid of real friends, surrounded by flatterers, forced to always have
bodyguards to prevent assassination attempts, unable to leave his palace for fear that some of
his citizens try to kill him. The tyrant cannot do the things that ordinary citizens can do, such
as briefly leaving the country. In an argumentative tour de force, Plato succeeded in making a
persuasive case for a view that at first sight would have appeared very counterintuitive to his
readers. The soul of the tyrant, argues Plato, is in the worst possible turmoil and discord because
the worst desires dominate it and therefore the tyrant cannot do what is really good. In contrast,
the well-ordered soul of the philosopher makes him the happiest of all human beings. Tyranny
is a serious problem for the tyrant as it is for his subjects.
Another important feature of Plato’s portrait of the tyrant is his view that the most tremen-
dous and basest appetites characterize the tyrant’s soul. Eros controls the soul in its absolute
anarchy just like the tyrant rules the city, infringing on any laws (Rep. IX, 575a). Plato was
thus persuaded that someone is a tyrant first in his soul and then also publicly, especially if he
has the chance to grab absolute power. Tyranny is first an ailment of the soul and then may
become a political evil.
Finally, it is worth asking the following questions: Is this Plato’s final word on tyranny:
is it the last step and conclusion of the decline of the forms of government? Is tyranny irre-
deemable and the tyrant an inevitably lost soul? I am inclined to think this is not the case and
I wish to point to three pieces of evidence. First, Plato shows clearly that he is not averse to
23
Alina Scudieri
monarchy per se: in the Republic and in the Politicus he maintains that a king endowed with
political science – a “philosopher-king” – is the best possible ruler. Certainly, the philosopher-
king is the total opposite of the tyrant because his knowledge of political science enables him
to pursue the common good of the city. This consideration brings about the possibility of
“reeducating” the tyrant’s soul and of reforming his city. As we have seen, there is ample
evidence in his dialogues and letters that Plato not only thought that this was a possibility but
also tried to implement his project by visiting (three times) the tyrants of Syracuse. That this
is not just mere speculation is shown by a comment we find in Aristotle’s Politics. In one of
his many critical remarks, he states that Plato never explains whether tyrannies change and, if
they do, why they do so or what constitutes this change.
The reason of this omission is that any explanation would have been difficult. The
matter cannot be settled along the lines of his argument; for on those lines a tyranny
would have to change back into the first and ideal constitution, in order to maintain
continuity in the revolving cycle of change.33
The quote appears obscure to us because nowhere in the Republic (or elsewhere for that matter)
does Plato say anything like that. Aristotle, who had been a pupil of Plato’s for 19 years in the
Academy, cannot be taken as an uninformed witness. It is likely that he knew something that is
not written anywhere in the Republic or in any Platonic dialogue. Whether this was Aristotle’s
own elaboration or a development in Plato’s thought that he disclosed only orally to his pupils
we do not know. Aristotle’s wording makes me inclined to think that this was an interpreta-
tion of the theory of the forms of government well known in the Academy. Plato seems then
to have arrived at a vision, popularized by Polybius, namely the anakyklosis or cyclical theory
of constitutions. In any case, Aristotle’s remark supports the view that Plato thought tyranny
was reformable. From Plato’s works we can infer that he thought that the tyrant was not an
ordinary man, that he was characterized by a superior intellectual endowment but was led
astray by a bad education (see Rep. IX). Examples of actual tyrants such as Dionysius the Elder
or potential tyrants such as Alcibiades testify to this. In addition, Plato was clearly persuaded
that approaching a philosophically promising young tyrant was a quick and expedient way to
implement his view of the best regime, because of the tyrant’s enormous power and lack of
accountability: for the philosopher, tyranny could be a shortcut to Kallipolis. Plato’s visits to
the tyrants of Syracuse and his intentions there – as they emerge from the Seventh Letter and
from Plutarch’s Life of Dion – testify to his seriousness. Evidently Plato was persuaded that phi-
losophy had the ability to “rearrange” the elements in the soul of the tyrant, to place reason in
charge and therefore direct his extraordinary eros toward philosophy and the search for knowl-
edge instead of the basest desires. This operation of rearrangement would have amounted to
sort of a healing of the sick tyrannical soul and the philosopher thus emerges as a physician of
the soul: from absolute evil goodness emerges; from the worst form of government, the best is
created.34 This conclusion shows Plato’s optimism regarding the power of philosophy and the
possibility that goodness triumphs over evil.
The education of desire: morality, virtue and vice

Our treatment of Plato’s ethics must be prefaced by an observation. In ethics, Plato was just
as revolutionary as he was in politics, but this fact is not so easy to appreciate. The best exam-
ple is again in the Republic. In Book 1, the discussion about justice appropriately starts with
24
Plato on evil
two definitions which were traditional in Greek society. They are met by Socrates’ criticism
and immediately followed by Thrasymachus’ trenchant statement that “justice is the advantage
of the stronger.” Plato’s plan is evident: he wants to show how old-fashioned the traditional
definitions are, and the consequent bewilderment of the young generations faced by the sharp
criticism of the Sophists. Cephalus, the host of the conversation, describes justice as telling the
truth and returning what one has received. Socrates refutes this definition with an easy counter-
example: would it be just to return a sword one has borrowed to a person who in the meantime
has gone insane and could kill with it? (Rep. I, 331a–d). Cephalus leaves the scene and his son
Polemarchus enters the debate, trying to rephrase and defend his father’s definition (an act of
filial piety and thus of justice). Polemarchus maintains that what his father meant by “returning
what one has received” was that it is just to “help friends and harm enemies” (Rep. I, 332a–c).
Socrates, however, retorts that he believes that the just person never harms anyone, not even
their enemies (Rep. I, 335d). He was thus persuaded that wrongdoing transforms a good into an
evil person and therefore doing injustice should be avoided in any case. It is difficult to realize
how revolutionary this statement sounded to Plato’s contemporaries. It was a matter-of-fact,
obvious truth for a Greek citizen, a staple of contemporary morality: one only has to look at
any early Greek poet, starting with Homer, or at Sophocles, a contemporary of Socrates, whose
works are built around the principle that it is just to help friends and to harm enemies.35 In addi-
tion, the same view is present in most subsequent classical authors.
Platonic morality is founded on the famous Socratic view according to which no one does
evil deeds knowingly: evil is the result of ignorance, of not knowing what is good. Socrates
believed that, if someone had knowledge of what is good and evil, they would inevitably act
on that knowledge and choose what is good. A person who knows that drinking too much
alcohol will cause a deadly disease would only continue to binge drink if they were crazy. For
Socrates, morality was a matter of knowledge and consistency. Plato accepted this Socratic
picture of morality and supported it in many dialogues: it always remained the foundation
for his own view of morality. However, he realized that things are more complicated and
had the intellectual honesty to tackle the problem and go beyond Socrates’ teaching. Two
dialogues, the Gorgias and the Republic, are key to understanding Plato’s views here. In the
former, Plato realizes the limits of the Socratic doctrine: the final skirmish between Socrates
and Callicles, who admits to having been defeated by Socrates because he does not have any
more counterargument, is revealing. Callicles tells Socrates that he has been defeated but not
persuaded by his arguments and therefore refuses to continue his dialogue with Socrates. We
may imagine that he will go on living his life as before, considering the defeat in argument a
mishap in his career and without learning anything from it. Plato shows here he has appreci-
ated the Sophists’ lesson to the extent that “truth” (whatever this word may mean) must be
persuasive in order to influence people’s conduct. Socrates’ ethical intellectualism is helpless
in the face of this lesson. Very significantly, Plato chooses to conclude the dialogue with a
myth about the destiny of our soul in the afterlife. This myth reveals that wrongdoing harms
the soul even if this does not show externally. But the gods know this as they see the naked
soul without the external pomp, revealing the scars of all the wrongdoings committed. It is
revealing that Plato’s realization of the shortcomings of Socrates’ teaching is accompanied
by a myth, having the purpose to disclose a truth that cannot be argued rationally. It is the
admission of the defeat of reason but Plato then starts searching for a solution, which he
outlines in the Republic.
Building upon his awareness of the limits of Socratic ethics but wishing to retain the essen-
tial idea behind it (the role of reason in morality), Plato in the Republic identifies two problems
25
Alina Scudieri
which make Socrates’ depiction of morality more complicated. This is revealed in the episode
of Leontius in Book 4. Leontius, an Athenian citizen, was ascending from the harbor to the
city when he:
noticed some corpses lying on the ground with the executioner standing by them. He
wanted to go and look at them, and yet at the same time held himself back in disgust.
For a time he struggled with himself and covered his eyes, but at last his desire [epithymia]
got the better of him and he ran up to the corpses, opening his eyes wide and saying to
them, “There you are, curse you – a lovely sight. Have a real good look!”
(Rep. IV, 439e–440a)
Plato shows here he has identified the problem of “inner conflict” as well as that of the
“weakness of the will,” to which he offers a remarkable solution. In Book 4 he gives a very
detailed account of the tripartite human soul and inner conflict is explained as civil strife involv-
ing the three parts: desire, being the biggest part (Rep. IV, 442a; cf. 429a), overwhelms reason
unless the latter is aided and supported by the spirited part (thymos). Plato uses a political meta-
phor and speaks of a “civil strife” (stasis) among the parts; just like the body politic is ailing when
is plagued by civil strife, so the soul is sick when it is rife with discord. There is thus a “healthy”
condition of the soul, when reason, supported by the spirited part, controls desire, and a sick
one, when the parts conflict with each other and the basest desires inevitably get the upper hand.
The education of the spirited part is thus a fundamental component of the creation of a whole-
some citizen, because a poor upbringing will favor the appetitive part (Rep. IV, 441a–e).36 With
deliberate repetition Plato uses medical vocabulary in conjunction with a political vocabulary to
describe the parallel situation of the city and the soul. They are both “healthy, sound, whole”
when reason is in control and every part does its task. Justice consists of the harmonic order of
the parts as well as of the classes, when each does its proper business. Injustice, on the contrary,
consists of the strife among the parts of the soul which dissolves its unity. One final point. Plato
repeatedly states that there is an arrangement of the parts of the soul (and hence of the city)
which is “according to nature.” To create justice means establishing a natural (kata physin) rela-
tion of control and subordination among the constituents of the soul. “Virtue seems therefore
to be a kind of health or beauty or fitness of the soul; and vice a kind of illness or deformity or
weakness” (Rep. IV, 444d–e). This is Plato’s conclusion about morality: to be just and virtu-
ous is something natural: it is according to nature. Unfortunately, human beings have a natural
spontaneous morality, which is seriously compromised by doing evil deeds.
This is confirmed by the discussion of the immortality of the soul in Book 10 of the Republic.
There Socrates argues that the soul is immortal and that its true (aletheia), original (archaia)
nature is characterized by a “kinship with the divine and immortal and eternal” and by “love
of wisdom” (philosophia). This is thus the natural condition of the soul but injustice and other
vices such as indiscipline, cowardice, and ignorance make it evil and weaken it, severing it from
the body.37 Plato decided to reinforce this argument with a myth, which he places at the end of
the Republic, concerning the destiny of our soul in the afterlife. Er, a soldier killed in battle and
who resurrected after 12 days, was able to narrate what he saw in the netherworld: he reported
that the soul, being immortal, has the opportunity to choose a new body and therefore a new
life. In that choice “lies the greatest danger” because the soul can make a correct choice only
if it is able to see beyond the appearances of the new life. For instance, the first soul asked to
choose grabbed the life of a tyrant, not knowing the terrible evils that lay behind it. Only if we
have practiced philosophy in our previous life can we be sure to make a correct choice in the
afterlife (Rep. X, 618c–620a).
26
Plato on evil
Philosophy thus emerges as a way of life, the only life choice which can enable us to
choose what is good and avoid what is evil in this world; and to make the correct choice in
the afterlife.38 Enabling us to see what is true beyond the appearances, philosophy is the only
activity which makes human beings the closest approximation to complete goodness and
knowledge, namely God.
Notes
1 On Plato’s view of philosophy see Vegetti 2003.
2 On Plato’s Demiurge and his ordering action see Sedley 2008. Sedley states right from the Preface that
ancient Greek philosophers never questioned the fact that even a divine creator would have to use
preexisting materials (xvii).
3 This is a view that Leibniz will later adopt and develop with his notion of “The best of all possible
worlds” in his theodicy. See Leibniz 1710; a good modern translation can be found in Leibniz 1989.
4 Plato’s words can also be translated as “a likely account”: Timaeus 26c; cf. 29d and 68d. On this play on
words see Burnyeat 2009. On the role of myth in Plato’s works see Morgan 2004: 271–7 on the notion
of “likely account.” Also Collobert, Destrée, and Gonzalez 2012.
5 On Plato’s borrowings from Hesiod see the essays in Boys-Stones-Haubold 2010.
6 We gather this information from Plutarch, Life of Pericles, 32, 1: Aspasia, Pericles’ mistress, was accused of
impiety (asebeia) and “Diopeithes brought in a bill providing for the public impeachment of such as did
not believe in gods, or who taught doctrines regarding the heavens.” These circumstances also explain
the many trials for impiety against sophists and natural philosophers in the fifth century.
7 Plato, Gorgias 507e–508a.
8 An excellent introduction to this dialogue can be found in the entry “Plato’s Timaeus” by Zeyl and
Sattler in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-timaeus.
9 An excellent treatment of the Demiurge can be found in Carone 2005. Carone believes that the mind
of God should be conceived as immanent to the universe and therefore the Demiurge should not be
seen as a separate god.
10 Necessity had already been correctly identified with “the indeterminate, the inconstant, the anoma-
lous” by Grote 1865: III: 249. Later Grote adds that “by Necessity (as has been said before) Plato means
random, indeterminate, chaotic, pre-existent, spontaneity of movement or force” (266). Necessity thus
represents lack of order and the opposite of finalism. See also Cornford 1937 and. Morrow 1950.
11 Politicus 269d. See also Republic VII, 530a–b, where Socrates maintains that the relation between day
and night, and between the heavenly bodies, cannot be immutable and invariable because these entities
are bodily and visible. In that passage too, Socrates speaks of the “Demiurge of heaven.” On the role of
astronomy in Plato see Franco Repellini 1989.
12 Some recent interpreters have maintained the existence of three ages in the Statesman myth. See Brisson
1995, who restates the opinion expressed in Brisson 1974. See also Rowe 1995; Saxonhouse 1992: 129.
13 See Cherniss 1954.
14 The situation seems apparently different in Laws X, 897c, where Plato speaks of a good soul which
possesses prudence and virtue and a bad soul: the one drives the universe on an ordered path; the other
moves it in a mad and disordered way. Cf. X, 904a for a further discussion.
15 See Plato, Republic II, 379c.
16 On euetheia see Giorgini 2016.
17 For a different opinion see Cropsey 1995. Cropsey describes the human condition in our age “aban-
doned by the god” as a “crepuscular scene” (134).
18 “ours is the golden age, at it is evident from the presence of logos and philosophy. Philosophy is the sister
of decadence. The rejuvenative function of the counternormal epoch is inseparable from a temporary
suspension of our humanity; it is a period of forgetting and silence”: Rosen 1995: 61.
19 On this notion of imitation of God see Sedley 1997; Armstrong 2004.
20 Carone strongly argues for this conclusion (175–6).
21 For an introduction to the debate see the monographic issue of the journal Methexis 6 (1993). For a col-
lection of the evidence in favor of an “esoteric” interpretation of Plato see Kraemer 1990. For a judicious
evaluation of the problem as well as an excellent bibliography see Vegetti 1994. Ross 1951, Chapter 9, is
still one of the most persuasive and well-balanced positions on the topic.
22 See Aristotle, Physics IV.
27
Alina Scudieri
23 See Ober-Hedrick 1996. This is confirmed by Plato himself in the Seventh Letter and in many passages
in the dialogues, e.g., Gorgias; Republic. On this view of political participation see the classic Arendt
1958.
24 Thucydides III, 80–84: “Then, with the ordinary conventions of civilized life thrown into confusion,
human nature, always ready to offend even where law exists, showed itself proudly in its true colours, as
something incapable of controlling passion, insubordinate to the idea of justice, the enemy to anything
superior to itself ” (III, 84 in Thucydides 1972).
25 For an introduction see Ferrari 2003.
26 On the intricacies of Plato’s image of the tripartite soul see Cooper 1984. Many fine observations in
Montoneri 2014.
27 Plato lays much emphasis on the fact that the philosophers do not aspire to worldly power and must be
“forced,” by a mixture of persuasion and compulsion, to redescend into the cave of worldly existence.
Accordingly, this fact guarantees that the philosophers will be uninterested in keeping their power and
will perform only what they take to be a service to the community. See Republic VII, 519e–521b.
28 Plato, Republic VI, 499b–d; cf. VI, 487e and VII, 540d. See also Laws IV, 709a–c, where the Athenian
Stranger maintains that the easiest and fastest way to implement the best regime consists in finding a
city ruled by “a young tyrant, endowed with good memory, fast in learning, courageous and magnani-
mous by nature,” whose soul possesses moderation and all the parts of virtue.
29 See, for instance, Plato, Republic VI, 499d;VII, 540d. See also the important final lines of Book 9.
30 Aristotle, Politics I, 1254 b13–4; cf. I, 1260a11.
31 On factional strife as the cause of decline of even the best political arrangement see Plato, Republic VIII,
545d. Plato opted for giving a mythical, evocative account of the origin of decline but the sense is clear:
he speaks of lysis, “dissolution,” of the unity of the city:VIII, 546a. On the “two cities” see VIII, 551d.
32 See Newell 2013; Giorgini 1993; Lanza 1979.
33 Aristotle, Politics V 12, 1316a.
34 I agree with the conclusions of Giorgini 2009.
35 See Whitlock Blundell 1989, especially Chapter 2. Note that this is also the view of Xenophon’s
Socrates as stated in Memorabilia 4, 5, 10.
36 On the education of the spirited part see the insightful see Newell 2000.
37 Plato, Republic X, 608d–612a.
38 On the conclusion of the Republic, and for a general appreciation of the entire work, see the classic
Voegelin 1957: vol. 3. On the notion of philosophy as the choice of a life see Hadot 1995.
References
Arendt, H. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Armstrong, J.A. 2004. “After the Ascent: Plato on Becoming Like a God.” In Oxford Studies in Ancient
Philosophy 26: 171–83.
Boys-Stones, G.R., and Haubold, J.H., eds. 2010. Plato and Hesiod. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brisson, L. 1974. Le Meme et l’Autre dans la structure ontologique du “Timée” de Platon. Paris: Klincksieck.
Brisson, L. 1995. “Interprétation du mythe du Politique.” In Reading the Statesman, edited by C.J. Rowe.
Sankt Augustin: Akademia Verlag: 349–363
Burnyeat, M.F. 2009. “Eikos muthos.” In Plato’s Myths, edited by C. Partenie, 167–86. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Carone, G.R. 2005. Plato’s Cosmology and Its Ethical Dimensions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cherniss, H. 1954. “The Sources of Evil According to Plato.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
98: 23–30.
Collobert, C., P. Destrée, and F.J. Gonzalez, eds. 2012. Plato and Myth. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill.
Cooper, J.M. 1984. “Plato’s Theory of Human Motivation.” History of Philosophy Quarterly 1: 3–21.
Cornford, F.M. 1937. Plato’s Cosmology. London: Kegan Paul.
Cropsey, J. 1995. Plato’s World. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Ferrari, G.R.F. 2003. City and Soul in Plato’s Republic. Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag.
Franco Repellini, F. 1989. “Platone e la salvezza dei fenomeni.” Rivista di Storia della Filosofia 44: 419–42.
Giorgini, G. 1993. La città e il tiranno. Milan: Giuffrè.
Giorgini, G. 2009. “Plato and the Ailing Soul of the Tyrant.” In Le philosophe, le roi, le tyran, edited by
S. Gastaldi and J-F. Pradeau, 111–127. Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag.
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Giorgini, G. 2016. “Progress or Regress? Plato’s Account of the Beginnings of Mankind.” In Nous,
Polis, Nomos. Festschrift Francisco L. Lisi, edited by A. Havlicek, Ch. Horn, and J. Jinek, 147–62. Sankt
Augustin: Academia Verlag.
Grote, G. 1865. Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates. London: John Murray, 3 vols.
Hadot, P. 1995. Philosophy as a Way of Life. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kraemer, H.J. 1990. Plato and the Foundations of Metaphysics: A Work on the Theory of the Principles and
Unwritten Doctrines of Plato with a Collection of the Fundamental Documents. New York: SUNY Press.
Lanza, D. 1979. Il tiranno e il suo pubblico. Turin: Einaudi.
Leibniz, G.W. 1710. Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l’homme et l’origine du mal. Amsterdam:
Troyel.
Leibniz, G.W. 1989. Philosophical Essays, translated by R. Ariew and D. Garber. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Montoneri, L. 2014. Il problema del male nella filosofia di Platone. Forlì: Victrix.
Morgan, K. 2004. Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Morrow, G.R. 1950. “Necessity and Persuasion in Plato’s Timaeus.” Philosophical Review 52: 147–163;
reprinted in Allen, R.E. 1965. Studies in Plato’s Metaphysics. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul: 421–38.
Newell, W.R. 2000. Ruling Passion. The Erotics of Statecraft in Platonic Political Philosophy. Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield.
Newell, W.R. 2013. Tyranny. A New Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ober, J. and Hedrick, C., eds. 1996. Demokratia. A Conversation on Democracies, Ancient and Modern.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Rosen, S. 1995. Plato’s Statesman. The Web of Politics. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University
Press.
Ross, W.D. 1951. Plato’s Theory of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon.
Rowe, C.W. 1995. Plato. Statesman. Warminster: Aris & Phillips.
Saxonhouse, A. W. 1992. Fear of Diversity. The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought. Chicago,
IL, and London: University of Chicago Press.
Sedley, D. 1997. “Becoming Like a God in the Timaeus and Aristotle.” In Interpreting the Timaeus – Critias,
edited by T. Calvo and L. Brisson, 327–39. Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag.
Sedley, D. 2008. Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, and London:
University of California Press.
Thucydides. 1972. History of the Peloponnesian War, translated by Rex Warner. London: Penguin.
Vegetti, M. 1994. “Cronache platoniche.” Rivista di Filosofia 85: 109–29.
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29
2
AUGUSTINE ON EVIL
Phillip Cary
Honored as Saint Augustine by Catholics, Augustine of Hippo (354–430) was bishop for about
35 years of the town of Hippo Regius in Roman Africa (a province consisting mostly of what
we would now call Algeria). He is the most important Church father to write in Latin, which
makes him the most influential Christian theologian in the West. The Church fathers were the
formative Christian intellectuals of the second through the fifth centuries. They were the first
Gentile writers who deeply engaged Jewish texts such as the New Testament (written almost
entirely by Jews), and the Old Testament (the Christian name for the Hebrew Bible), which
they accepted as holy Scripture, and which they understood and taught in the context of classical
education, rhetoric, and philosophy. As the foremost Latin Church father, Augustine’s eloquent,
subtle and resourceful interpretation of scriptural teaching became the matrix of Christian think-
ing for well over a thousand years in Western Europe. His writings had an authority second only
to the Bible, and became the gold standard for theological orthodoxy among medieval Catholics
such as Anselm and Aquinas, as well as early Protestants such as Luther and Calvin.
Augustine’s thoughts on evil are scattered unsystematically across an enormous body of writ-
ings. The citations below are meant to point the reader to key passages in some of his most
important and accessible works.
A two-sided view
In Augustine’s view evil has no real being, yet it is pervasive and powerful. There is thus a
two-sidedness to his thinking that must be understood. C.S. Lewis speaks for the one side when
he says, “badness is only spoiled goodness” (Lewis 1960: 49) and Martin Luther speaks for
the other when he insists that all humanity is in bondage to sin (Luther 1969). Augustine can
therefore be called both an ontological optimist and a moral pessimist. Ontologically his teach-
ing is, quite starkly, that “whatever things exist are good” (Confessions 7: 12.18),1 because God
created all things and made nothing evil. Morally, however, the fall of Adam initiated a reign of
sin and death that has corrupted all his descendants. This two-sided view comes together when
Augustine speaks of human nature itself as a good thing that is corrupted or vitiated, a natura
vitiata (Marriage and Desire 2: 3.9; Nature and Grace 39.46; cf. On Free Choice of the Will 3: 13.38).2
In Augustine everything that exists is good, but everything other than God can suffer
corruption, which is to say it can be deprived of goods that are appropriate or natural to it.
30
Augustine on evil
This privation is the basic form of evil; it is in fact a lack of form, a deformation, such as the
ruination in a ruined house, the illness in an unhealthy body, and the disorder in a wicked soul.
Hence there can be no evil except in good things. Evil is the corruption in good things that, if
it goes far enough, results in their destruction. So living things get sick and die, a house falls into
ruin and collapses, human souls grow vicious and fail to acquire the virtues needed for a happy
life, and communities become unjust and fall into internecine conflict that threatens their unity
and thus their very being (City of God 19: 12). The doctrine of original sin adds human nature
itself to this list of good things that have been corrupted.
To understand both sides of this two-sided view, it helps to know something about the
views Augustine opposed. In a nutshell, his ontological optimism is set forth in writings against
the Manichaeans early in his career, whereas his moral pessimism develops in his writings
against the Pelagians in the last decades of his life. The key question raised by his Manichaean
opponents is “Where does evil come from?” (Unde malum?). The key question Augustine
himself raised against his Pelagian opponents is “What need do we have of divine grace?”
Augustine’s answers to these two questions converge on the concept of free will and its cor-
ruption by sin. Because sin is a corruption of the will (voluntas) it is necessarily voluntary, he
argues against the Manichaeans (On Free Choice of the Will 3: 1.2). But, because the will itself
has a history going back to the soul of Adam, he argues against the Pelagians, its corruption is
not purely voluntary but an unchosen inheritance that it must struggle to overcome, and never
does fully overcome in this mortal life.
Evil as corruption in good things

To begin with Augustine’s ontological optimism: it is useful to bear in mind that what
“Manichaeanism” means in Western history was largely determined by Augustine’s anti-
Manichaean writings, not by the Manichaeans themselves. Gerald Bonner is unusual among
Augustine scholars in offering an extensive account of the Manichaean religion in its own
terms, as well as Augustine’s polemics against it (Bonner 1986: 157–236). Manichaeanism (or
Manicheism) combined elements of Zoroastrianism and Gnosticism. It originated in Persia with
the teachings of Mani, also known as Manes or Manichaeus (216–277), who presented him-
self as a prophet and apostle of Jesus Christ. It is sometimes classified as the last great form of
Christian Gnosticism, but most scholars treat it as a different religion from Christianity. In any
case, when it arrived in the Roman Empire it claimed to be the only true Christianity, and
precisely for that reason was resisted as a heresy by the Catholic Church. Although illegal under
both pagan and Christian emperors, it spread widely and attracted an underground following
that included the young Augustine, who spent nearly a decade as a Manichaean in his twenties.
The Manichaean question – “Where does evil come from?” – presented Augustine with a
dilemma. Either evil comes from God or it does not. Since no one wants to say God is the source
of evil, it seems we are forced to conclude that evil arose independently from God. From this
the Manichaeans drew the dualistic conclusion that there are two natures or kinds of being, the
one good and the other evil – the one derived from God and the other a race of darkness that
is as old as God is, a primeval nature that God did not create and does not control. This cosmic
dualism reinforces a psychological dualism: in the Manichaean view our souls are fragments of
divine light from God, while our bodies belong to the race of darkness. The ultimate aim of
Manichaean spirituality, like that of many Gnostics before them, was to separate the soul from
the body forever, so that the soul may return home to heaven unencumbered by evil.
Interestingly, Augustine in retrospect sees a materialist ontology underlying Manichaean
dualism (Confessions 5: 10.19–20). According to Augustine’s diagnosis, the Manichaeans’
31
Phillip Cary
fundamental mistake was to think of both good and evil as material beings. They thought that
both God and the soul are literally made of the light of heaven, the same corporeal light that we
see in the sun and the moon. Evil also is a material being, a dark and noxious substance that
composes our bodies. Augustine’s escape from Manichaean dualism was therefore decisively
aided by the antimaterialist ontology of ancient Platonism, from which he learned to think of
God as the incorporeal Good and evil as a kind of nonbeing (Confessions 7: 9.13–17.23). Hence
his answer to the Manichaean question is that evil does not come from God but is also not an
independent being, for it is not a being at all but a corruption or privation of being.
The two key terms here relate Augustine’s account of evil to both the biblical and the
classical traditions. Privatio, a term that Augustine uses occasionally (Confessions 3: 7.12; City
of God 12: 7; Enchiridion 3.11),3 is the standard translation of Aristotelian steresis, the privation
or lack of form, a concept that played an important role also in later Platonist accounts of evil
that were influential on Augustine’s thinking (O’Brien 1996). Modern scholars use the label
“privative theory of evil” to describe the Augustinian view because of the aptness of this term.
However, Augustine much more often used the other term, corruptio, and its cognates. This
is partly because it is found frequently in the Latin translation of the Bible, where it renders
the Greek term phthora and its cognates, which describe both the bodily decay that goes with
death (e.g., 1 Corinthians 15: 52–3; 1 Peter 1: 4) and the moral decay that goes with sinful
desires (e.g., 1 Corinthians 15: 33; Ephesians 4: 22).4 The term also has classical resonances,
as its cognate in English is often used to translate the closely-related verb, diaphtheiro, which is
the term used in the accusation against Socrates that he corrupts the youth of Athens (Plato,
Euthyphro 2c, Apology 24b).
Corruptio can refer to any change for the worse, hence any failure, disorder, defect or priva-
tion. In Augustine’s usage it is an ontological term, for it equates a loss of goodness with a defi-
ciency in being (The Nature of the Good 4–17, Enchiridion 4.12–13, Confessions 7: 12.18). Because
the concept is ontological, it extends to much more than moral evil or sin. In part this is because
there is only one Latin term, malum, to cover both what is called evil and what is called bad in
English. Hence the concept of corruption applies to bad apples, bad clothes, bad health, and bad
people. Anything that goes bad in any way is corrupted.
By the same token, so long as a thing is not wholly corrupted, it continues to exist and there-
fore is still God’s good creation. Hence Augustine can go so far as to say that every evil thing is
really an evil good thing or even “an evil good” (Enchiridion 4.13). This formulation is meant to
be memorable but not deeply paradoxical; it is merely another way of saying that evil things are
in fact good things that are partly corrupted. The important consequence is that there can be no
such thing as utter corruption, for that would be utter nonexistence – which is not evil, for it is
nothing at all. Because everything that exists is God’s good creation, complete loss of goodness
is complete loss of being. Thus to speak of the devil as “pure evil” is to think like a Manichaean;
in orthodox Christianity there is no such thing as pure evil. The orthodox teaching, reinforced
by Augustinian ontology, is that the devil is a fallen angel, one more example of God’s good
creation that has been corrupted.
Augustine’s thought requires a sharp distinction between “corruptible” and “corrupted,”
which is to say between the possibility and the actuality of evil. Everything God created is
corruptible, for it is both good and changeable (The Nature of the Good 1), which means it has
some form of goodness that it can lose (Confessions 7: 12.18). Changeability or (in language
familiar from the history of English poetry) mutability is for Augustine a kind of ontological
fragility or vulnerability to evil. It is not inevitable that things become corrupted, but they are
inevitably corruptible, for this is a necessary consequence of being created and therefore mutable.
Only God is incorruptible, because only God is immutable and thus free from all possibility of
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changing for the worse. Ultimate human happiness or salvation is therefore a kind of participa-
tion in divine immutability and incorruptibility which, though it cannot make a created thing
into something uncreated and timelessly eternal as God is, does stabilize the being of created
things so that they may enjoy what the New Testament calls “everlasting life” rather than a life
threatened by evil (Confessions 4: 12.18).
Moral evil as disordered love

For Augustine, sin or moral evil (the two terms are equivalent) is a corruption of the soul, spe-
cifically in the will. This way of situating moral evil implies that choosing evil does not mean
choosing an evil thing. Rather, it means choosing a good thing in an evil way, where the evil
is located in how the soul chooses and in the kind of love that motivates the choosing. For the
focus of moral evaluation for Augustine is the will, and every act of will is an act of love (as
every act of the eye is an act of seeing and every act of the intellect is an act of understanding).
Sin therefore is not incompatible with love, but rather is a way of loving that is corrupt. It is
disordered love, in which the will turns to good things in the wrong order, loving lower goods
over higher goods (like valuing money more than people) and especially temporal goods over
eternal goods (like clinging to a friend as if he could make you everlastingly happy). Since only
God is the eternal Good, only God can make a person everlastingly happy. To seek ultimate
happiness elsewhere – loving things other than God as if they could be the foundation of a
happy life – is to find only misery. This point is illustrated frequently in the narrative of the
Confessions and summed up in the famous prayer in its opening chapter: “Our heart is restless
until it rests in you.” The insistence on properly-ordered love is the backbone of Augustine’s
ethics (On Christian Doctrine, book 1; cf. Confessions 7: 16.22).
The simplest kinds of moral evil are sins of the flesh or carnal sins (“carnal” is equivalent to
“fleshly,” as it comes from the Latin term for flesh, carnem). Since the apostle Paul in the New
Testament identifies flesh (Greek sarx) as a fundamental source of moral evil (Romans 8: 1–13;
Galatians 5: 16–24), Augustine takes pains to distinguish the flesh from the body – for to identify
the body as the source of evil would be to think once again like a Manichaean. Augustine argues
that the whole human being, body and soul, is corrupted as a result of sin, but the source of sin
is the soul not the body, for it is the soul that wills, chooses, and loves wrongly, whereas the
body merely bears some of the punishment of sin, of which the most important is death (City of
God 14: 2–3). Sins of the flesh arise when the soul indulges itself in excessive love for corporeal
things (what we would now call “physical” things) that are appealing to the bodily senses (they
look good, taste good, feel good, etc.). These lower, external goods can be a source of tempta-
tion (Confessions 10: 30.41–34.53), but the direct cause of sin is always an act of will in the soul
(City of God 14: 11).
The sins of the flesh are relatively superficial compared to the sin of pride, in which what is
loved in the wrong order is oneself (Confesssions 10: 36.58–39.64). In Augustine’s analysis, pride
is the desire to become the basis of one’s own being, replacing God (City of God 14: 13). This
is the sin of Satan at the beginning, the first of all moral evils in the universe (prior to the sin of
Adam). It illustrates how it is possible to make evil choices even when there is no evil thing in
the world to choose. Satan loved a good thing (himself) in the wrong order (above God), and
this kind of love is a sinful disorder in the free will that God gave him.
An important consequence of Augustine’s view of free will is that the source of sin is a good
thing. Again, this is not meant to be a paradoxical claim. Like every kind of evil, sin can only
exist in a good thing – in this case, the will (On Free Choice of the Will 2: 1.3; City of God 12:
7–8). Thus God makes moral evil possible precisely by creating creatures with free will, because
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like all created things free will is corruptible. One could likewise point out that God made
blindness possible by creating creatures with eyes. The opposite side of the coin is that, precisely
because free will is a good thing, it is not neutral or indifferent between good and evil. As the
eye is created for the purpose of seeing, not in order to go blind, so free will is created for the
purpose of freely loving God and neighbor, not in order to make sin possible. Hence although
it is free will that makes sin possible, that is not its purpose but rather the way it is corrupted.
Sin is thus not an exercise of freedom but a way for the will to lose the freedom to accomplish
that for which it was created.
In Augustine’s very influential interpretation of the sin of Adam, it was preceded by the sin
of Satan, for the serpent in the garden (Genesis 3: 1) was traditionally the devil in disguise (City
of God 14: 11). Yet Augustine does not make much of the serpent’s role in the story, precisely
because Adam’s sin is like Satan’s: it does not depend on any prior corruption in the world, but
rather is in essence the proud attempt to become the basis of his own being. To live accord-
ing to self in this way is to fail to live according to the truth, which is the same as to fail to live
according to God (City of God 14: 4).
That moral evil is always a failure to live in accordance with the truth illustrates a deep
connection between will and intellect in Augustine. Disordered love is never separable from
cognitive error. Manichaean materialism, for example, is a moral as well as intellectual failure.
To think that both God and the soul are material beings is to fail to see either one clearly, due
to the impurity and corruption of the mind’s eye, which assimilates itself to what it loves, turn-
ing away from the inner light of Truth (which is God) to pay attention only to mental images
(phantasmata, in Augustine’s Latin) derived from things of the senses (Confessions 7: 1.1–2; The
Trinity 10: 5.7–7.10). Our souls were created with intellects meant to see God, but because of
our carnal habits we are always looking at external, corporeal things as if they were more real
and more desirable than the incorruptible Good, which is also the intelligible Truth and inward
Beauty (Confessions 10: 27:38).
Sin and grace

Augustine is known in the Western Christian tradition as “the doctor of grace” (where doctor is
used in its original Latin sense of “teacher,” one who has a doctrine) mainly because of his writ-
ings against Pelagius and his followers. Augustine and his fellow bishops in Africa succeeded in
convincing both the pope in Rome and a synod in Jerusalem to condemn Pelagian teaching as
heretical. As a result, “Pelagianism” has become a standard name for the heresy of denying the
need of divine grace for salvation. Like “Manichaeanism,” it is a term whose actual usage has
been determined mainly by Augustine’s writings against it, though once again Gerald Bonner
offers us an extensive account of both sides of the controversy between Augustine and his
Pelagian opponents (Bonner 1986: 312–93).
Grace, in Augustine’s teaching, is the inward help of God that is needed if the soul is to
overcome its carnal habits and live in justice or righteousness. (No difference between these
two English terms should be read into translations of Augustine, because they translate a single
term in Latin, justitia, as well as a single term in New Testament Greek, dikaiosyne.) Because our
will itself is corrupted, we cannot free ourselves from sin by our own free will (On Free Choice
of the Will 3: 18.2). Augustine often compares sin to a disease, with the implication that it is not
something we ourselves can cure (Nature and Grace 30.34, 48.56–49.57). We contracted the
disease by our own bad choices, but now the choices have become an inescapable habit, like an
addiction that we cannot overcome by our own willpower. By contrast, the Pelagian teaching is
that God has afforded us sufficient help to live in righteousness simply by giving us the law and
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commandments in Scripture, in addition to creating human nature with the power of free will
(The Spirit and the Letter 2.4). Hence Augustine will sometimes contrast grace and law, and other
times grace and nature, in both cases to bring out what the Pelagians are missing about divine
grace: that it is God’s own work in our souls, inwardly moving the will to take delight in loving
God and neighbor, which is true righteousness and obedience to the law of God as well as the
true fulfillment of human nature (The Spirit and the Letter 3.5). This inner gift of the righteous-
ness of God (justitia Dei, a very important term for the Reformation doctrine of justification) is
not coercive or alien to the will but is precisely what we pray for when we ask for God’s help
to live and love as we ought (The Spirit and the Letter 32.56).
In Pelagianism, living rightly is not a gift of God but is due to the exercise of our own free
will. Augustine, in effect, treats this as a psychologically naive form of moralism that underes-
timates the power of sin in our souls. The biblical commandments to love God and neighbor,
which are central to Christian ethics, demand not merely outward compliance but an inward
willingness of heart, which is not forthcoming among those whose will is corrupted by carnal
habits. We are in bondage to sin, not because some external force compels us but because in the
depth of our hearts we habitually take more delight in lower goods than in God. Hence, even
when our will is to choose and love in obedience to God’s law, we find the contrary will also
operative within us, still inordinately attached to lesser goods (drink, sex, money, and so on) so
that in fact we would rather not obey God. The result is an outward compliance with God’s
law combined with inward resistance, and thus a failure to achieve wholehearted obedience
(The Spirit and the Letter 8.13). Since both kinds of desire are present within one will, it is a will
divided against itself, which Augustine vividly depicts and analyzes in the narrative leading up to
his conversion (Confessions 8: 5.10–12, 7.16–9.21): old will against new will, carnal love against
spiritual love, hence (in terms taken again from Paul) flesh against spirit – both of which are
impulses within the soul, not a contrast between body and soul as in Manichaeanism.
In his anti-Pelagian works Augustine argues that behind our carnal habits is our vitiated
nature, which we inherited from the first human being. Not just individual souls but human
nature itself is corrupted, subject to a kind of hereditary moral disease, because all descend-
ants of Adam are born sinners. The matrix of Augustine’s thinking here is Paul’s contrast
between Christ and Adam (Romans 5: 12–21). By nature, we are born in Adam, but by
grace we can be reborn in Christ through baptism. This teaching of the Catholic Church
becomes the basis of Augustine’s key argument against the Pelagians, which centers on the
necessity of baptism for salvation.
Augustine’s doctrine of original sin means not just that we are all prone to sin, but that we
all share in Adam’s guilt. Even infants are not innocent. Despite having committed no actual
sins of their own, they are deserving of divine condemnation because of their participation in
the legacy of Adam, and there is no salvation for them without Christian baptism. Unbaptised
infants therefore suffer everlasting condemnation, though they are subject to the least severe
penalty of all the damned (The Punishment and Forgiveness of Sins 1: 16.21). Augustine draws on
deep roots in the African Church when he depicts mothers running with their sick babies to
have them baptized before they die (Sermon 293: 10; cf. The Punishment and Forgiveness of Sins
1: 18.23; The Literal Meaning of Genesis 1: 11.19). Pelagians have no way of understanding these
good Christian women, Augustine argues, because they have no understanding of the depth of
original sin, the evil we have all inherited from Adam.
Original sin is like inherited property in that it is ours under the law, with all its burdens and
liabilities, whether we want it or not. And it is like biological inheritance in that it is transmitted
to us by procreation, not merely by our upbringing (The Punishment and Forgiveness of Sins 1:
9.9–15.21). Its effect is in fact both moral and biological. As Adam disobeyed God, Augustine
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argues, so our bodies now disobey our souls: they grow sick and die even when our will is to
live, and they cannot function sexually without lust, an inordinate desire that is out of the will’s
control (City of God 14: 15–16). Hence in our fallen state the good of procreation is impossible
without the evil of sexual lust. This is the most visible form of concupiscence or cupidity, the
disordered love that Augustine contrasts with charity, his name for love of God and neighbor
(thus “charity” in the Augustinian tradition means much more than giving alms to the poor).
It is important to realize that for Augustine “concupiscence” can refer to any inordinate desire,
The cognate verb, concupiscere, is used in the Latin translation of the commandment “thou shalt
not covet” (Exodus 20: 17; Romans 7: 7). But specifically sexual concupiscence becomes a cen-
tral topic in Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings because of its peculiar inescapability (the human
race cannot continue without it) and visibility (since genitalia are moved by lust rather than
controlled by the will). Thus concupiscence can serve as a one-word description of how human
nature is corrupted after Adam, and specifically sexual concupiscence is what, in Augustine’s
view, makes that corruption impossible to miss.
Since original sin infects all of humanity, it makes everyone worthy of damnation. No one
can be saved except by the working of grace, which is not given to everyone. In the last dec-
ade of his life Augustine gradually came to clarity about the implications of his conviction that
grace is, by definition, gratuitous, which implies that it cannot be earned by our own will or
works (Cary 2008: 70–121). Therefore it is ultimately up to God who receives grace and is
saved. Adapting an image from Paul (Romans 9: 21), Augustine illustrates this ultimate logic of
grace by labeling the human race a “mass of damnation” (or sometimes “mass of sin” or “mass
of perdition”). God is free to choose part of this mass for salvation, while leaving the rest in
their original state of damnation. It is like a potter choosing to use one part of a mass or lump
of clay to make a vessel for honorable use (one might think of a chalice used in the temple)
and another for dishonor and filth (perhaps a chamber pot). The point is that the whole mass
starts out equally sinful and damnable, and therefore it is an act of sheer gratuitous mercy when
God chooses to save some undeserving sinners rather than others. This way of treating us sin-
ners is unequal but not unjust, Augustine argues, because no one gets anything worse than
they deserve. In a key biblical illustration that Augustine treats at length in a decisive discussion
(To Simplician 1: 2.1–22; cf. Enchiridion 25.98), the twins Jacob and Esau are born perfectly
equal, but only Jacob is chosen by the grace of God (Romans 9: 13).
God’s choosing of some rather than others for salvation is the heart of the Augustinian
doctrine of election (where “election” simply reflects the Latin term for choice). Since God is
eternal and has knowledge of all history from beginning to end, this choice is (from our tem-
poral perspective) predestined, decided upon before our birth. So, in Augustinian theology,
the doctrine of predestination is based on the doctrine of election, which specifically concerns
God’s eternal choice to bestow the grace of salvation on some and not others. This doctrine is
famously prominent in Calvinist theology, but is also defended by Thomas Aquinas, the great
medieval Catholic theologian (Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 23).
Providence and evil

Because predestination, as Augustine defines it, is specifically concerned with grace (The
Predestination of the Saints 10.19), it should not be confused with larger issues about providence,
divine foreknowledge and determinism. However, providence and predestination are of course
logically connected, as God’s eternal choice of how to distribute the gift of grace is informed
by his eternal knowledge of the history of the world he creates and providentially governs.
Augustine’s view fits the recent label “meticulous providence,” in that it excludes any possibility
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of mere accident. Everything that happens comes under God’s providential ordering of history,
and in particular no evil takes place that God does not foreknow and permit. For God always
has the power to prevent any evil, and therefore always has good reason for permitting the evils
that do occur. In Augustine’s terms, God makes good use of evils (The Nature of the Good 37),
permitting them because he knows what good he will bring out of them (City of God 14: 11).
Augustine illustrates God’s providential governance of human history with the way he tells
the story of his own life in the Confessions. Young Augustine has many concupiscent desires, but
God uses them for Augustine’s own good, turning the sweetness of his sinful delights into bitter-
ness (for instance, sexual lust turns into jealousy) so as to turn the young man back to the true and
lasting delight of the love of God, in which there is no bitterness (Confessions 2: 2.4; 6: 6.9). Even
the apparent success of his evil desires, for example when his ambition leads him to desert his
mother in Africa and sail off to a promising career in Italy, is really the result of divine providence
using his desires to bring about the healing of his desires. Unbenownst to himself, he is going to
Italy to meet St. Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, who will be instrumental in his conversion, his
escape from Manichaeanism, and his return to the Catholic Church (Confessions 5: 8.15).
There are rules for telling a providential narrative of this Augustinian sort, which have had a
great influence on later Christian theodicy – the modern name given to attempts to “justify the
ways of God to men” (Milton 1993: book 1, line 26) by showing how evil can exist in a world
created and governed by a God who is both omnipotent and perfectly good. The first rule is that
God never causes moral evils but only permits them – for example, by not preventing sinners
from sinning. Most fundamentally, in his meticulous providence God always brings a greater
good out of every evil he permits (the “greater good principle,” as it has come to be called).
Consequently, God is never to be blamed for any evil, but only praised for the wisdom with
which he uses it for his good purposes. Moreover, no one ever suffers unjustly, for all are sinners
deserving divine punishment. But there is a difference between faithful Christians, whose suf-
fering is a salutary form of moral discipline, and the wicked, who sometimes escape punishment
in this life because God is patient and gives them time to repent (City of God 1: 8–10). Hence in
an Augustinian theodicy no one ever has grounds for complaining against God.
The controversial Augustine

There is much that is controversial about the legacy of Augustine, even in the largely Augustinian
Christianity of the West. His ontological optimism went largely unchallenged in the medieval
and early modern period, but in recent years his privative theory of evil has been dismissed
rather peremptorily, as if it were an attempt to solve the problem of evil by claiming that evil is
unreal (Mackie 1955: 48; Matson 1961: 141–4). This peremptory dismissal, as defenders of the
doctrine have pointed out (Maritain 1942; Cress 1989) is based on two misconceptions. First,
in the privative theory evil is not illusory but is as real as any defect, disorder or failure. Second,
Augustine and his heirs do not use the privative theory as a theodicy but as a rejoinder to the
Manichaean contention that evil has a being of its own, independent of God. Its purpose is to
give an account of the ontology of evil, not to explain why God permits it. A more informed
criticism of the privative theory turns from ontology to experience, claiming that pain is a
reality that cannot be described as a privation. (Kane 1980; cf. the denial of this claim in the
response to Kane by Anglin and Goetz 1982). Another important criticism involves raising the
question: how evil can have power to cause anything if it has no being? The standard reply,
given by Thomas Aquinas, is that the power of evil depends on the causal power of the good
it corrupts (Summa Theologica Part I, Question 48, article 1, reply 4 and Question 49, article 2,
reply 2). An evil man may do great harm, but the fact that he can do anything at all is due to
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his possessing powers such as intellect and will, which are by nature good but which do harm
when corrupted by error and injustice. A more general question is whether the privative theory
can be articulated apart from a robust classical metaphysics that owes a great deal to Platonism
(Hick 1979: 43–64).
Augustine’s understanding of providence coheres with his ontological optimism in teaching
that God literally can do no wrong. Because God is never blameworthy, Augustinian theodicy
has no room for complaints against God. Recent biblical scholarship has strongly challenged this
approach, pointing out that the Bible has genres of lamentation and complaint directed toward
God in the Psalms and other texts such as Job and Lamentations. Unlike Augustine, it seems,
the Bible can hold together the conviction that God is always right and the human need to
complain and question God’s ways (Brueggemann 1984: 51–122).
More troubling than Augustine’s ontological optimism is his moral pessimism. It can be seen
as realistic but also as inhumane – especially his doctrine of infant damnation. The notion of
limbo arose as a mitigation of the punishment of infants after death, as they are excluded from
heaven but suffer no pain or torment. Recently, a document issued under Pope Benedict XVI
pointed out that neither limbo nor the damnation of unbaptised infants was ever an official
teaching of the Catholic Church. Hence hope for the salvation of unbaptized infants is a legiti-
mate (though not required) Catholic belief.5
Questions arise as to how much of the doctrine of original sin can survive modern histori-
ography and theories of evolution after Darwin. Mainline Protestants (Schleiermacher 1986:
269–354; Kierkegaard 1980; Niebuhr 1941: 178–264) and now Catholics (Wiley 2002) often
argue for a modified version of Augustinian doctrine that sees sin as universal but does not
depend on transmission from a literal, historical Adam. Conservative evangelicals in contrast
typically regard the connection with a historical Adam as essential (Madeume and Reeves 2014).
Like most of the Church fathers, Augustine himself preferred to avoid literalism in his readings
of the Bible. Most famously, he rejected the notion of six literal days of creation, even in his “lit-
eral” commentary on Genesis (The Literal Meaning of Genesis 4: 26.43; 5: 1.1–36). However, he
had no reason to doubt the historical existence of Adam and was deeply interested in the con-
cept of a first man as the source of the sinful unity of human nature. A modern Augustinianism,
without a literal Adam or infant damnation, will typically point to a kind of social solidarity in
sin that includes the whole of humanity, with a certain tragic element of “ownership” of sins
that are ours without our choosing (Couenhoven 2013). In this view, our sinfulness is not trans-
mitted by biological propagation, but neither is it acquired by voluntary choice. From infancy
our moral agency is formed by cultural forces that deform us, making us racists in some cultures,
thoughtless consumers in others, and yet we cannot simply disown responsibility for the char-
acter that results from processes of cultural formation in which we are, inevitably, active and
willful participants. Augustinianism, rather than Pelagianism, is in a position to acknowledge
that our active self-shaping is always already constrained by a problematic inheritance much
older and more powerful than ourselves.
Augustine’s view of sexuality was challenged even within his lifetime. While his condemna-
tion of concupiscence was hardly unusual, his notion that sexual desire after Adam was always
concupiscent meant that every act of sexual intercourse was sinful, made possible by illicit lust
rather than purely by the legitimate desire to beget children. Hence even within marriage sexual
activity was always sinful, though it was a small sin that could be forgiven by ordinary daily
prayers (such as “forgive us our trespasses” in the Lord’s Prayer). Augustine explicitly defended the
goodness of marriage (The Excellence of Marriage; City of God 14: 21–2; Marriage and Desire 1: 1.1;
The Punishment and Forgiveness of Sins 1: 39.57), but many critics over the centuries have agreed
substantially with Julian of Ecclanum, his last great Pelagian opponent, who saw in his writings
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a residual Manichaeanism that logically implied a condemnation of marriage itself, despite what
Augustine claimed. On the other hand, postmodern thinkers writing in the vein of Foucault
have welcomed Augustine’s notion that none of us is in possession of a sexuality that is pure and
innocent, free from the vicissitudes of human corruption and power (Rees 2011; Schuld 2003).
Over the centuries, immense controversies have swirled around Augustine’s doctrines of
sin and grace. Augustine’s critics tend to think his view of the corrupting power of sin leaves
too little role for human nature and free will cooperating with grace in the process of salvation.
His voluminous writings and the developments in his own thought over the course of several
decades allow for rival interpretations of Augustine on this score. Protestant theologians often
emphasized the gratuity of grace (as in the motto “grace alone,” which excludes the possibility
of earning God’s favor) and the power of sin (as in the Calvinist doctrine of “total depravity,”
which means that every power of the soul is corrupted by sin) while downplaying Augustine’s
affirmations that the process of salvation requires merit, which is earned by the will freely
cooperating with grace (Grace and Free Choice 6.13–9.21; cf. On Faith and Works 14.21–15.26).
Catholic interpreters of Augustine who came close to these Protestant views, putting great
emphasis on the incapacity of human nature and the power of sin, touched off damaging con-
troversies within Catholicism. The rigorism of the Jansenists, for example, inspired by the pub-
lication of Cornelius Jansen’s massive study Augustinus in 1640, provoked a controversy that
rocked the French Church for more than a century, surviving attempts by both king and pope
to suppress it (Pelikan 1984: 374–85; Doyle 2000). Meanwhile, Protestants such as John Wesley,
who was a theological critic of Calvinism, found themselves opposing Augustine as well. Much
of the history of Protestant–Catholic polemics can be seen as an ongoing argument about the
teaching of Augustine as well as the Bible.
In the twentieth century, perhaps the deepest criticism of Augustine came from Karl Barth, a
Protestant theologian who overturned the fundamental assumptions of his doctrine of election.
Whereas for Augustine election means that God chooses some rather than others for salvation,
for Barth it means that God chooses one for the salvation of others, because election is centered
on God’s choosing to be for humanity in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the savior of all (Barth
1957; 3–194). Arguably, Barth’s doctrine recaptures the original structure of election in the
Bible, where God chooses Abraham and his seed for the blessing of all nations (Genesis 12: 3).
Biblical election thus differs from Augustinian election because, instead of God choosing some
to the exclusion of others, it means God chooses some for the sake of others.
Augustine’s thought remains a pervasive, if often contested and frequently indirect, influence
in Western culture. Attempts to take evil seriously, from Kant’s notion of radical evil (Kant
1960: 23–39) to Kierkegaard’s notion of Angst (Kierkegaard, 1980) and even Camus’s notion
of the absurd as “sin without God” (Camus 1991: 40), often have an Augustinian pedigree. But
so also do many modern notions of grace, including Martin Buber’s account of how “will and
grace are joined” in the encounter of I and Thou (Buber 1970: 58, 62).
Notes
1 Citations of Augustine’s treatises follow a standard format: “book: chapter.paragraph.” The book number
is included only if the treatise contains more than one book. Some editions of Augustine’s works omit
either chapter or paragraph numbers, and some label paragraph numbers as “chapter” numbers (the
difference can be told by the fact that chapter numbers in the standard format are never smaller than
paragraph numbers).
2 English translations of Augustine’s titles are unfortunately not standardized. Old titles tend to be closer
etymologically to the Latin, as for example On Marriage and Concupiscence (De Nuptiis et Concupiscentia),
for which the more recent translation, cited here, is titled Marriage and Desire. Similarly, the more recent
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translation On the Good of Marriage (De Bono Conjugali) is titled The Excellence of Marriage, and the more
recent title for On the Merits and Remission of Sins (De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione) is On the Punishment
and Forgiveness of Sins, both of which are cited below.
3 A convenient way to consult Augustine’s Latin is at the website, www.augustinus.it/latino, which contains
his complete works. Modern critical editions of his works are available in the series Corpus Christianorum
Series Latina (Turnhout: Brepols).
4 The use of “corruption” and its cognates is particularly visible in the King James translation of the Bible.
More recent translations tend to use terms such as “perishable” in place of “corruptible.”
5 This document “The Hope of Salvation for Infants who Die without Being Baptised” is available on the
Vatican website at www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_con_cfaith_
doc_20070419_un-baptised-infants_en.html
References
Anglin, B. and Goetz, C. (1982) “Evil is Privation,” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 13:4.
Aquinas, T. (1997) Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, ed. A. Pegis, vol. 1, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Augustine. (1953) The Nature of the Good (De Natura Boni), trans. J.H.S. Burleigh, in Augustine: Earlier
Writings, Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, pp. 326–48.
Augustine. (1953) To Simplician—On Various Questions (Ad Simplicianum de Diversis Quaestionibus), trans.
J.H.S. Burleigh, in Augustine: Earlier Writings, Philadelphia: Westminster, pp. 370–406.
Augustine. (1958) On Christian Doctrine (De Doctrina Christiana), trans. D.W. Robertson, New York:
Macmillan.
Augustine. (1982) The Literal Meaning of Genesis (De Genesi ad Litteram), 2 vols., trans. J.H. Taylor, New
York: Newman.
Augustine. (1984) City of God (De Civitate Dei), trans. H. Bettenson, London: Penguin.
Augustine. (1988) Enchiridion, trans. A.C. Outler, in Augustine: Confessions and Enchiridion, Philadelphia,
PA: Westminster, pp. 335–412.
Augustine. (1988) On Faith and Works (De Fide et Operibus), trans. G.J. Lombardo, New York: Newman.
Augustine. (1991) Confessions (Confessiones), trans. H. Chadwick, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Augustine. (1993) On Free Choice of the Will (De Libero Arbitrio), trans. T. Williams, Indianapolis, IN:
Hackett.
Augustine. (1994) Sermons, vol. 8, trans. E. Hill, Hyde Park, NY: New City.
Augustine. (1997) Nature and Grace (De Natura et Gratia), trans. R. Teske, in Answer to the Pelagians I, Hyde
Park, NY: New City. pp. 225–75.
Augustine. (1997) The Punishment and Forgiveness of Sins (De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione), trans.
R. Teske, in Answer to the Pelagians I, Hyde Park, NY: New City, pp. 19–137.
Augustine. (1997) The Spirit and the Letter (De Spiritu et Littera), trans. R. Teske, in Answer to the Pelagians I,
Hyde Park, NY: New City, pp. 150–202.
Augustine. (1998) Marriage and Desire (De Nuptiis et Concupiscentia), trans. R. Teske, in Answer to the
Pelagians II, Hyde Park, NY: New City, pp. 28–96.
Augustine. (1999) The Excellence of Marriage (De Bono Conjugali), trans. R. Kearney, in Marriage and Virginity,
Hyde Park, NY: New City, pp. 33–61.
Augustine. (1999) Grace and Free Choice (De Gratia et Libero Arbitrio), trans. R. Teske, in Answer to the
Pelagians IV, Hyde Park, NY: New City, pp. 71–106.
Augustine. (1999) The Predestination of the Saints (De Predestinatione Sanctorum), trans. R. Teske, in Answer
to the Pelagians IV, Hyde Park, NY: New City, pp. 149–90.
Augustine. (2012) The Trinity (De Trinitate), trans. E. Hill, Hyde Park, NY: New City Press.
Barth, K. (1957) Church Dogmatics, volume 2, part 2, trans. G.W. Bromiley et al., Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.
Bonner, G. (1986) St Augustine of Hippo: Life and Controversies, Norwich: Canterbury Press.
Brueggemann, W. (1984) The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary, Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg.
Buber, M. (1970) I and Thou, trans. W. Kaufman, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Camus, A. (1991) The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. J. O’Brien, New York: Random House,
1991.
Cary, P. (2008) Inner Grace: Augustine in the Traditions of Plato and Paul, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Couenhoven, J. (2013) Stricken by Sin, Cured by Christ: Agency, Necessity and Culpability in Augustinian
Theology, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Cress, D. A. (1989) “A Defense of Augustine’s Privation Account of Evil,” Augustinian Studies 20:109–128.
Doyle, W. (2000) Jansenism, New York: St. Martin’s.
Hick, J. (1979) Evil and the God of Love, London: Collins.
Kane, G. S. (1980) “Evil and Privation,” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 11:43–58.
Kant, I. (1960) Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. T.M. Greene and H.H. Hudson,, New
York: Harper & Row.
Kierkegaard, S. (1980) The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic
Issue of Hereditary Sin, trans. R. Thomte, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Lewis, C. S. (1960) Mere Christianity, New York: Macmillan.
Luther, M. (1969) The Bondage of the Will, in P. Watson (ed.), Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation,
Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, pp. 99–334.
Mackie, J.L. (1955) “Evil and Omnipotence,” in N. Pike (ed.) God and Evil, Engelwood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall.
Madeume, H. and Reeves R., eds. (2014) Adam, the Fall and Original Sin: Theological, Biblical, and Scientific
Perspectives, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2014.
Maritain, J. (1942) St. Thomas and the Problem of Evil, Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press.
Matson, W.I. (1965) The Existence of God, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Milton, J. (1993) Paradise Lost, New York: Norton.
Niebuhr, R. (1941) The Nature and Destiny of Man, vol. 1, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
O’Brien, D. (1996) “Plotinus on Matter and Evil,” in The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus, ed.
L.P. Gerson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pelikan, J. (1984) Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300–1700), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Plato (1997) Complete Works, ed. J.M. Cooper, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Rees, G. (2011) The Romance of Innocent Sexuality, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock.
Schleiermacher, F. (1986) The Christian Faith, ed. H.R. Mackintosh and J.S. Stewart, Edinburgh: T. &
T. Clark.
Schuld, J. (2003) Foucault and Augustine: Reconsidering Power and Love, Notre Dame, IN: University of
Notre Dame.
Wiley, T. (2002) Original Sin: Origins, Developments, Contemporary Meanings, Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press.
For Further Reading

Burnaby, J. (1938) Amor Dei, Norwich: Canterbury Press. (This classic study of Augustine on love – in
English, despite the Latin title, and now available in a paperback reprint by Wipf & Stock – remains the
best and most comprehensive introduction to Augustine’s ethical thought.)
Evans, G.R. (1990) Augustine on Evil, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Does an unusually thor-
ough job discussing the cognitive dimension of moral evil.)
Fitzgerald, A. ed. (1999) Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. (The
first place to go for scholarly orientation regarding any major topic in Augustine’s life and thought, his
influence on later thinkers, and an introduction to each of his writings.)
41
3
AQUINAS ON EVIL
W. Matthews Grant
Someone familiar only with the writings of twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophical
theists might be surprised by how little attention the most celebrated of the medieval theists
gives to the so-called “problem of evil,” at least as that problem is nowadays understood. As
we shall see, it is even a matter of dispute whether Aquinas thought there was an interesting
question to ask about how God could be morally justified in permitting the evil we find in the
world. Still, Aquinas has much to say about the ontology, types, and causes of evil, and about
evil’s relationship to God. His treatment of evil is found principally in select articles from the
Summa theologiae, in select chapters from the Summa contra gentiles, in his collection of disputed
questions De malo (On Evil), and in his commentary on the book of Job.
The ontology and types of evil

Like Augustine,1 Aquinas denies that evil is any sort of real entity, any sort of positive ontologi-
cal item. Rather, evil is privation, the lack in some subject of what ought to be there, as, for
example, blindness is the lack of sight in the person who, by nature, ought to see. As such, evil is
decidedly not illusory. Privations abound. But, when we affirm their “existence,” we are affirm-
ing that something is missing, not picking out entities or anything actual.
The belief that evil is privation was well established in Aquinas’s day, but he did not accept
it solely on authority.2 Nor were his reasons for affirming the view exclusively, or even primar-
ily, theological. Aquinas tells us that since “one opposite is known through the other . . . what
evil is must be known from the nature of good” (ST 1.48.1). Thus, to understand why Aquinas
identifies evil with privation, we must first understand some of his views on goodness.
Referencing Aristotle, Aquinas takes goodness to be whatever is in some way desirable (ST
1.5.1). By “desirable” he means an object of positive appetite, inclination, or tendency, whether
conscious or unconscious. Now, it turns out for Aquinas that everything actual, insofar as it is
actual, is an object of desire. One argument he gives for this claim is that everything is perfect
insofar as it is actual, and everything is desirable insofar as it is perfect, since all things desire
their own perfection (ST 1.5.1). Another argument comes from Aquinas’s belief that all that is
actual (save God) has what he calls a per se efficient cause,3 and that all per se efficient causes have
an inclination to or directedness towards their effects, an appetite or desire for them (DM 1.3).
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Aquinas on evil
Given that everything actual is an object of desire, it follows that everything actual is good.
But, then, all that has positive existence is good, since that which has positive existence is
actual. Here we reach Aquinas’s doctrine of the convertibility (or coextensionality) of being
and goodness: “Goodness and being are really the same, and differ only in idea” (ST 1.5.1).
But, if being and goodness are really the same, and evil is the opposite of goodness, then evil
cannot be being. Evil cannot consist in anything that exists, any entity. Rather, it must consist
in the absence of something (ST 1.48.1).
Yet, it cannot be mere absence that constitutes evil. Were that true, the absurdity would fol-
low that “everything would be evil through not having the good belonging to something else;
for example, a man would be evil who had not the swiftness of a roe, or the strength of a lion”
(ST 1.48.3). What constitutes evil is not mere absence, but privation, the absence of what is
due, of what ought to be there. Just as it makes sense to say that the goodness of a thing consists
in its having the perfection it ought to have, so it makes sense to say that the badness of a thing
consists in its lacking the perfection it ought to have (SCG 3.6.1).
A presupposition of Aquinas’s account of evil, of course, is that there are standards –
objective standards if good and evil is to be an objective matter – regarding what perfections
different things ought to have. It would make very little sense, in his view, to talk of good
and evil, or of kindred notions like health and unhealth, without such standards. A standard
is provided, Aquinas thinks, by a thing’s nature, which roots a set of teleologically ordered
potentialities the realization of which constitutes the perfection or fulfillment of that thing
(SCG 3.2.7; SCG 3.13; SCG 3.16.3; ST 1–2.94.2). Among these potentialities in human
beings, for example, are certain cognitive powers whose full flourishing requires that we see.
Sight, then, is a perfection for human beings, blindness an evil.
An important implication of Aquinas’s account is that evil is always in something good as its
subject; or, we might say, evil is parasitic on the good. Since evil is the lack of what something
ought to have, it presupposes the something as its subject, and this subject, since it is an actual
entity, will, like all actual entities, be good. Since evil presupposes a good subject, neither can
it wholly consume the good that it resides in, nor, for the same reason, could there be anything
that is wholly or essentially evil through and through (ST 1.48.3–4). Aquinas does allow that
we can refer to the subject of a privation as bad or evil. We can say, for example, that eyes
unable to see are “bad” eyes, or that an act lacking order to a proper end is a bad act. But the
evil of the bad eyes or act consists in the privation, not the subject. The privation is the evil
as such (DM 1.1).
Recognizing all evil to consist in privation, Aquinas distinguishes two most general catego-
ries of evil (ST 1.48.5). A first type involves privations that bear on “the form and integrity” of
a thing. Examples include a thing’s lacking the powers it ought to have, as in blindness, or its
lacking some integral part, as in an animal’s missing a limb. A second type involves privation in
a thing’s operation or activity. Examples of this type include when a plant does not grow deep
enough roots, when an animal walks with a limp, or when a man sins. In all such cases, the
activity either lacks due order to its proper end, or lacks fitness for achieving its end.
Aquinas gives special names to these types of evil when found in free creatures (ST 1.48.5;
DM 1.4). Privation of due operation performed voluntarily he calls “evil of fault” (malum
culpae) since the voluntary agent is at fault for the defect in its free act. He calls privation of
form and integrity in free creatures “evil of penalty” (malum poenae), both because he views
such privations as penalties consequent on original and/or personal sin,4 and because these
privations have a characteristic feature of punishment in that they are contrary to the will of
the afflicted. Of these two sorts of evil, Aquinas thinks evil of fault is worse (ST 1.49.6), for
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our good consists most of all in good voluntary activity (culminating in the activity of seeing
God), and so defect in such activity is the more significant evil. For Aquinas, it is far better to
suffer evil than to do evil.
The causes of evil

Aquinas maintains that evil necessarily has a cause. For a privation exists in a subject that was in
potency to the perfection that ought to have been there instead of the privation, and, thus, some
cause is needed for why the privation and not the perfection (SCG 3.13.2–3). Indeed, since the
good or perfection was natural to the thing, its absence – the unnatural – especially requires a
cause (ST 1.49.1).
One might suppose that whatever causes evil is itself evil, perhaps even that there is a supreme
evil that is the first cause or source of all badness. But this Aquinas thinks impossible. “Only
good can be a cause; because nothing can be a cause except inasmuch as it is a being, and every
being, as such, is good” (ST 1.49.1). Moreover, a first cause of some feature must have that
feature essentially, not derivatively or by participation. But, for Aquinas, to have a feature essen-
tially means simply to be that feature through and through; not to have it as a subject has some
feature distinct from itself. Since Aquinas denies that there could be anything that is evil through
and through, he also rejects the possibility of a first cause or source of all evil (ST 1.49.3).
By insisting that the cause of evil is good, Aquinas does not mean to deny certain senses in
which we can call such a cause “evil.” He allows, for example, that something can be called
“evil” in a certain respect, or relatively, insofar as it is the cause of privation in another (DM
1.1 ad 1). In this sense, a lion is “evil” from the standpoint of its wounded prey; though, in fact,
the lion is dangerous to its prey precisely insofar as the lion is not itself deprived, but rather
healthy and thriving. As we saw above, Aquinas also allows that subjects good insofar as they
are actual can be called “evil” in virtue of lacking what they ought to have given the kinds of
things they are; a broken leg can be called a “bad” leg, so long as we remember that the bad-
ness consists in the lack of integrity in the bone structure, not in the leg insofar as it exists and
has whatever perfection remains. We shall see that Aquinas explains the privations in some
effects in terms of privations in their causes, as a “bad” leg might cause a defect in walking.
What he insists on is that privations are never themselves causes. A cause is always something
actual and, qua actual, good.
Not surprisingly, Aquinas discusses the causes of evil with reference to Aristotle’s four causes
(ST 1.49.1). He denies that evil has a formal cause, since evil consists in privation of due form.
Nor does evil have a final cause, since it consists in lack of order to the proper end. Evil does
have a material cause, for evil always belongs to some subject, and a subject is considered a mate-
rial cause in relation to that of which it is the subject. Finally, and most importantly, evil has
an agent or efficient cause, but – Aquinas insists – only a per accidens, not a per se efficient cause.
That evil cannot have a per se efficient cause simply follows from the meanings of the relevant
concepts. All per se causes intend their effects either consciously or as a matter of unconscious
natural inclination, as fire has a natural tendency to ignite. But anything that is intended is
desired and, thus, by definition “good.” So, any per se effect, or effect of a per se cause, is good.
Since evil is opposed to good, it follows that any cause of evil must be accidental (per accidens);
that is, the evil is not intended or aimed at by the cause (DM 1.3).
In discussing the ways that evil can have a per accidens efficient cause, Aquinas returns to the
distinction made above between privations that bear on “the form and integrity” of a thing and
privations affecting a thing’s operation or activity (ST 1.49.1; DM 1.3). Privations of the latter
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Aquinas on evil
sort result from some prior defect in the principal or instrumental cause. Thus, the limp in an
animal’s gait may result either from degeneration of the nervous system or a broken bone. In
such a case, the privation in the action is caused per accidens: it is not intended by the animal,
which aims only to walk, but rather results from the animal’s walking while in a wounded state.
Should we say, then, that the privation in the animal’s nervous system or bone is the cause
of the privation in its gait, contrary to Aquinas’s insistence that the cause of evil is not evil,
but good. Well, certainly, on Aquinas’s account the preexisting privation plays an explanatory
role vis-à-vis the privation in the animal’s movement. But the animal’s wounded state has no
power to bring about a privation in its action except insofar as the animal, in virtue of the per-
fection belonging to it, acts. Thus, while it would be an exaggeration – and a misreading – of
Aquinas’s position to say that evil never plays any explanatory role in the cause of evil, it would
also be false, in these cases, to say that what caused the evil in the action is simply a privation.
Rather, what causes the evil of action is a “deficient cause,” something that exists and operates
in virtue of its perfection, but which is deprived in certain ways that result in the operation’s
being defective (SCG 3.10.7).
In our example, the animal’s wounded state is, of course, a privation bearing on the “form
and integrity” of the animal. Aquinas thinks that privations of form and integrity can sometimes
be explained by reference to preexisting privations, namely when the privations of form and
integrity are due to a deficient cause operating defectively (SCG 3.10.7; DM 1.3). For example,
a birth defect (perhaps involving degeneration of the nervous system) could result from the
defective operation of the reproductive powers of one or both parents, which defective opera-
tion can be explained by reference to a preexisting defect in those powers. In such a case, the
birth defect clearly falls outside the aim or intention of the animal and its powers.
In other cases, however, privation of form and integrity does not result from a preexisting
privation but rather from an agent’s operating in the full perfection of its powers. Such happens:
when there necessarily follows on the form intended by the agent the privation of
another form; as, for instance, when on the form of fire there follows the privation
of the form of air or of water. Hence that evil and corruption befall air and water
comes from the perfection of the fire: but this is accidental; because fire does not aim
at the privation of the form of water, but at the bringing in of its own form, though
by doing this it also accidentally causes the other.
(ST 1.49.1; cf. DM 1.3)
Or, in connection with our example above, a virus might cause privation in a nervous system
not through any deficiency on its own part but simply through using host cells in the nervous
system to replicate, which process has as an accidental by-product the corruption of those cells.
Such examples show that, on Aquinas’s view, many privations of form and integrity can be
explained by one thing flourishing at the expense of another. The successful activity of the fire
and the virus result in the deprivation of the water and the nervous system, even though the
deprivation is not the aim of the fire or virus.
Among privations that bear on operation or activity, Aquinas treats the cause of moral evil
(or sin) as a special case. On the one hand, like other defective actions, the privation in a sinful
act – the act’s lack of conformity to the moral rule – needs to be explained with reference to a
preexisting or explanatorily prior defect in the agent. On the other hand, there are constraints
on the nature of this preexisting defect that do not arise when explaining other defective actions.
First, the preexisting defect needs to be rooted in the will, and voluntary, otherwise the sinner
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W. Matthews Grant
would not be responsible and at fault for the resulting defect in his act. Yet, second, the preex-
isting defect cannot itself constitute a sin, for, in that case, we would merely push the question
of the cause of sin a step back, requiring an explanation for this preexisting sin, and courting an
infinite regress in our attempt to explain sin, if every sin had to be explained by a preexisting
sin (SCG 3.10; DM 1.3).
Aquinas solves the problem by identifying the explanatorily prior defect in the sinful agent
with the sinner’s nonconsideration or nonuse of the moral rule prior to choice. On the one
hand, the nonconsideration of the moral rule is voluntary, since it is freely within the will’s
power to consider the rule. On the other hand, the nonconsideration is not itself a sin; for:
the soul is not bound nor is it always possible to actually give heed to a rule of this
kind. . . . [Thus] the fault of the will does not consist in not actually giving heed to
the rule of reason or divine law but in proceeding to choose without employing the
rule or measure.
(DM 1.3; cf. SCG 3.10.17)
Moreover, just as in ordinary cases of defective action the efficient cause does not intend the
privation that results from its acting in a wounded state, so neither does the sinner intend
the privation that consists in his act’s lack of conformity to the moral rule. What the sinner
intends is some good or apparent good that he hopes to achieve through his action. The adul-
terer’s aim is pleasure, not that his act be disordered (DM 1.3, SCG 3.6.9). Sin results from the
sinner’s not considering or applying the moral rule, which consideration would prevent him
from performing an act contrary to his true good, for the sake of a lesser or apparent good.
Evil and God

Most contemporary discussion of evil and God focuses on the so-called problem of evil. But, as
mentioned in the introduction, there is some debate about whether Aquinas even recognized
or attempted to answer the problem as it is nowadays understood. Certainly, Aquinas did not
seriously consider that the world’s evil might give us reason to deny the existence of an all-
powerful, wholly good God. He believed the existence of such a God was demonstrable; an
account of evil, thus, has to accommodate itself to the fact of God’s existence, known not only
to faith but also to reason.5
Yet, it isn’t simply Aquinas’s confidence in God’s existence that has led some to ques-
tion whether Aquinas would take the contemporary problem of evil seriously. Brian Davies
writes that:
If we take the problem of evil to be expressed by the question, “How can God justify
himself morally for the evil that exists?,” Aquinas would dismiss it as a pseudo-
problem . . . a bogus one. . . . For Aquinas, to ask whether God can be morally
justified when it comes to the evils that occur is to ask a question that should never
have been raised in the first place. For him, God is not to be thought of as a moral
agent behaving either well or badly.6
As Davies sees it, the difficulty is not that it would be impious to doubt God’s moral goodness
(or his very existence) in light of the world’s evil, or conversely to take it upon ourselves to
justify God morally for his permission of evil. The problem is that Aquinas doesn’t understand
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Aquinas on evil
God’s goodness to be moral goodness in the first place, and thus the question of whether God
can be morally justified is not one Aquinas would think it makes sense to ask.
Much of Davies’s interpretation, and of those who take a similar line,7 rests on considerations
regarding Aquinas’s understanding of morality, on the one hand, and his understanding of God,
on the other. For Aquinas, morality is about what people ought to do, and the virtues they
need to acquire, in order to achieve their fulfillment as human beings. Morality presupposes a
gap, as it were, between the person and his full perfection, a gap that must be closed by action.
But, for Aquinas’s God, there is no gap – since he is pure act and has his end and fulfillment in
himself. There is nothing God “ought to do” concerning evil or anything else. The “moral,” so
understood, is not a category that applies in God’s case.
Further support for Davies’s interpretation might be found in the fact that, when Aquinas
takes up the question of God’s goodness (ST 1.6.1–3; SCG 1.37–41), he does not define
that goodness, as many contemporary theistic philosophers do, in terms of morality. There
is no mention of moral goodness at all. Rather, God is deemed supremely good because
supremely desirable, as the ultimate source of all desired perfections. Yet, further support for
Davies’s interpretation might be claimed from the fact that, if his interpretation is correct, it
explains why Aquinas offers nothing comparable to the extensive theodicies and defenses of
God offered in abundance by contemporary theistic philosophers, who, understanding God’s
goodness in moral terms, feel the need to explain how God might be morally justified for
permitting the world’s evils.
Nevertheless, other scholars have argued, on the contrary, that Aquinas does think of God
as morally good, and that we can even speak of Aquinas as offering a theodicy in response
to the problem of evil.8 Support for this view might be found in passages where Aquinas
explicitly attributes certain virtues to God, such as justice and liberality (e.g., SCG 1.93). It
might also be found in passages where Aquinas appears to take seriously what sounds very
much like the problem of evil, or where he appears to offer reasons for God’s permitting evil,
as one might do if one were attempting to reconcile that permission with God’s goodness,
understood morally.
For example, in the article in which Aquinas offers his famous five ways of demonstrating
God’s existence, he poses to himself the following objection:
It seems that God does not exist; because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other
would be altogether destroyed. But the word “God” means that He is infinite good-
ness. If, therefore, God existed, there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil
in the world. Therefore God does not exist.
(ST 1.2.3 obj. 1)
To this Aquinas responds:
As Augustine says (Enchir. xi): Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any
evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring
good even out of evil. This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should
allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good.
(ST 1.2.3 ad 1)
Or consider a similar objection, which Aquinas poses to himself when asking whether evil
is to be found in things: “The good unmixed with evil is the greater good. But God makes
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always what is best. . . . Therefore, in things made by God there is no evil” (ST 1.48.2 obj. 3).
To this Aquinas responds:
God and nature and any other agent make what is best in the whole but not what is
best in every single part, except in order to the whole. And the whole itself, which is
the universe of creatures, is all the better and more perfect if some things in it can fail
in goodness, and do sometimes fail, God not preventing this. . . . Hence many good
things would be taken away if God permitted no evil to exist; for fire would not be
generated if air was not corrupted, nor would the life of a lion be preserved unless the
ass were killed. Neither would avenging justice nor the patience of a sufferer be praised
if there were no injustice.
(ST 1.48.2 ad 3; cf. ST 1.22.2 ad 2; and SCG 3.71)
Also relevant is Aquinas’s commentary on the book of Job where he seems to recognize the
suffering of the just as a challenge to the claim that God exercises providence over human affairs:
“Now what especially seems to impugn God’s providence where human affairs are concerned
is the affliction of just men” (68). In response to Job’s famous “The Lord has given; the Lord
has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21), Aquinas praises Job not only for
recognizing God’s providence in these matters but also for recognizing that “man has no just
complaint with God if he should be despoiled of his temporal goods because He Who gave
them freely could bestow them either for a time or to the end” (89). Throughout the com-
mentary, Aquinas does not shy away from offering reasons for God’s permission of evil: “Now
it happens sometimes that God permits either trials or even some spiritual defects to befall some
men in order to procure their salvation” (172).9
Davies, of course, is aware of such passages. Much depends on their significance. For
example, would the meaning of the virtues as predicated of God by Aquinas enable someone,
even in principle, to argue a case that the virtues so defined do not apply to God, in light of
the world’s evil? If not, then God’s virtues for Aquinas do not constitute the sort of moral
goodness that would be needed to make sense of the problem of evil as contemporary phi-
losophers understand it. Similarly, are the objections Aquinas poses to himself in the passages
quoted above the same as the contemporary problem? Are Aquinas’s brief responses best
understood as offering a moral justification of God’s permission of evil? Is the commentary
on Job offering a theodicy, or should it be read in some other way? Answering such questions
would require a lengthier treatment, but these are the sorts of questions that need answering
to determine whether Aquinas takes (or would take) the problem of evil in its contemporary
form seriously.
However one resolves the foregoing debate, there are certain points Aquinas clearly wants
to make regarding God’s relationship to evil. A key principle, for Aquinas, is that a provider,
governor, or artisan looks out for the good of the whole – and not just the parts – of that
over which he has charge, and will permit defects in the parts for the sake of the whole. And,
whether or not his point is to offer a moral justification for God, Aquinas clearly thinks that
God permits evil because the universe as a whole is more perfect for containing it (see ST
1.48.2 ad 3; ST 1.22.2 ad 2; and SCG 3.71). As noted already, he thinks that many goods
would be taken away, were there no evil: not only goods of the sort mentioned in the pas-
sage from ST 1.48.2 ad 3, quoted above, but also the beauty of the universe, which “arises
from an ordered unification of evil and good things” (SCG 3.71.7), the possibility of some
creatures’ being more God-like from having greater perfection than others (SCG 3.71.3), and
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Aquinas on evil
the possibility of creatures truly appreciating the good; for “the good is better known from its
comparison with evil, and while we continue to suffer certain evils our desire for goods grows
more ardent” (SCG 3.71.8).
Moreover, Aquinas thinks God creates both to share his goodness with creatures, and that
his goodness might be reflected by them. But, since God’s simple and infinite goodness can-
not be adequately represented by a single creature or type of creature, he creates a multitude of
different kinds of creatures, occupying different grades of goodness (ST 1.47.1–2). One level
of goodness belongs to material creatures that come into existence through generation and pass
out through corruption, and whose interaction with one another in regular, predictable ways
involves the flourishing of some at the expense of others. The universe is more perfect, and
better reflects God’s goodness, for containing such creatures, but its containing such creatures
brings privation as a necessary accompaniment (ST 1.22.2 ad 2).
It is important to note that, with his talk of God’s permitting evil for the sake of the perfec-
tion of the universe, Aquinas does not anticipate the Leibnizian position that ours is the best
possible world, which God necessarily creates precisely because it is the best. On the contrary,
Aquinas thinks that God could have created a different world, or no world at all. Moreover,
given God’s infinite power and goodness, Aquinas denies that there is a best possible world
among those God could create. For any world God could create, he could create a better one,
either a world containing greater kinds of things10 or a world with the same kinds of things
enjoying greater accidental perfections. In this respect, Aquinas thinks that God could do bet-
ter than he does considered “substantively;” i.e., he could make a better world. But he could
not do better than he does considered “adverbially.” That is, the manner of God’s making could
not be improved upon since, even in a case where God creates a better world, God would not
be creating from any greater wisdom or goodness, and thus God’s manner of acting would
not be any better than it is in his creation of our world (ST 1.25.5–6).
From what was said in the previous section, it should be clear that Aquinas denies that God is
a per se cause of evil; for any per se effect is an object of appetite, and therefore something good,
evil’s opposite. Whether God is a per accidens cause of evil depends on the type of evil we are
talking about. Aquinas allows that God is a per accidens cause of privations of “form and integ-
rity.” For, in virtue of God’s causing the good of the order of the universe, he causes without
intending the privations that follow on that order, insofar as that order includes some things that
flourish at the expense of others (ST 1.49.2).
On the other hand, Aquinas denies that God is even a per accidens cause of privations that bear
on operation or activity. Although as the universal cause of all that exists apart from himself God
causes all creaturely operations insofar as they are actual and have whatever perfection belongs to
them (ST 1.44.1–2; SCG 3.67), the cause of the defects in these activities is explained by prior
defects in the creaturely causes (ST 1.49.2 ad 2). Aquinas is especially insistent that God does
not cause sin (ST 1–2.79.1; DM 3.1), even while also insisting that God causes the act of sin (ST
1–2.79.2; DM 3.2). How can God cause the latter without causing the former? For Aquinas, a
sin of action consists of two elements: an act and a defect or privation, the act’s lack of conform-
ity to the moral rule. To cause the sin, an agent must cause both the act and the privation. But,
while God and the sinner both cause the act, only the sinner causes the privation; thus, only
the sinner causes the sin. God, as universal cause, need not cause the privation, since privations
aren’t actually existing entities. And, as we’ve seen, Aquinas thinks the privation is imputable to
the sinner in virtue of a prior voluntary but nonsinful defect in the sinner, the sinner’s failure to
consider or apply the moral rule, which consideration would have precluded the sinful choice
(SCG III.10; DM 1.3).
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Objections and replies

Aquinas’s account of evil continues to be of interest to philosophers, enjoying contemporary
defenders while at the same time being the target of various objections to which its defenders
have attempted to reply. This section offers a brief introduction to these debates.
The most basic sort of objection targets Aquinas’s ontology of evil, challenging his conten-
tion that all evil is privation by proposing counterexamples to the claim.11 The most commonly
proposed counterexamples are pain and certain types of moral evil. Pain seems to be not just the
absence of pleasure but a positively bad sensation – something that exists which we recognize
as bad and try to avoid. Similarly, it would seem that not all moral evil can be analyzed simply
as the absence of our doing what we ought. A murder is not just the neglect of a duty but a
positive act with positive properties that make the act bad, such as the intent to kill someone
who is innocent. Such moral evils, moreover, appear to be positively and aggressively opposed
to the good in ways that seem inconsistent with the claim that they are mere lacks or absences.
Defenders of the privation account maintain that their view can accommodate these types
of evil. They point out, for example, that sensations of pain have an important function to play
in the life of an organism, namely to alert the organism to an injury that has occurred, urging it
to seek remediation. As such, painful sensations are good, part of the functioning of a healthy
animal without which the animal would be in serious danger. The sensation of pain is repugnant
to the animal, but that repugnance is needed to perform its function; it is good for pain to be
unpleasant since that is how it does its job. Granted, the unpleasantness of pain can outstrip its
usefulness, can disrupt tranquility, can even be seriously debilitating. But, in these cases, though
the pain may be a cause of evil, it is not the evil itself. Rather, the evil in such cases is the priva-
tion in the animal’s normal functioning, for example the debilitation that results from the pain.12
With respect to moral evil, Aquinas, as we’ve seen, thinks a sin of action consists of two ele-
ments, the positive act and the privation of conformity to the moral rule, in which the badness
or sinfulness of the act consists. It is, consequently, no criticism of Aquinas to accuse him of
trying to account for moral evil without reference to acts and their properties. On the privation
account, we can even speak of certain properties of acts as making the acts bad, insofar as they
are the properties in respect of which the acts lack conformity to the moral rule. And we can
speak of certain acts as opposed to certain goods, insofar as the moral rule requires respect for
goods that these acts fail to respect. Yet, so defenders of Aquinas claim, none of these points
entails that the badness of sins of action consists in the acts or their properties rather than the
privation of conformity to the moral standard. On the contrary, they have held that, since the
fundamental reason the acts are morally bad is their lack of conformity to the moral standard,
their badness is more fittingly identified with that lack than with the act’s positive properties.
This is especially so when it is considered that an act is morally bad for having certain properties
only because acts that have those properties lack conformity to the standard.13
Turning to Aquinas’s views on the causes of evil, at least three recent objections have tar-
geted his explanation of the cause of the privation in sinful acts in terms of the sinner’s non-
consideration of the moral rule.14 First, Aquinas holds the sinner responsible for not considering
the rule at the moment the sinner chooses the sinful act. But, to make sense of the sinner’s
responsibility for not considering the rule, the sinner would need to be consciously aware that
there was a rule pertaining to his action, which would imply conscious awareness of the content
of the rule, which would in turn imply that the sinner was considering the rule, after all, con-
trary to Aquinas’s intent to explain the sin in terms of the sinner’s nonconsideration of the rule.
Second, to hold the sinner responsible for not considering the rule would seem to presuppose
that agents are obliged to consider the moral rule for every action they perform, a requirement
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too demanding to be plausible. Third, that the agent is not considering the rule prior to the sinful
action seems (contrary to Aquinas’s intent) irrelevant to the explanation of sin, since Aquinas
states explicitly that the sinner isn’t bound to consider the rule except at the very moment he
proceeds to the sinful choice without it.
In response to each of these objections, points have been made in Aquinas’s defense.15 To
the first, it has been argued that the sinner’s responsibility for not considering the rule at the
moment of sinful choice does not require (as would be contradictory) that the sinner be occur-
rently aware of, or considering, that very rule. All that is required is that the sinner be aware
that his actions are subject to moral standards and that he should therefore turn attention to his
dispositional knowledge of the rules bearing on his actions, or enquire into the relevant rule if
it is not already part of his dispositional knowledge. Against the second objection, it has been
maintained that the requirement to consider the moral rule for all of our actions is not implau-
sibly burdensome once it is realized that we do not have to enquire about the rule from scratch
for each action, but can rely for most of our actions on past reasoning and dispositional knowl-
edge ready at hand. To the third objection, it has been pointed out that the relevance of the
prior nonconsideration of the rule is to show how sin is possible, since Aquinas doesn’t believe
it would be possible to commit a sin while consciously considering (or grasping) the rule against
it. In this sense, the nonconsideration is explanatorily prior to the sinful act, and also temporally
prior in that, at the moment of the sin, the sinner must no longer be considering the rule, even
if he was considering it at some point before the moment of sin. Thus, the nonconsideration of
the rule has an explanatory role to play even though the sinner is not bound to be considering
the rule prior to the moment he proceeds to the sinful choice without such consideration.
Turning to Aquinas’s views regarding evil and God, much critical attention has focused on
Aquinas’s claim that God, as universal cause, can cause the act of sin without causing sin itself.
In order to get the problem up and running, we must allow for the sake of argument that God
can cause creaturely acts without taking away the freedom requisite for moral responsibility.
Allowing that, a first objection holds that God will cause the privation in the act of sin simply
in virtue of causing the act and its positive properties. After all, it is because the act and its
properties are what they are that the act lacks conformity to the moral rule, and thus has the
privation that makes it sinful. Moreover, this privation would seem simply to follow on the
act and its properties.16
A second objection raises doubts that the privation in the act of sin can be imputed to the
sinner in light of his voluntary nonconsideration of the rule (which makes the sinful choice
possible) without its also being imputable to God. For, on Aquinas’s understanding of the rela-
tionship between divine and creaturely agency, it looks like, if God had caused the creature’s
consideration of the rule at the relevant time, the creature would have considered the rule, and
no sin would have occurred. Thus, if the privation can be imputed to the sinner in virtue of the
sinner’s not considering the rule, why can’t it be imputed to God, in virtue of God’s not causing
the sinner’s consideration?17
In response to the first of these objections,18 it has been argued that God’s causing the act
of sin and its positive properties is not enough to make him cause of the act’s lack of conform-
ity to the moral standard, any more than Elizabeth’s making an omelet that weighs so many
ounces makes her the cause of her omelet’s being heavier than a sandwich made by Cecilia.
Just as Elizabeth has made only one of the terms on which the relational truth that her omelet
is heavier that Cecilia’s sandwich depends, so, arguably, God has caused only one of the terms
(the act and its properties) that, together with the moral standard, gives rise to the act’s lack of
conformity to that standard. This response requires, of course, that we deny that God causes
the other term, the moral standard, from which, together with the act and its properties, the
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act’s lack of conformity emerges. But, plausibly, Aquinas would agree that God does not cause
the moral standard, insofar as Aquinas thinks the moral standard is ultimately rooted in human
nature which is an objective way in which the divine being is imitable, prior to any act of the
divine will (ST 1.15.2).
Jacques Maritain famously attempted to answer the second objection by arguing that when
God causes a creaturely action he always moves the creature to a good act, a good act that will
result from God’s motion, unless the creature “shatters” or impedes the divine motion by not
considering the moral rule. Since God moves the creature to a good act, which becomes bad
only because of the creature’s nonconsideration of the rule, Maritain holds that we can credit
God in the case of a good act, while imputing the privation in a bad act to the sinner alone.
The sinner is responsible for the privation in virtue of his nonconsideration of the rule, which
nonconsideration, of course, is not a positive act or entity, and thus, unlike the act of sin itself,
need not be caused by God as universal cause.19
Even some sympathetic with Maritain’s general goals have raised doubts about the success
of his solution. For, given Aquinas’s account of the relationship between divine and creaturely
agency, the creature does not consider the rule only if God does not cause the creature’s consid-
ering it. Thus, the question remains: Why shouldn’t the privation in the act of sin be imputed
to God in virtue of God’s not causing the creature’s considering the rule, just as it is imputed to
the creature in virtue of the creature’s not considering it?20
One response to this remaining question focuses on what Aquinas has to say regarding caus-
ing by nonperformance. According to Aquinas, an agent causes something by its nonperform-
ance if and only if (1) had the agent performed the act in question the effect in question would
not (or not likely) have obtained, and (2) the agent ought to have performed the act in question
(ST 1–2.6.3). So, for example, we explain why the dough didn’t rise by the failure of the baker
to put yeast in. But we wouldn’t explain it by the failure of the custodian to put yeast in, for it
is not something the custodian ought to have done, even though his having done it would have
also resulted in the dough’s rising. Applying these principles to the issue at hand, we can impute
the privation in the act of sin to the sinner, because the sinner ought to have considered the rule,
and, had he done so, the sinful act with its privation would not have occurred. But we cannot
impute the privation to God in virtue of God’s not causing the sinner to consider the rule. For,
if God does not cause the sinner to consider the rule, then it wasn’t something God ought to
have done. And that point follows simply from the fact that – as Aquinas and all other theists
agree – God never fails to do what he ought.21
It should be clear from this brief introduction that Aquinas’s treatment of evil remains a topic
of lively and challenging philosophical discussion. The richness of his ideas will ensure that this
discussion will continue into the foreseeable future.
Notes
1 See Chapter 2 in this volume for a detailed discussion of Augustine on evil.
2 For a helpful discussion of influences on Aquinas’s account, see O’Rourke 2016. For a helpful general
overview of Aquinas on the metaphysics of evil, see Wippel 2016.
3 See Aquinas 1993, 71–4.
4 Aquinas holds that our first parents (Adam and Eve) were created in a state of grace (original justice) in
which their reason was subject to God, their passions to reason, their bodies to their souls, and in which
they possessed all the virtues (ST 1.95.1–3). Moreover, they enjoyed certain accompanying privileges
that go beyond human natural capacities, and which would have been handed on to their children had
the parents not sinned; for example, though naturally mortal and subject to afflictions, Adam and Eve
(unlike nonrational animals) were given supernatural gifts of immortality and preservation from bodily
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harm (ST 1.97.1–2; ST 1–2.85.6; ST 1.96.1 ad 2). Both the state of grace and the privileges were lost to
Adam and Eve and their progeny as a result of the first sin.Thus, for Aquinas, all human evil is ultimately
either sin or a penalty consequent on sin (DM 1.4; ST 1–2.85.5).
5 Aquinas takes himself to have demonstrated God’s existence, for example in the first 25 or so questions
of the Summa theologiae.
6 Davies 2011, 113–14.
7 See, for example, McCabe 2010, 104–12; and Feser 2009, 125–6.
8 See, for example, Shanley 2002, 93 and 115–16; and Stump 2010, 375.
9 For a helpful overview of Aquinas’s commentary on Job, see Nutt 2015. For an application to questions
of theodicy, see Stump 1996.
10 Though he thinks no created thing could surpass the humanity of Christ, or Mary, the mother of God,
whose special relationships to God convey an infinite dignity (see ST 1.25.6 ad 4).
11 See, for instance, Calder 2007, Crosby 2002, and Crosby 2007.
12 See Lee 2000, 257–60; Lee 2007, 473–9; Alexander 2012, 100–108; and Samet 2012.
13 See Grant 2015, and Lee 2007, 479–86.
14 For these objections, see Barnwell 2015, 283–7.
15 For these points, see Jensen 2018.
16 See Newlands 2014, 287–290. Newlands discusses such objections as they arise in the early Leibniz.
17 See Grant 2009, 477–8.
18 See Grant 2017, 132–8.
19 See Maritain 1966, 38–43.
20 See Grant 2009, 480.
21 See Grant 2009, 480–91.
References
Alexander, D.E. (2012) Goodness, God, and Evil, London: Continuum.
Aquinas, St. Thomas. (1975) Summa Contra Gentiles, trans. A.C. Pegis et al., Notre Dame, IN: University
of Notre Dame Press.
Aquinas, St. Thomas. (1981) Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province,
Westminster, MD: Christian Classics.
Aquinas, St. Thomas. (1989) The Literal Exposition on Job, trans. A. Damico, Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press.
Aquinas, St. Thomas. (1993) On the Principles of Nature, trans. T. McDermott, in Aquinas: Selected
Philosophical Writings, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 67–80.
Aquinas, St. Thomas. (1995) On Evil, trans. J. Oesterle, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
Barnwell, M. (2015) “The Problem with Aquinas’s Original Discovery,” American Catholic Philosophical
Quarterly 89(2), pp. 277–91.
Calder, T.C. (2007) “Is the Privation Theory of Evil Dead?” American Philosophical Quarterly 44(4),
pp. 371–81.
Crosby, J.F. (2002) “Is All Evil Only Privation?” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association
75, pp. 197–209.
Crosby, J.F. (2007) “Doubts About the Privation Theory That Will Not Go Away: Response to Patrick
Lee,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 81(3), pp. 489–505.
Davies, B. (2011), Thomas Aquinas on God and Evil, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dougherty, M.V. (2016), Aquinas’s Disputed Questions on Evil: A Critical Guide, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Feser, E. (2009), Aquinas, Oxford: Oneworld.
Grant, W.M. (2009) “Aquinas On How God Causes the Act of Sin Without Causing Sin Itself,” The
Thomist 73(3), pp. 455–96.
Grant, W.M. (2015) “The Privation Account of Moral Evil: A Defense,” International Philosophical Quarterly
55(3), pp. 271–86.
Grant, W.M. (2017) “Moral Evil, Privation, and God,” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 9(1),
pp. 125–45.
Jensen, S. (2018) “Aquinas’s Original Discovery: A Reply to Barnwell,” American Catholic Philosophical
Quarterly 92(1), pp. 73–95.
Lee, P. (2000) “The Goodness of Creation, Evil, and Christian Teaching,” The Thomist 64, pp. 239–69.
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Lee, P. (2007) “Evil as Such Is a Privation: A Reply to John Crosby,” American Catholic Philosophical
Quarterly 81(3), pp. 469–88.
Maritain, J. (1966) God and the Permission of Evil, Milwaukee, WI: Bruce.
McCabe, H. (2010) God and Evil in the Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, London: Continuum.
Newlands, S. (2014) “Leibniz on Privations, Limitations, and the Metaphysics of Evil,” Journal of the History
of Philosophy 52(2), pp. 281–308.
Nutt, R.W. (2015) “Providence, Wisdom, and the Justice of Job’s Afflictions: Considerations from
Aquinas’ Literal Exposition on Job,” Heythrop Journal LVI, pp. 44–66.
O’Rourke, F. (2016) “Evil as Privation: the Neoplatonic Background to Aquinas’s De malo, I,” in Aquinas’s
Disputed Questions on Evil: A Critical Guide, ed. M.V. Dougherty, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, pp. 192–221.
Samet, I. (2012) “On Pain and the Privation Theory of Evil,” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion
4(1), pp. 19–34.
Shanley O.P., B.J. (2002) The Thomist Tradition, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.
Stump, E. (1996) “Aquinas on the Sufferings of Job,” in The Evidential Argument from Evil, ed. D. Howard-
Snyder, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 49–68.
Stump, E. (2010) Wandering in Darkness, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wippel, J.F. (2016) “Metaphysical Themes in De malo, I,” in Dougherty 2016, pp. 12–33.
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4
MACHIAVELLI
The drama of politics and its inherent evil
Giovanni Giorgini
According to the Bible, the serpent tempted Eve, suggesting that by eating the forbidden fruit
she and Adam would become “like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). Knowledge
of good and evil is God’s prerogative, in the sense that God determines what is good and evil;
human beings have moral discernment, which enables them to identify what is good but by
eating the forbidden fruit Adam and Eve want to go further, to decide for themselves what is
good or evil. They reject their condition of “creatures” and want to become “makers,” creators
of values. Machiavelli did not have any such ambition, despite a long interpretative tradition
that sees him as a “teacher of evil” and a subverter of traditional (Christian) morality.1 In fact,
Machiavelli was not the bearer of a new morality for humankind, the herald of a “transvalu-
ation of all values,” nor was he the thinker who separated morality from politics, justifying
politically what is morally condemnable. These statements are grounded on the observation that
the words “good” and “evil” retain their usual meaning in his works nor is there any dispensa-
tion from ordinary morality for statesmen. Machiavelli’s original contribution rather consists
in the discovery that politics has a distinct dimension of duty that, in exceptional cases, forces
the statesman to commit actions that collide with moral and religious imperatives. Machiavelli
discloses to his readers that, contrary to the popular, naive opinion that statesmen can do what
they wish, politics is in fact the realm of necessity because statesmen are often forced to choose
between evil alternatives and opt for the lesser evil. This fact reveals the dramatic side of the
political realm, which should be known, and eventually accepted, by Machiavelli’s reader, the
prospective statesman.
Machiavelli was also a man of letters and, after being deprived of all public office (post res
perditas, as he sadly remarked), he described himself as a poet and very often compared life and
politics to a theater. It is in this grand theater of life that the drama of politics is performed
and it is here that Machiavelli imparts his most dramatic lesson to his readers: the “seriousness
of politics.”2 Politics is a serious matter; differently from other spheres of human activity such
as art, economy, or even morality, where the negative outcome of an action affects only the
agent or causes limited damages such as loss of money or an ugly sculpture, politics is the realm
where decisions are made which affect thousands of people, whose life or death depends on
the statesman’s capacity to make the right decision. A person who enters politics must accept
the responsibility which comes with public service and must be aware that he is entering a
path which may lead him to infringe upon his own ethical and religious considerations, with
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Giovanni Giorgini
the result of damning his own soul.3 Machiavelli thus operated a dramatic turn from the
Christian teaching, for he disclosed that the duty to rule responsibly and the goal of personal
salvation could not be pursued together. Being “good” in politics means being determined to
act for the common good of the state and this often entails making decisions and committing
actions that are morally evil and remain so: very often, then, the good prince cannot but be
a bad Christian.4 It is useful to remember here just how strong the orthodox view concern-
ing morality and politics was at the time Machiavelli was writing. Good politics was simply
doing what a good religious person ought to do in obeying God’s commandments: ethical
and religious commandments translated immediately into political precepts that inspired the
statesman’s action. Machiavelli’s break with this view of politics was extraordinary and deeply
shocking at the time.5
Machiavelli’s world
In order to assess Machiavelli’s departure from the traditional view of politics of his days we
should first of all examine Machiavelli’s world so that we can ascertain the role played by evil in
it. To begin with, Machiavelli is interested in evil as concerns human matters. He shows to be
quite uninterested in the metaphysical question of theodicy, namely the origin and existence of
evil in the universe and the role of God in it. He notoriously maintained that “I judge the world
always to have been in the same mode and there to have been as much good as wicked in it”
(Discourses II, Preface); what he is thinking of is political virtue and political wickedness. As it is
made clear by what follows, the “vices” of our times are the lack of “observance of religion, of
laws, and of the military,” which are not moral flaws but have practical import. In Machiavelli’s
judgment the world did not consistently improve or decline; there was not a general progress or
declension but rather its goodness remained the same; what changed over time was the “allo-
cation” of virtue and vice. Machiavelli was indeed convinced that human things are always in
motion and therefore must necessarily either ascend or descend;6 likewise, the wicked and the
good, namely political virtue and vice, “vary from province to province” but this motion is not
determined only by chance: human beings, and especially statesmen, can influence it through
their virtue, by laying down good laws and institutions that will regulate human passions. For
Machiavelli there is no ultimate sense in history; there is no meaningful motion, forward or
backward, that can be detected even by the acutest observer. On the other hand, there is neither
a deterministic force acting in the universe and human beings can therefore print their mark
on history. For instance, the sad contemporary condition of Italy, especially as compared to the
glory days of Roman power, was not the result of the inevitable decline that follows a peak: it
is imputable to the low quality of Italian politicians, which is in its turn a product of the bad
education and the vicious examples of the Roman Church.7
Although uninterested in questions of theodicy, Machiavelli was also a philosopher and
had a metaphysical view of the condition of mankind in the world. He addressed this ques-
tion obliquely while examining the issue of the eternity of the world in a puzzling chapter of
the Discourses (II, 5).8 There he maintained that the world is eternal (thus implicitly rejecting
Christian creationism) and subject to periodical natural disasters such as floods, plagues, and
famines. These calamities force the few survivors, “mountain men and coarse,” to recreate
civilization almost from scratch; this line of progress continues up to the point when human
beings are too many or too wicked and nature again intervenes in order to “purge” the world,
reducing the number of men and improving their moral quality, “so that men, through having
become few and beaten, may live more advantageously and become better” (Discourses II, 5).
This narration entails a vision of an original, simple morality of the survivors taken after classical
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Machiavelli
authors such as Plato and Cicero.9 It also implies that growing civilization brings complexity and
moral deviousness with it. Machiavelli is persuaded that the age he lives in is a time of moral
complexity; his contemporary statesmen should acknowledge this fact and thus relinquish all
hope of translating, simply and immediately, moral qualities into political virtue.
Having maintained that human beings are not deterministically maneuvered by some force or
nature, Machiavelli goes on to argue that men’s free will is still constrained by the way the world
is made, its inherent necessity and imperfection. We may consider this notion Machiavelli’s
closest approximation to a metaphysical view, a view strongly influenced by classical authors
and especially by Plato.10 In Discourses I, 6, Machiavelli offers to his reader one of his “general
rules,” which discloses his image of the world: “In all human things he who examines well sees
this: that one inconvenience can never be suppressed without another’s cropping up.” This idea
is paralleled by an observation put in the very last chapter of the Discourses. Here, after so many
recommendations to his reader about how to create and maintain a free republic, Machiavelli
pensively comments that “It is of necessity, as was said other times, that in a great city acci-
dents arise every day that have need of a physician” (Discourses III, 49). We should read these
statements on the background of the observation that “It appears that in the actions of men, as
we have discoursed of another time, besides the other difficulties in wishing to bring a thing
to its perfection, one finds that close to the good there is always some evil that arises with that
good”; there are things “that have the evil so close to the good, and so much are they joined
together that it is an easy thing to take one, believing one has picked the other” (Discourses III,
37). Human matters are characterized by their imperfection and instability and by the closeness
and combination of good and evil. It is in this realm of imperfection that the statesman acts: his
force resides in his virtue, his capacity to identify the right course of action in the circumstances,
while his nemesis is labeled with the evocative name of fortuna.
Fortuna, the obscure force in history that summarizes everything that is beyond man’s con-
trol, must be accounted for by any prudent statesman who plans to do “great things,” namely
creating, maintaining, and aggrandizing a state.11 The relation between man’s virtue and the
influence of fortuna is a central theme in Machiavelli’s thought, on which he labored his entire
life. Indeed, already at the time when he sent a letter to Giovan Battista Soderini (September
1506) known as the Ghiribizzi al Soderino Machiavelli elaborated the theory of riscontro, or
“match,” to explain success and failure in political action: a man must “match” his times,
namely human action must be aligned to the historical conditions of the age. Human actions
do not happen in a void and this makes it difficult to give general rules in politics: the states-
man should therefore possess “virtue,” namely the capacity to identify what the circumstances
require of him. This theme is explored in depth in Machiavelli’s two major political works, with
certain inconsistencies which reveal how profoundly the subject tortured Machiavelli’s mind.
In the Prince fortuna appears to be the opposite of virtue, in that she (“fortune is a woman”!) is
the obscure and unpredictable force in history that contrasts human agency. Machiavelli duly
instructs his reader that “Those who become princes from private individual solely by fortune
become so with little trouble, but maintain themselves with much” and choses Cesare Borgia
as example. This seems appropriate since the duke Valentino “acquired his state through the
fortune of his father and lost it through the same,” although he had done everything that a
“prudent and virtuous man” should do to give solid foundations to his power. After reviewing
his actions Machiavelli emphatically states that:
I do not know what better teaching I could give to a new prince than the example of
his actions. And if his orders did not bring profit to him, it was not his fault, because
this arose from an extraordinary and extreme malignity of fortune.
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At the end of the chapter Machiavelli reiterates that:
If I summed up all the actions of the duke, I would not know how to reproach him;
on the contrary, it seems to me he should be put forward, as I have done, to be imi-
tated by all those who have risen to empire through fortune and by the arms of others.
It is at this point that the shocking conclusion comes: Machiavelli reproaches the duke
Valentino for the election of Pope Julius II Della Rovere, a fierce enemy of the Borgias, and
concludes: “So the duke erred in this choice and it was the cause of his ultimate ruin” (Prince 7).
Misjudgment, not lack of fortune, was thus to blame. Then, the last chapter in the Prince before
the Exhortatory Letter is devoted to the role of fortune in human affairs. Here again fortuna is
presented as the resisting force to prudent human action12 and Machiavelli elaborates the theory of
the “quality of the times”: circumstances require human beings to act accordingly and the two dif-
ferent modes of behavior are “impetuous” or “cautious.”13 Men must thus be able to adapt to the
circumstances and their actions must match the contingent requirements. However, here again
Machiavelli concludes against his reasoning in the entire chapter: “I judge this to be good,” the
best course consists in acting impetuously in all circumstances in order to beat fortune (Prince 25).
This impression is confirmed by a philosophically dense chapter in the Discourses, devoted to
demonstrating that “Fortune blinds the spirits of men when she does not wish them to oppose
her plans” (II, 29). Here Machiavelli sums up his opinion about “how human affairs proceed.”
He begins by saying that certain “accidents” clearly show “the power of heaven over human
affairs” but then goes on to say that fortune choses a man of great virtue, able to recognize
the favorable occasion, in order to accomplish great deeds. Machiavelli ends the chapter stat-
ing something “very true” and confirmed by history, namely that men can follow the ways
of fortune without opposing her and should never despair because fortune has “oblique and
unknown” ways. The end is undetermined and history is open to human action. It is safe to
conclude, then, that Machiavelli’s final judgment about the role of fate in human affairs sees the
preeminence of human virtue over fortune. A force always to be considered by the wise states-
man, fortune eventually yields before human prudence and determination.
Evil in politics: corruption, which generates tyranny

We are now in a better position to examine Machiavelli’s view of evil in politics. Since the
human world is imperfect, evil is an inherent presence in it. Political arrangements are devised
first to enable human beings to live and then to live well. Human beings originally congregate
spontaneously to survive the adversities of nature and, in their interactions, they elaborate the
notions of good and bad, useful and noxious, and then that of justice (Discourses I, 2). With jus-
tice come laws and institutions, which are necessary because men are not all good, honest, and
compassionate: political arrangements are therefore necessary and Machiavelli is persuaded that
without them not even bare life is possible, let alone a virtuous or flourishing life. This is the
reason why preserving the state, defending it from external enemies and not allowing it to be
torn apart by factional strife, must be the supreme consideration for the statesman. Machiavelli
subscribes completely to the view first found in Thucydides and then canonized in the Roman
Laws of the Twelve Tables in the sentence salus reipublicae suprema lex esto.14 In this view the
subsistence of the state is the common good of the citizens; it is also the primary and overarching
good, since without the state there is anarchy and might makes right.
Evil in politics is thus anything that imperils and destroys the state. Since the state is the
common good, Machiavelli identifies evil with the private interest, which tears the community
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apart and paves the way to the utter negation of politics – tyranny. This is a very important
but often misconstrued point, for Machiavelli self-consciously has a very unusual position:
looking at the Roman experience and at the situation of his days, Machiavelli believes that in
every political arrangement there typically are two factions (or “humors” as he describes them
using a bodily metaphor) – the few and the many, the rich noble and the poor commoners.
It is only natural that these two factions have different, conflicting purposes: the nobles want
to dominate and the people want to be left alone, have their property and family safe, and be
in the condition to live their life safely.15 Machiavelli thus believes that conflict, not harmony,
is the natural condition for a state; even more strikingly, and contrary to a long tradition of
political thought that considered civil strife a deadly ailment of the body politic, he believes
that conflict is salutary for it preserves the freedom of the republic. The all-important point,
the determining factor, is the presence of good laws in the state: these guarantee that the clash
of different interests does not harm the republic for they find an institutional outcome to the
conflict. For instance, Machiavelli deems very important that the people be able to sue mag-
istrates for misconduct in the proper courts; when these public outlets for people’s anger are
wanting, they recur to slander in the private: “Men are accused to magistrates, to peoples, to
councils; they are calumniated in piazzas and in loggias”; this situation creates hatred, division,
and eventually the ruin of the state (Discourses I, 8).
In the Roman Republic, which is Machiavelli’s model, the presence of the two factions of
the People and the Great and the consequent “tumults” were exploited by the lawgiver to mold
a mixed constitution and therefore a “perfect republic” (Discourses I, 2). The good laws act on
a double level: they educate the citizens to never lose sight of the common good even during
factional strife; they “institutionalize” the conflict, not allowing it to escalate to the point when
disgruntled citizens recur to “the extraordinary,” namely extra-legal and therefore subversive
measures (Discourses I, 7). Rome, contrary to Florence, had such good laws and institutions and
therefore was not a “divided” or “inordinate” republic (Discourses I, 4). In addition, thanks to
Numa Rome had a well-established religion, which brought about good institutions and virtu-
ous citizens. Numa is praised for realizing the importance of religions as a means to create good
citizens: “As he found a very ferocious people and wished to reduce it to civil obedience with
the arts of peace, he turned to religion as a thing altogether necessary if he wished to main-
tain a civilization.” This is the beneficent effect of religion: “citizens feared to break an oath
much more than the laws, like those who esteemed the power of God more than that of men”
(Discourses I, 11). Lack of religion, on the contrary, brings about all sort of ills as it is testified
by the dire situation of Italy, full of irreligious, evil people and, in addition, politically divided
because of the bad teachings and examples of the Church of Rome.
Machiavelli has a word for the situation of division, factional strife, lack of love for the com-
mon good, moral and political decline: corruption. Where there is no love for the common
good, customs decline and selfish interests prevail to the point that the entire state is destroyed.
Machiavelli was not exaggerating or overstating his point. Faithful to his belief that the pru-
dent man should learn “from long experience with modern things and a continuous reading
of ancient ones” (Prince, Dedicatory Letter), Machiavelli draws from the works of the clas-
sics (especially Thucydides, Plato, Livy, and Tacitus) and couples their teaching with his own
experience in practical politics. Plato in the Politicus had observed that it was an amazing feat
that a polis could survive bad politicians and Thucydides had shown the sad fate of cities that
had been destroyed and their inhabitants sold into slavery; the Roman historians had described
Rome’s decay under corrupt politicians and bad emperors; Machiavelli himself had seen the rise
and destruction of so many political entities in his lifetime.16 And his native city Florence had
been rife with personal rivalries and factional struggles most of its existence, as it is testified by
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the Florentine Histories. Machiavelli speaks both of “a corrupt people” and of “corrupt matter.”
Both expressions emphasize the division and lack of common good present in a city, describing
it from different perspectives: the low moral and political condition of the citizens or the ill-
functioning of the institutions. Corruption is a condition of disorder and lawlessness, of inequal-
ity before the laws so that the aristocrats feel entitled to use the laws to their sole advantage and
to increase their power; corruption breeds civil strife, which, in turn, almost inevitably paves the
way to a sole ruler. This is a condition of the utmost danger for a state because two outcomes
are possible: either a “good and prudent man” intervenes and saves the republic by enforcing
the laws or using extraordinary means, or a tyrant takes the power and rules for his own benefit.
Contrary to the popular view, which sees him as the evil teacher of tyrants on how to
keep their power, Machiavelli traced a hard and fast distinction between the prince and the
tyrant: the prince aims at saving the state and therefore at the common good for his fellow
citizens; the tyrant has only his personal interest in view. The tyrant is the likely outcome
of a civil strife that induces the aristocrats and the people to pursue their selfish interest; the
condition of civil strife is therefore extremely dangerous for a republic and institutional rem-
edies should be devised by legislators to avoid it. Commenting on the case of the Decemvirs
in Rome in Discourses I, 40, Machiavelli states:
the inconvenience of creating this tyranny arose for those same causes that the greater
part of tyrannies in cities arise; and this is from too great a desire of the people to be
free and from too great a desire of the nobles to command. When they do not agree to
make a law in favour of freedom, but one of the parties jumps to favour one individual,
then it is that tyranny emerges at once.
The tyrant precipitates the search for personal advantage and, by appropriating the entire state,
transforms what is common – the res publica – into something private. Tyranny, therefore, is the
emblem and the embodiment of utter evil in politics. The tyrant himself may be a ferocious or
a gentle man but tyranny is always evil because it is the denial of the common good: a “good
tyrant” is a contradiction in terms because being “good” in politics means to act for the “com-
mon utility” of the citizens. In fact, when Machiavelli in Discourses II, 2, speaks of the possibility
that in a city a “virtuous tyrant” appears by chance, he deliberately uses this oxymoronic expres-
sion to show that the community would not benefit at all from him: his conquests, which make
him “virtuous,” are only to his own advantage. In this distinction between common good vs.
private interest lies the difference between the prince and the tyrant, good and evil in politics.17
Since tyranny is a lurking danger in all political arrangements, lawgivers and prudent states-
men should devise institutional means to defuse this threat. The best remedy to such occurrence
is to provide for an institutional solution in advance, as did the Roman Republic with the
office of dictatorship. Failing this, a republic in a state of disorder must rely on a combination
of virtue and fortune: the fortune to find a prudent statesman who takes charge of the situation
and reforms the state. These are Machiavelli’s reflections in the Florentine Histories, a work that
revolves around the topic of civil war and factional strife:
Cities, more especially those imperfectly organized, which are governed under the
name of republics, frequently change their rulers and the form of their institutions;
not by the influence of liberty or subjection, as many suppose, but by that of slavery
and license; for with the nobility or the people, the ministers respectively of slavery or
licentiousness, only the name of liberty is in any estimation, neither of them choos-
ing to be subject either to magistrates or laws. When, however, a good, wise, and
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powerful citizen appears (which is but seldom), who establishes ordinances capable
of appeasing or restraining these contending dispositions, so as to prevent them from
doing mischief, then the government may be called free, and its institutions firm and
secure; for having good laws for its basis, and good regulations for carrying them into
effect, it needs not, like others, the virtue of one man for its maintenance. With such
excellent laws and institutions, many of those ancient republics, which were of long
duration, were endowed. But these advantages are, and always have been, denied to
those which frequently change from tyranny to license, or the reverse; because, from
the powerful enemies which each condition creates itself, they neither have, nor can
possess any stability.18
Machiavelli’s man
Two famous quotes may introduce us to the question of Machiavelli’s anthropology. In the
Prince, he famously states that “of men, we may say generally this: that they are ungrateful, fickle,
pretenders and dissemblers, evaders of danger, eager for gain.”19 The emphasis should be put on
“generally”: this is a general rule for the prince, who must assume for political purposes that all
his subjects will turn out to be such if they are not tamed by the laws and by princely power. But
this is not a universal observation: it is valid “generally” and does not preclude the possibility of
finding “good men” who care for their country. In the Discourses we read:
As all those demonstrate who reason on a civil way of life, and as every history is full
of examples, it is necessary to whoever disposes a republic and orders laws in it to
presuppose that all men are bad.
(Discourses I, 3)20
We should beware of construing these statements as supporting the trite notion that
Machiavelli had a negative anthropology, a pessimistic view of human nature: this is in fact a
political anthropology; it is not metaphysical. Machiavelli advises the statesman to assume, for
political reasons, that all his subjects are wicked; but in reality, in ordinary life, human beings are
varied, some are good and some are bad, as it is testified by Machiavelli himself in his letters. In
politics, however, an als ob anthropology is required. 21
Further light on Machiavelli’s anthropology is scattered by Prince 23, where we read: “men
will always turn out bad for you unless they have been made good by a necessity.” This state-
ment is in fact the conclusion of a paragraph where Machiavelli exposes a “general rule that
never fails: that a prince who is not wise by himself cannot be counselled well” (emphasis mine).
Machiavelli’s opinion is that good counseling “must arise from the prudence of the prince”
(emphasis mine). The two fundamental elements to be noted here are the notions of prudence
and wisdom: Machiavelli believes that these two qualities enable the prince to save the state and
his educational project is exactly to enable his readers to become wise and prudent statesmen.
Machiavelli therefore believes that there are such “good men” who can become virtuous politi-
cians if they receive the proper education. Otherwise, there would be no point in educating to
the common good evil men.
Once we have ascertained this, we should explore Machiavelli’s phenomenology of good
and evil men. Before we do that, however, we must underline another important element in the
previous sentence. Men are made good by necessity; this statement is repeated in Discourses I, 3,
where Machiavelli says that “men never work any good unless through necessity,” and in what
follows he makes clear that “license,” i.e., lack of law and order, brings about “confusion and
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disorder,” whereas the laws make men good. We should therefore interpret this “necessity” that
makes men good as the constraint of the laws; it is neither an external, casual circumstance nor
internal deontology that induce human beings to behave properly but rather the institutional
force of the laws. This is clearly confirmed by Machiavelli’s repeated statement in Discourses I, 1
that the “necessity ordered by the laws” created excellent citizens even in countries geographi-
cally unsuited to virtue.
We may now address the fundamental question: who are the good men and the bad men
according to Machiavelli? His answer is exquisitely political. The good men are those who care
for the common good and act accordingly, engaging in politics and working to preserve and
aggrandize the state. On the contrary, the bad men are those who pursue selfish interests and
thus divide and imperil the state or who, because of their sluggishness or ineptitude, destroy
the political community. Moral depravity and “sinful” behavior have nothing to do with this
judgment. For instance, Machiavelli condemns Oliverotto from Fermo not because of his moral
flaws (he killed his maternal uncle, who raised him, to usurp his power) but because he turned
his free city into a personal rule and was not even able to preserve his power (Prince 8); simi-
larly, Giovanpagolo Baglioni is called “tyrant of Perugia” and berated for not being “honorably
wicked”: an incestuous murderer of relatives, he did not catch the occasion to kill Pope Julius II
and many cardinals when he had the opportunity for it, thus failing to leave “an eternal memory
of himself as being the first who had demonstrated to the prelates how little is to be esteemed
whoever lives and reigns as they do” (Discourses I, 27). Machiavelli’s condemnation is at the
political, not the moral level.
It is at this level that Machiavelli’s infamous distinction between well-used and badly used
cruelties enters the scene (Prince 8). Machiavelli does not depart from conventional morality in
defining “cruel” certain acts but his final judgment is exclusively political. In fact, Machiavelli
prefaces this distinction by stating “if it is licit to speak well of evil” and then proceeds on a
political level: well-used cruelties are those which are committed “for the necessity to secure”
the state and for the well-being of the citizens, namely evil acts that serve the common good.
Badly used cruelties are those that stem from the wickedness of the prince and have no public
utility. In the case of Agathocles, tyrant of Syracuse and “hero” of Prince 8, his use of cruel
methods to quench civil strife and to fight foreign invaders (the Carthaginians) entitle him
to be called a “virtuous” prince. Similarly, Ferdinand of Aragon, king of Spain, is lauded for
using “pious cruelty” in order to accomplish “great things,” namely unifying and fortifying his
kingdom (Prince 21).
Machiavelli believes that a political act should be judged not only by the intentions of the
agent but also in a consequentialist perspective: one should look at the purpose of the statesman
as well as at the consequences of his actions. Romulus is an instructive example, for he killed his
brother Remus in the very act of founding Rome and creating a “civil way of life”; Romulus did
not act “out of his own ambition” but in order to defend the “common good.” In fact, he
did not establish a short-lived personal rule but rather kept for himself only the typical author-
ity of a good king and went on to create the Senate. Machiavelli can therefore conclude that,
although “the deed accuses him, the effect excuses him” (Discourses I, 9). Likewise, Machiavelli’s
famous statement that “Cesare Borgia was considered a cruel person; however, his cruelty had
mended Romagna, put it together, reduced it to a peaceful and faithful condition” sheds light
on what are for him the goods a real statesman should pursue: unity of the state through law and
order, peace and faith, namely recognition of the ruler’s authority.22 Cesare Borgia is again an
instructive example: after commanding his lieutenant Remirro dell’Orco to ruthlessly crush the
riotous Romagna lords, he had him found quartered on the central square of Cesena in order
to deflect popular anger from himself: to inhumanly kill your acolyte who paved the way to
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your rule cannot but be considered a disloyal and cruel act; however, this act made Borgia look
strong and fair and enabled him to pacify and unify that riotous region: it served the common
good and was therefore politically justified.
The political circumstances are the determining factor when it comes to evaluate the politi-
cal soundness (and therefore “goodness”) of an action. In Prince 19 Machiavelli gives us one of
his unconventional observations: “And here one should note that hatred is acquired through
good deeds as well as bad ones; and so, as I said above, a prince who wants to maintain his state
is often forced not to be good.” For where there is a “corrupt matter” even good deeds are
not useful; the prudent statesman should therefore imitate the “virtuous” emperor Septimius
Severus, who pacified and enlarged the Roman Empire by acting as “a very fierce lion and
a very astute fox.” We may note again the presence of this element of necessity here: it is
necessity that, in certain political circumstances, forces the statesman to do evil deeds. Also
the notion of fortuna and her role reappear here: if a politician is so lucky as never to find
himself in circumstances which threaten the existence of his state, he will not need to com-
mit evil deeds. Fortuna is responsible for presenting the circumstances; the statesman must
be ready and capable to adapt to them. In the case of a new prince, the element of necessity
is higher. Reviewing the actions of Severus, Machiavelli emphasizes his ferociousness and
cruelty, which were however accompanied by great “virtue,” namely the capacity of unify-
ing the state: the result was that both people and soldiers admired him and remained the one
“astonished and stupefied,” the other “reverent and satisfied” and he could reign untroubled.23
Completely different is the case of Commodus, who could have had an easy time keeping the
orderly empire inherited from the father Marcus Aurelius. But Commodus “had a cruel and
bestial spirit” and thus indulged the armies, making them “licentious,” and committed vile
and undignified acts: as a result, he brought unto himself the hatred of the people and the con-
tempt of the soldiers and was murdered in a conspiracy. The deciding factor in Machiavelli’s
judgment is the use of cruelty, whose moral status remains unchallenged: cruelty is morally
evil but sometimes politically required. Machiavelli accordingly concludes this chapter by
stating that in order to found a state a new prince must imitate Severus’ necessary actions; on
the contrary, in order to keep an already established and firm state, one should imitate Marcus
Aurelius’ fitting and glorious behavior. Evil deeds required by the circumstances and which
serve the common good are politically excused although they remain evil; and acting well for
the public utility brings glory.
How to remain a good man while doing evil deeds

It is to be noted that Machiavelli is quite consistent in his definition of “good” and “evil” and
also distinguishes between “good” and “virtuous” or “prudent” men: the former are those men,
princes as well as common people, who are motivated by love for the country and pursue the
common good in their political action; the latter are the effective politicians, capable to preserve
and aggrandize the state although not always motivated by disinterested love for the country;
this is the case of the Sicilian tyrant Agathocles, whose “virtue” in ruling Syracuse is extolled
more than once regardless of his “savage cruelty and inhumanity” (Prince 8). Virtue has a quin-
tessentially political meaning. Obviously, Machiavelli envisages the possibility that some people
live a private life and are good and pious human beings according to traditional morality. But,
when it comes to the public sphere, “goodness” is determined solely by love for the country
and pursuit of the common good. Machiavelli’s very elevated image of politics emerges from
the examples he presents to his readers for imitation: outstanding figures who did “great things”
and are therefore to be imitated by all those who want to follow in their footsteps: founders
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of states like Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, Romulus; and then statesmen who saved or aggrandized
their states such as Agesilaus, Brutus, and Cato. These were all outstanding men endowed with
an extraordinary political vision and totally unselfish in their motivations. They are the dem-
onstration that there exist such “good men,” that human beings are not all wicked. When we
explore these examples further, we notice that all these rulers were forced to commit evil deeds
in order to accomplish their task; this observation shows that effective political action can rarely
be achieved without compromising one’s moral integrity. This lesson is alluded to already in
the incipit of the Prince. In his dedication to Lorenzo de’ Medici, Machiavelli writes that the
only two qualities of his work that might render it appealing to Lorenzo are “the variety of the
matter and the gravity of the subject” (emphasis mine). I think these words were carefully chosen
and should be taken literally: the gravity of certain political situations requires a prince to adopt
means that have grave moral consequences for his soul.
What Machiavelli is pointing to here is that there is a tension between means and ends in
politics because the statesman will very likely need to do things that are right (from the perspec-
tive of political virtue) but wrong from the perspective of a Christian morality. This means that
the person who takes political responsibility must put his personal happiness, in this and the next
life, in second place after public well-being. There is a clear clash between public and personal
happiness.24 One’s soul is a private matter, while the protection and nurturing of a safe and stable
state is a public matter and precedence must be given to the public. Machiavelli’s statesman thus
stands out as a heroic figure, capable not only of sacrificing his body for the homeland but also
of surrendering his soul.
Politics is thus the realm of tragic dilemmas because the statesman is often forced to abdi-
cate moral duties in order to follow the political imperative of saving the state. It is also a
reign of necessity for there are requirements that a statesman cannot avoid: even avoiding to
decide is a choice that may have fatal consequences. This doctrine is summed up in Prince
18, where Machiavelli explains that in order to accomplish “great things” a prince must be
able to use both “the beast and the man,” violence and the laws. He explains that, “since a
prince is compelled of necessity to know well how to use the beast, he should pick the fox
and the lion,” namely the symbols of ruse and force. The entire chapter is punctuated by
the emphasis on necessity in the prince’s actions. Machiavelli’s famous conclusion is still
staggering after 500 years:
This has to be understood: that a prince, and especially a new prince, cannot observe all
those things for which men are held good, since he is often under a necessity, to main-
tain his state, of acting against faith, against charity, against humanity, against religion.
Being a good man (according to ordinary morality) and being a good prince are often conflict-
ing ends. The prince must therefore “not depart from good, when possible, but know how to
enter into evil, when forced by necessity” (Prince 18). It is to be noted that evil remains evil
for Machiavelli: traditional moral categories are not overturned, but this dramatic dimension of
complexity only adds to the political scene.
The statesman must know that politics is a serious matter because the happiness or unhap-
piness, and sometimes even the life or death of his fellow citizens depend on his decisions;
therefore, he must be ready to dirty his hands when extreme situations require it. If we interpret
political “goodness” Machiavelli’s way, we realize that it is possible to remain a “good man”
even while using evil means if the end is the salvation of the state. Here lies the novelty of
Machiavelli’s teaching. Paradoxically, this political education may be construed as an education
in “how not to be good,” in the capacity to dirty one’s hands but always for the ultimate goal,
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the only end that makes all means honorable: saving the state.25 This is the sense of the famous
statement we read in the Prince:
Hence it is necessary to a prince, if he wants to maintain himself, to learn to be able

not to be good, and use this and not use it according to necessity.26
It is important to insist on this element of political necessity that forces the statesman to be
“not good” in certain circumstances in order to correctly appreciate the dramatic aspect of
Machiavelli’s message to his reader and prospective statesman: evil actions are sometimes
required in politics and thus those who are not willing to dirty their hands for their country
should opt for a different life choice. This aspect was well caught by that refined reader of
Machiavelli, Max Weber. In his Politics as a Vocation he remarked:
The man who is concerned for the welfare of his soul and the salvation of the souls of
others does not seek these aims along the path of politics. Politics has quite different
goals, which can only be achieved by force.27
The prince is the sole interpreter of the contingent necessity, which requires him to “enter
evil.” He has the responsibility to decide whether he should accomplish an action that is morally
wrong but required by the circumstances. The prince must therefore have an education which
enables him to correctly understand the contingent situation and the appropriate action required;
in addition, he should have a clear hierarchy of priorities, where the subsistence of the state is
at the top. Machiavelli’s fundamental problem is the education of a new kind of statesman so
that he both has his priority right and is capable to address the ever-changing circumstances: the
Prince and the Discourses should therefore be read as educational works. The central chapters of
the Prince, devoted to the examination of the qualities of the new prince, serve the purpose to
instruct the prospective prince to judge what is good beyond the appearances. They pivot around
the notion that what classical political thought and Christian morality told us to be good or to
be the correct action actually brings about a disastrous political result: the loss of the state. What
Machiavelli imparts there is a moral and political lesson on distinguishing the good from the
apparent good in politics; dispelling moral confusion is conducive to the right political action.28
The complex relation between good and evil in politics emerges clearly in Discourses I, 18.
Here Machiavelli examines the question “whether in a corrupt city one can maintain a free
state,” namely whether it is possible to maintain a republican government in a city where there
is factional strife unrestrained by laws and institutions. Machiavelli begins by saying that it is
nearly impossible to give a definite rule on this matter because one should examine the cases
according to the degrees of corruption; he reiterates here what he had maintained in Prince 20
while investigating the pros and cons of fortresses: it is impossible to give a definite judgment
because one should examine the specific situations. Machiavelli conceives of politics as an art,
where the statesman applies general rules learned from experience or instructive readings to
the ever-changing historical conditions. So, what he intends to do in this chapter is to give a
general rule which will contribute to the education of the statesman, to form his virtuous habit,
if we wish to use an Aristotelian phrasing. The abundant use of examples of previous statesmen
and of their success or failure serves the purpose to make the reader politically wise: Machiavelli
leaves it up to him to correctly apply this teaching according to the specific circumstances.
The example of Rome, which made new laws to rein in the fast-growing corruption of the
citizens but did not change the political arrangement of the state, is very instructive: the result
was a complete failure. In order to keep her freedom Rome should have changed her political
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arrangement because a “corrupt matter” requires laws and institutions that are different to those
of a well-ordered and healthy city: for there cannot be “a similar form in a matter altogether
contrary” (note the Aristotelian overtones). This change of arrangement and institutions may
be operated in two different ways: either little by little or all at a stroke. Both enterprises,
however, turn out to be “almost impossible.” To renovate the institutions little by little, it is
necessary to find a “prudent man” who sees the problem arising “from afar,” in its very begin-
ning, but such men are very rare and, in any case, find it very difficult to persuade their fellow
citizens, who are used to living in a corrupt situation. But also renovating the institutions all of
a sudden, when everyone is aware of their corruption, is highly problematic because it cannot
be done in the ordinary way, namely through the laws, because the ineffectiveness of the laws
is precisely the source of the problem. Machiavelli maintains that in such cases one must “have
recourse to the extraordinary, that is to say to violence and arms”: it is necessary to assume sole
power in the city to be able to act unrestrainedly. It is here that the complexity of the problem
is fully revealed and the highest challenge for the statesman lies:
Because the reordering of a city for a political way of life presupposes a good man, and
becoming prince of a republic by violence presupposes a bad man.
Machiavelli is well aware of the scale of the problem of trying to create a republic in a situation
of corruption where there is “inequality” among citizens, namely when there are aristocrats
who consider themselves above the law, and a disorderly people. Seen in an abstract light, such
an enterprise looks almost impossible and even contradictory, since one cannot be a good and a
bad man at the same time. But in Machiavelli’s perspective a “good man” in politics can do evil
things while remaining a good man for goodness is gauged by love for the common good. The
conundrum exists only for those who apply moral categories also to politics. It is extremely rare
that a “good man” will want to become a prince using “evil ways,” albeit with a good end in
mind, and conversely that an evil man who has become prince will want to use well the power
he acquired against the laws. But this is exactly the sense of Machiavelli’s teaching, its core. It is
difficult to maintain a republic in corrupt cities without veering toward “a kingly state,” where
the strong hand of the prince (the “kingly hand”) may succeed in reining in the license of the
people and the insolence of the aristocrats, who have private militia, “rule over castles” and feel
they are above the laws.29 Machiavelli’s intent – and ambition – is to educate a kind of statesman
who knows how to be good and not-good according to circumstances. His historical examples
of those who succeeded in combining the use of evil means with the pursuit of a good end are
very telling: the Spartan king Cleomenes, who killed all the Ephors, and Romulus, who killed
his brother and Titus Tatius the Sabine. They both acted to preserve their cities free and great,
for the common good and not for personal gain, and should therefore be exonerated. Cleomenes
and Romulus had already been quoted in an earlier chapter (I, 9), where Machiavelli stated a
“general rule,” to the extent that it is necessary to have sole power in order to create a republic
or a kingdom. Romulus belongs to the category of “prudent orderer of a republic” who wish
to be useful to the “common good” and the “common fatherland.”30 These statesmen ought
never to be blamed by any wise man for using extraordinary means in order to reach their ends.
Conclusion: the redeeming element in politics

If we take Machiavelli’s central lesson to be the disclosure of the dramatic nature of politics, the
inherent evil in it which will result in the tainted hands of the politician, this lesson has a univer-
sal application. Political regimes may have changed but human beings have not. Contemporary
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liberal democracies have efficient checks and balances and a wider distribution of power; they
place more constraints on their statesmen, who are accountable in front of public opinion as
well as before courts. Does this change things and undermine the validity of Machiavelli’s view
of “necessary evil”? I do not think so. In an imperfect world, even democratic politicians will
sometimes have to face tragic dilemmas and confront the problem of dirty hands.31 Was it just
and morally justifiable to drop the atom bomb on the civilian population of Japanese cities in
order to reduce American casualties? Harry S. Truman, the president who authorized dropping
the bomb, had a sign on his desk saying “The buck stops here!”, bowing to the evidence that
in all political arrangements there must be a supreme authority who makes the final decision
and takes responsibility for it. Sometimes in politics tragic decisions have to be made and they
inevitably entail guilt and pollution: does the “seriousness of politics” make evil sometimes nec-
essary and therefore exonerate the author?32 Whether a politician will ever find himself in such
a situation is a matter of luck, as Machiavelli taught his readers.
Saint-Just famously stated that “no-one can reign innocently.” Does this mean that the end-
place of all Machiavellian politicians will be Hell? Machiavelli has an interesting answer to this
question. Speaking of the “well-used cruelties” that serve the common good, he noted that
those who use them will find some remedy to mend their state “with the help of God and of
men” (Prince 8). Politics thus seems to have a redeeming element for those who act for the com-
mon good. It appears that God looks benevolently upon those who love their country.
Notes
1 I am here thinking of such authors as Strauss 1958 and Berlin 1979, just to mention two refined con-
temporary interpreters. In Strauss’s complex reading, Machiavelli was a true philosopher and as such
inevitably sapping the moral foundations of society. Berlin argues that Machiavelli rejected Christian
ethics in favor of an alternative moral universe. But the tradition is long. See also Hampshire 1989 for
his sophisticated interpretation to the extent that Machiavelli showed the importance of the virtue of
experience and envisaged a new morality for politicians, in stark contrast with the Christian virtues and
what Weber would call an ethic of ultimate ends. See Weber 1978: 212–25.
2 It was Nicola Matteucci who spoke of the “seriousness of politics” in his interpretation of Machiavelli.
See Matteucci 1984: 31–67. For Machiavelli’s works I have used the Italian text in Opere, ed. C.Vivanti
(Turin: Einaudi, 1997), 3 vols. For the English translation I have used The Prince, translated and with
introduction by H. Mansfield (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Discourses
on Livy, translated by H. Mansfield and N.Tarcov (Chicago, IL, and London:The University of Chicago
Press, 1998); Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others, ed. by A. Gilbert (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1989), 3 vols.
3 In the Florentine Histories Machiavelli praised the city’s magistrates who fought against Pope Gregory
XI and commented: “so much more did those citizens then esteem their homeland than their souls”:
Florentine Histories III, 7.
4 For a different opinion see Orwin 1978: 1217–28. Orwin denies the existence of a tragic element in
Machiavelli.
5 As early as 1539 Cardinal Reginald Pole famously described Machiavelli as a “son of Satan” and an
“enemy of the human race,” the author of a poisonous book. On the context of Pole’s invective and on
the early reception of Machiavelli see Anglo 2005.
6 Discourses I, 6; II, Preface; Florentine Histories V, 1.
7 See e.g., Discourses I, 12; II, 2.
8 On this extremely important and puzzling chapter of the Discourses see Giorgini 2014: 3–38.
9 See Plato, Timaeus 22a–23c; Laws III, 676b–678a. Cicero, De Republica VI, 21, 23; Tusculan Disputations I, 28.
10 See for instance the myth of the reversed cosmos in Plato’s Politicus 269c–274e.
11 The expression “great things” recurs several times in the central chapters (16–18) of the Prince, where
Machiavelli examines the appropriate ways of a new prince. It identifies the target that the new prince
should set in front of himself: saving the state or creating a new one, aggrandizing it and “embellishing”
it with good laws and institutions. No other feat brings glory to a statesman more than this.
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12 At the beginning of Chapter 25 fortuna is named together with God’s will as influences on human
agency, so fortuna appears to have the meaning of luck. Interestingly enough, the reference to God is
dropped in the rest of the chapter.
13 The idea that men’s actions must match the quality of the times is repeated, with some additional
thoughts, in Discourses III, 9.
14 This lesson emerges quite clearly in Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue, where the Athenian envoys twice
remind the Melian councilors that they are not engaged in a contest for excellence in discourses: what
is at stake is the very survival of their city (soteria tes poleos): Thucydides V, 85–113, see especially 87 and
111. The same Thucydides identified for the first time the notion of status necessitatis: when accused by
the Boeotians of acting impiously and against the traditional customs because they occupied a sanctuary
and drank from a holy spring inside it, some Athenian soldiers replied that they were forced to do so by
necessity: and even the gods are lenient toward those beset by necessity: “Actions to which people were
constrained by war or some other emergency would be pardonable in the god’s eyes too”: IV, 97–8. On
the salus reipublicae, or salus populi, see Cicero, De legibus III, 3, 8. In Florentine Histories V, 11 Machiavelli
has one citizen of Lucca state that “You should have been aware for a long time that one ought not or
cannot receive praise or blame for things done out of necessity.”
15 This is the “common utility” that a citizen derives from “a free way of life”: “being able to enjoy one’s
things freely, without any suspicion, not fearing for the honour of wives and that of children, not to be
afraid for oneself ” (Discourses I, 16).
16 See Machiavelli’s description in Discourses I, 10.
17 I wish to refer here to Giorgini 2008: 230–56.
18 Florentine Histories IV, 1.
19 Prince 17, emphasis mine.
20 Cf. Discourses I, 9, where it is said that “men are more prone to evil than to good.”
21 I therefore agree with Erica Benner’s judgment: “I suggest that Machiavelli’s statements about human
badness are best understood as cautionary and regulative judgments”: Benner 2009: 193.
22 See Prince 7, where it is said that the duke Valentino reduced Romagna into a “peaceful and unified
condition,” “to peace and obedience to a kingly arm.” Passerin d’Entrèves 1967 already perceived that
unity, peace and obedience inside the state were the goods that legitimized the ruthless action of the
new prince.
23 Compare the use of similar adjectives in the episode of Remirro dell’Orco in Prince 7.
24 This problem was already identified by Plato in Republic VII: the philosophers must give up their life of
contemplation, in which their happiness resides, and must redescend into the cave to take care of their
fellow citizens. Machiavelli, who lives in a Christian culture, goes further: statesmen should be prepared
to give up their happiness not only in this life but also in the afterlife.
25 See Prince 18, where we read:“So let a prince win and maintain his State: the means will always be judged
honorable and will be praised by everyone.” Cf. Discourses III, 41: “That advice deserves to be noted and
observed by any citizen who finds himself counseling his fatherland, for where one deliberates entirely
on the safety of his fatherland, there ought not to enter any consideration of either just or unjust, merci-
ful or cruel, praiseworthy or ignominious; indeed, every other concern put aside, one ought to follow
entirely the policy that saves its life and maintains its liberty.” It is evident from this latter passage that
moral categories remain unaltered in politics; only, their relevance is submitted to political considerations.
26 Prince 15. Note that in this and in the subsequent chapter Machiavelli speaks of the “vices without
which it is difficult to save one’s State” (15) and the “vices which enable him [the prince] to rule” (16):
vice remains vice and the prince is not morally absolved.
27 Weber 1978: 223.
28 See Hampshire 1989: 163–5.
29 Discourses I, 55.
30 Discourses I, 19 on Romulus’ prudence. In his judgment of Romulus Machiavelli seems to be deliber-
ately contrasting Cicero’s negative appraisal of him in De Officiis III, 41.
31 On this inevitable problem in politics see the insightful de Wijze 2012: 189–200. In addition, Giorgini
2017: 58–86.
32 “For men to choose to kill the innocent as a means to their ends is always murder, and murder is one of
the worst of human actions”: these grave words belong to one of the acutest moral philosophers of the
twentieth century, Elizabeth Anscombe. She wrote them in a pamphlet aimed at contrasting the pro-
posed honorary degree to be conferred to President Truman by Oxford University; Anscombe deemed
the reasons for dropping the bomb not cogent enough. See Anscombe 1958: 2.
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References
Anglo, S. 2005. Machiavelli: The First Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Anscombe, G.E.M. 1958. Mr. Truman’s Degree. Oxford: published by the author.
Berlin, I. 1979. “The Originality of Machiavelli.” Against the Current. Oxford: Clarendon.
Benner, E. 2009. Machiavelli’s Ethics. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
de Wijze, S. 2012. “The Challenge of a Moral Politics: Mendus and Coady on Politics, Integrity and ‘Dirty
Hands’.” Res Publica 18: 189–200.
Gilbert, A. (ed.) 1989. Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
3 vols.
Giorgini, G. 2017. “Machiavelli on Good and Evil” in Machiavelli on Liberty and Conf lict, eds.
D. Johnston-N., Urbinati-C. Vergara. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press: 58–86.
Giorgini, G. 2008. “The Place of the Tyrant in Machiavelli’s Political Thought and the Literary Genre of
the Prince.” History of Political Thought 29: 230–56.
Giorgini, G. 2014. “L’educazione filosofica dell’uomo politico: Discorsi II, 5.” Il Pensiero Politico 47: 3–38.
Machiavelli, N. 1998. The Prince, translated and with introduction by H. Mansfield. Chicago, IL, and
London: University of Chicago Press.
Machiavelli, N. 1998. Discourses on Livy, translated by H. Mansfield and N. Tarcov. Chicago, IL, and
London: University of Chicago Press.
Machiavelli, N. 1997. Opere ed. C. Vivanti. Turin: Einaudi. 3 vols.
Hampshire, S. 1989. Innocence and Experience. London: Penguin.
Matteucci, N. 1984. “Niccolò Machiavelli” in Alla ricerca dell’ordine politico. Bologna: Il Mulino.
Orwin, C. 1978. “Machiavelli’s Unchristian Charity.” American Political Science Review 72: 1217–28.
Passerin d’Entrèves, A. 1967. The Notion of the State. London: Oxford University Press.
Strauss, L. 1958. Thoughts on Machiavelli. Glencoe: Free Press.
Weber, M. 1978. “Politics as a Vocation” in Selections in Translation, ed. W.G. Runciman. Cambridge:
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5
HOBBES ON EVIL
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) is best-known as one of the preeminent theorists of the modern
state. In his political writings he defends obedience to undivided and absolute sovereignty as the
only solution to human conflict and war, arguing that only if the civil sovereign has overwhelm-
ing power to bend the will of each citizen can a catastrophe be avoided. As radical as they are
contentious, few of his readers have been willing to accept his views without reservation. Yet,
they are difficult to ignore. He inventively incorporates commonly held views and aspects of
the views of his opponents, and he makes a concerted effort, over several decades, to place his
politics in a systematic philosophy that includes metaphysics, natural philosophy, and what we
would today call psychology. The result is a tightly argued wide-ranging philosophical system.
This is also the reason why a handbook on evil should include a chapter on Hobbes. At several
moments, he contributes to the conceptual history of evil by showing how evil must be under-
stood to fit with his unconventional political and philosophical commitments. In this chapter I
provide an overview organized primarily around two of those moments.
First, Hobbes tries to undermine the traditional natural law position that identifies God’s
command as an independent standard to which the civil sovereign can be held to account.
Hobbes maintains that individuals owe virtually unlimited obedience to their earthly sovereign
in both temporal and spiritual matters, regardless of the content of the civil law. This means
that citizens commit a sin or culpable evil then and only then when they violate the command
of the civil sovereign. However, Hobbes builds this positivist edifice on a natural law foun-
dation. Crucially, he remains committed to the principle that “Subjects owe to Sovereigns
simple Obedience in all things wherein their obedience is not repugnant to the Lawes of God”
(L 31.1: 554; also EL 2.6.1: 144–5). The arguments squaring these two positions provide a
framework explaining what must be condemned as evil in civil and religious life.
Second, Hobbes develops a necessitarian and materialist metaphysics that rules out the exist-
ence of free will and commits him to maintaining that God is the cause of all evil in the world.
In a long-running debate with the Anglican theologian Bishop John Bramhall, Hobbes spends
considerable energy on showing the compatibility of these positions with Christian piety and
the justifiability of ordinary practices of praise, blame, and punishment. I turn to these argu-
ments, which provide further insight in Hobbes’s thoughts on the nature of evil, in the last
section of the paper. First, I start by outlining Hobbes’s conception of natural law as means to
avoid death as the chief natural evil, and his conception of sin in temporal and spiritual matters.
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Evil in moral philosophy

In this section I show that Hobbes conceives of morality, or natural law, as principles dictat-
ing the means to avoid the greatest natural evil – death. From the outset, Hobbes is strongly
opposed to teleological accounts of human flourishing. In his works dealing with natural phi-
losophy and metaphysics, and most extensively in De Corpore (1655), Hobbes defends a mate-
rialist and necessitarian ontology. He equates being with matter, thus ruling out the existence
of immaterial substances, and denies that bodies have properties besides extension and motion
(DCo 8.24: 118; see Duncan 2005). All motion is caused necessarily by the local motion of
other bodies, in a long chain of causes going back to a first cause, “the eternal cause of all things,
God Almighty” (DCo 9.5: 122–3; LN: 20). On the basis of this ontology he maintains that
scientific explanations must not venture beyond considering material and efficient causality. In
particular he denies that we can find final causes or purposes in nature, and teleological explana-
tions are therefore never genuinely explanatory (DCo 30.2: 509–10: L 2.1: 26).
This is also true for moral philosophy, the “Science of what is Good, and Evill” (L 15.40,
p.242). Hobbes does not deny that humans have purposes. They evidently pursue things they
find desirable and avoid things they consider harmful. However, he suggests, we can fully
explain such behavior in terms of imperceptible motions of the inner organs of the human body
(DCo 10.7: 131–2). In The Elements of Law (1640) he develops a materialistic psychology along
these lines, which he also adopts with few changes in Leviathan (1651, Latin ed. 1668), generally
considered the most mature exposition of his moral and political philosophy. When a person
perceives something as good and desirable, he argues in these works, this is ultimately nothing
but some corporeal motion in the heart, an “appetite,” that may cause the person to pursue it if
no other motion prevents it. Similarly, he suggests that practical deliberation consists in the suc-
cession of such appetites and aversions, and that an act of the will is the last of the appetites that
causes the person to act (L 6.5, p.80; L 6.49, p.90). This psychology reduces all intentionality
and purpose exhibited in the thoughts and actions of individuals to mechanical motions in their
bodies. This, Hobbes concludes, rules out the existence of a “Finis ultimus, (utmost ayme,)” or
“Summum Bonum, (greatest Good,)” for humans (L 11.1: 150). Humans have no purpose by
virtue of their nature, except to pursue the things they happen to desire (L 6.58: 96).
Hobbes’s treatment of human flourishing, prompted by his mechanistic ontology, is exem-
plary of his commitment to the agent-relativity of value. Nothing is good or evil in itself; things
are always only good or evil for someone. As Hobbes observes,
these words of Good, Evill . . . are ever used with relation to the person that useth
them: There being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common Rule of Good
and Evill, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves.
(L 6.7: 80–82; also EL: 1.7.3: 29;
DH 11.4: 47; DCv 14.17: 162)
While the agent-relativity of value is a fundamental feature of Hobbes’s treatment of evil,

he nevertheless aims to establish a number of certain and universal principles of morality. He
does so by holding that death is, generally, the greatest evil that can befall humans. Even in the
absence of any summum bonum this provides him with a foundation to establish moral principles,
which he accordingly conceives as dictating the means to self-preservation (Strauss 1952: 16).
He maintains in De Cive (1642, 2nd ed. 1647), the most influential Latin statement of
his political philosophy, that each person desires “that which is Good for him [sibi bonum]”
and avoids “what is bad for him [sibi malum], and most of all the greatest of natural evils
71
[malorum naturalium], which is death” (DCv 1.7: 27; also DCv Epistle Dedicatory §10: 6; EL
1.14.6: 71). On this basis he attributes to each individual, in the absence of political institutions,
the natural right to do anything necessary to preserve themselves. Conversely, reason dictates
the necessary means to self-preservation. Morality, or the laws of nature, consists in those dic-
tates of reason (DCv 1.8: 27; DCv 2.1: 33). Commentators have observed that Hobbes is in
Leviathan less clearly committed to a self-interested psychology (e.g., McNeilly 1966). Where
he had previously claimed that individuals necessarily pursue their own good, in Leviathan he
claims more moderately that the object of their desire “is principally their owne conservation”
(L 13.3: 190). Commentators also note that he admits that individuals do not always, in fact,
shun death as the greatest evil: they may pursue honor and revenge in a way that lead them to
willingly risk their lives, or they may suffer pains that lead them to “number death among the
goods” (DH 6.6: 48). Nevertheless, he remains in Leviathan of the opinion that natural law is
a set of dictates of reason “by which a man is forbidden to do, that, which is destructive of his
life” (L 14.3: 198). Since he takes natural law to be “Immutable and Eternall” (L 15: 240), he
must have remained committed to the position that our own death is the chief evil, providing
an agent-relative and self-interested foundation of morality (Murphy 2000: 45).
There are two complications to this account of Hobbes’s moral philosophy as means to
avoid a premature death as greatest evil. First, Hobbes holds that eternal damnation is a worse
fate than death in this life (Murphy 2000: 50; Olsthoorn 2014). The danger of ignoring one’s
duties toward God, he recognizes, may lead to evils in the afterlife that form a “greater punish-
ment than the death of Nature” (L38.1: 698; in DCv 1.7: 27 he speaks of death as the greatest
of “natural evils”). He therefore must show that his account of the obligations of subjects in a
Hobbesian commonwealth are consistent with their salvation. Second, Hobbes notes that the
laws of nature, which are “but Conclusions” regarding our self-preservation, can be properly
be called laws when we conceive them as “delivered in the word of God” (L 15: 242; also DCv
3.33: 56–7). Conceived as the word of God, the laws of nature must be obeyed in order to
avoid damnation and secure entry into the kingdom of Heaven. So conceived, however, they
only give a partial account of our obligations since they provide only our obligations in tempo-
ral matters. In spiritual matters (“things which have their foundation in the authority and office
of CHRIST and could not be known if CHRIST had not taught them” [DCv 17.14: 216]),
our obligations must be derived from revealed religion. For this reason, I first outline Hobbes’s
conception of sin or moral evil in temporal matters, and afterwards I turn to his conception of
sin in spiritual matters.
Sin and temporal obligations

In this section I outline Hobbes’s changing conception of sin or moral evil in temporal
matters. In his political works his primary aim is to defend the view that individuals have,
with some specific exceptions deriving from an inalienable right to resist threats to their
life, an unlimited obligation of obedience (Hobbes calls it “simple obedience”) to their civil
sovereign. He also aims to deny that natural law, outside the civil state, imposes meaningful
restrictions on permissible action, so as to explain why life in that state is rife with conflict and
should be avoided at all costs. Hobbes’s treatment of sin in temporal matters can be understood
as an attempt to simultaneously satisfy both aims.
In the first edition of De Cive (1642) he distinguishes between two conceptions of sin, one
of a wide and one of narrow signification. In the wide signification, any action against reason
is considered a “sin [peccatum]” in the “broadest sense” regardless of whether the act would be
considered immoral or merely imprudent. There is no distinction between actions “contrary to
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Hobbes on evil
the law, as to wreck someone else’s house” and actions “not contrary to law, as to build one’s
own house upon sand” (DCv 14.16: 162). (Note that this includes irrational actions that do not
frustrate the end of self-preservation.) All such foolishness is equally sinful. In the narrow signifi-
cation, actions are sinful when they are against reason and additionally are blameworthy and form
a “culpable evil [malum culpae].” Hobbes introduces the agent-relativity of our judgments of evil
to defend the claim that we can only reach an agreement on what should be regarded as culpable
by deferring to civil law. As he explains, individuals disagree about what contributes to their
preservation and must be considered good or evil; they will tend to “regard as evil [malos], i.e. to
find fault with [culpam attribuere], those who are a source of evil for themselves” (DCv 14.17: 162).
Therefore we must leave it to the state to determine what actions are against reason and there-
fore culpable. The function of the civil law is to settle for everyone what should be considered
“good and evil” (DCv Preface §8: 9–10; also DCv 6.9: 79; DCv 12.1: 131–2). Once the com-
monwealth is established we must no longer judge for ourselves what is good and evil but let the
reason of the commonwealth stand for our own. Sin, in the strict signification, is “what anyone
does, fails to do, says or wills contrary to the reason of the commonwealth, i.e against the laws” (DCv
14.17:162–6. The Elements does not contain a treatment of sin, but it does include a similar point
about the impossibility of having a standard of reason in the state of nature [EL 2.10.8: 188–9; EL
2.6.13: 158]). On this account of sin, we commit a culpable evil when we pursue what reason –
that is the state – identifies as evil, that is, as contrary to our self-preservation.
It is impossible to sin in the strict signification by violating natural law in the state of nature.
Violations of natural law must be classified as sinning in the “broadest sense” and as acts of
mere imprudence. This is consistent with Hobbes’s account of natural right. In the state of
nature, he maintains, everyone has a right “to all things,” (DCv 1.10: 28), which is to say that
no action is prohibited. His argument for this radical position is the following. He attributes to
individuals the right to do anything that reason indicates is necessary to preserve themselves. In
the absence of political institutions they must decide for themselves what course of action best
contributes to their preservation (DCv 1.9: 28). Since he has supposed that individuals always
pursue what seems good for them (sibi bonum), he concludes that all actions necessary seem to
the actor to contribute to their self-preservation (DCv 1.10: 28). That is why no action in the
state of nature is prohibited.
A development noted by Tuck (1979: 125), Hobbes revises his view of the nature of sins
against natural law in the second edition of De Cive (1647). In the second edition – which
includes several notes that develop and occasionally amend the argument in main text – Hobbes
admits that it is possible to sin in the strict sense by violating natural law. However, he does so
in a way that does not meaningfully restrict individual’s natural right in the state of nature. He
still maintains that in absence of declared civil law the only standard of action is the “judgement
of the person” acting (DCv 1.10n: 29; DCv 2.1n: 33). However, he now denies that individuals
necessarily act in accordance with their best judgment of what contributes to their preservation.
When they fail to do so they sin and commit a “wrong” against God (DCv 3.27n: 54; Hobbes
had already proposed this position in EL 2.2.3: 120; EL 2.2.7: 121). It is impossible in the state of
nature to commit a “wrong” against any “man,” Hobbes admits, but this does not imply that “it
is impossible in such a state to sin [peccare] against God or to violate the Natural laws.” A person
sins in this way, and commits a wrong against God, if “he claims that something contributes to
his self-preservation, but does not believe that it does so” (DCv 1.10n: 28–9; also DCv 3.4n: 45;
DCv 12.2: 132; DCv 3.28: 54; EL 2.6.12: 157). What matters, in one’s relation to God, is that
one sincerely believes that one acts in accordance with natural law. On the revised view, then,
Hobbes allows that individuals commit culpable evils in the natural state when they act against
their conscience. In that case they wrong God.
73
There are at least two reasons why Hobbes may have decided to introduce this amendment
in the second edition of De Cive. First, it allows him to censure actions contrary to natural
law by sovereigns, for instance acts of cruelty against their subjects. While such actions do
not wrong citizens, and accordingly citizens have no standing to protest, they do wrong God.
Although a sovereign “may do so rightly, i.e. without inflicting a wrong on himself, he will not
do so justly [juste], that is, without violating natural laws and wronging God” (DCv 6.13n: 83;
QLNC: 135). Second, it may help him to characterize treason as a culpable evil. Hobbes argues
that treason or the “crime of lèse-majesté” (DCv 14.20–21: 165–6) is a violation of natural
not civil law. It is the renunciation of the agreement to obey the sovereign and so a renuncia-
tion of all civil laws together. “This evil [malum],” Hobbes observes, “is more serious than any
single sin [peccato] as constant sinning is more serious than a single sin” (DCv 14.20: 165). Both
immoral acts by the sovereign and treason by citizens are actions that Hobbes wants to censure,
not merely as imprudent but as culpable evil. This requires him to admit that it possible to sin
in the strict sense by violating natural law.
There are, however, two difficulties with the resulting view that Hobbes can be understood
to resolve in Leviathan. First, the amendment suggests that Hobbes now thinks that sins in the
strict signification are always relational wrongs. Violations of natural law (characterized as acts
contrary to one’s conscience) in the state of nature are wrongs against God. Violations of the
civil law, analogously, are wrongs against the commonwealth (DCv 3.3: 44) and “against right”
(DCv 12.2: 133). By violating the civil law we violate the original agreement by which we have
transferred our rights to the sovereign, thereby wronging the commonwealth (DCv 3.4: 45;
DCv 1.10n: 28). If this is what Hobbes has in mind, though, it is inconsistent with the original
argument for the view that violations of the civil law are a culpable evil. On the original view
sins are not relational wrongs: we sin when we violate the civil law because we do not, on the
authoritative judgment of the commonwealth, pursue our self-preservation. On the amended
view, however, violations of the civil law are a sin because they are violations of the civil law, since
in so doing we wrong the commonwealth.
Second, Hobbes would presumably want to maintain that wrongs against the common-
wealth are always also sins against God. This could be so because “natural law commands
that all civil laws be observed in virtue of the natural law which forbids the violation of
agreements” (DCv 14.10: 159). The difficulty, however, is that Hobbes holds that one only
sins against God if one acts against one’s conscience. Accordingly, actions violating the civil
law that one mistakenly but sincerely thinks are required by natural law, are not sinful. It is
true that Hobbes argues that civil laws can safely be obeyed since the sovereign, not the
citizen, sins if the civil law requires an action contrary to God’s laws (DCv 12.2: 132–3; for
doubts about that argument see Murphy 1995). However, this does not establish the converse
claim: that citizens cannot safely disobey the civil law, even if they conscientiously judge it to
be necessary.
In Leviathan Hobbes addresses both problems. He removes all traces of the original argument
from the first edition of De Cive, and introduces a distinction between “sins” and “crimes” to
capture more clearly the distinct relational wrongs one may commit (against God and against
the commonwealth). He defines a “crime” as “a sinne, consisting in the Committing . . . of that
which the Law forbiddeth, or the Omission of what it hath commanded” (L 27.2: 452). This
definition leaves undetermined whether a crime is a violation of natural or civil law. He clarifies
that crimes are violations of civil law when he observes that crimes are sins “whereof man may
accuse another” (L 27.2: 454) and notes that “the Civill Law ceasing, Crimes cease: for there
being no other Law remaining, but that of Nature, there is no place for Accusation” (L 27.3:
454). On this definition of a crime, then, it is impossible that that one violates the civil law
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Hobbes on evil
without sin, even if one – wrongly but sincerely – holds the view that the crime is necessary for
ones preservation and thus demanded by natural law.
Hobbes provides two related reasons why crimes, violations of civil law, are the appro-
priate object of accusation by fellow humans. First, as violations of the civil law, crimes are
actions without right. That is why “there is an Injury done” and those injured have standing
to hold the violator to account in a court of law (L 27.54: 480; also L 42.111: 900). Second,
crimes are actions, not merely intentions, contrary to the civil law. For intentions that “never
appear by any outward act, there is no place for accusation” (L 27.2: 454; also L 27.3: 454).
We have no knowledge of the intentions of others, which accordingly “cannot be argued by
a humane Judge.” However, forming the intention to transgress civil law is a “sinne, though
it never appeare in Word, or Fact: for God that seeth the thoughts of man, can lay it to his
charge” (L 27.2: 452–4).
In Leviathan Hobbes defines sin as “not onely a Transgression of a Law, but also any
Contempt of the Legislator,” where contempt of the legislator includes having an “the Intention,
or purpose to transgresse” (L 27.1: 452). Again, he leaves undetermined whether a sin, qua
sin, is a violation of natural or civil law. Since intentions to violate a civil law are sins by virtue
of God’s standing to accuse the person, sins must be (also) violations of natural law. As in De
Cive he maintains that violations of natural law wrong God. He notes this when emphasizing
that sovereigns who violate natural law do not wrong their citizens. He compares such actions
against natural law – he now calls them “iniquitous” actions – with David’s murder of Uriah.
Though David’s action was “against the law of Nature, as being contrary to Equitie . . . yet it
was not an Injurie to Uriah; but to God . . . because David was Gods Subject; and prohibited all
Iniquitie by the law of Nature” (L 21.7: 330). A sovereign never acts without right in relation
to his subjects but he may act without right in relation to God.
In the second edition of De Cive, Hobbes had claimed that only acts against conscience are
sinful. He may appear to be committed to the same position in Leviathan when he maintains
that, in respect to the natural law, “every man being his own Judge, and accused onely by his
own Conscience, and cleared by the Uprightnesse of his own Intention,” therefore, when “his
Intention is Right, his fact is no Sinne: if otherwise, his fact is Sinne; but not Crime” (L 27.3:
454). He also maintains that in conscience – the “Court of Naturall justice” – ”God raigneth”
(L 30.30: 552; also L30.1: 520). This position, as noted above, exposes Hobbes to the objec-
tion that individuals who sincerely believe that they should violate natural law do not commit
a sin in doing so. In Leviathan he responds by emphasizing that the law of nature is “eternal”
and therefore that the “Violation of Covenants, Ingratitude, Arrogance, and all Facts contrary
to any Morall virtue, can never cease to be Sinne” (L27.3: 454; also EL 1.17.14: 94). Anyone
who has “attained to the use of Reason” is supposed to know what the law of nature requires
(L 27.4: 454–6). Indeed, “only Children, and Madmen are Excused from offences against the
Law Naturall” (L 27.23: 468). By emphasizing that ignorance of natural law is itself culpable,
Hobbes can characterize as sinful, violations of natural law in accordance with conscience.
Sin and spiritual obligations

I now turn to Hobbes’s treatment of culpable evil in spiritual matters. Hobbes’s primary aim
is, as noted, to defend the view that individuals owe simple obedience to their sovereign. This
obligation is grounded in the fundamental natural law requiring the avoidance of a premature
death. Hobbes, however, admits that damnation in the afterlife is a worse fate than death in this
life. The damned, on his eccentric reading of Scripture, are subjected to a lifetime of “Torments
of Hell” before being condemned to a “second Death” that lasts for eternity (L 38.13: 716; also
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AB: 87–92). He therefore admits without reservation that “if the command [of a sovereign] be
such, as cannot be obeyed, without being damned to Eternall Death, then it were madnesse to
obey it” (L 43.2: 928–30; also DCv 18.1: 235; DCv 6.11: 80; EL 2.6.5: 147). A full defense of
his political philosophy, then, requires showing what is necessary for salvation and entry into
the “Kingdom of heaven” (DCv 18.2: 235) and why this is consistent with obedience to earthly
sovereigns. In this section I outline this argument.
Hobbes’s basic strategy remains the same in all iterations of his political philosophy. He main-
tains that two things are necessary for salvation. The first is “Faith in Christ” (L 43.3: 930), a
sincere belief that “Jesus is the Messiah, that is, the Christ” (EL 2.6.6: 148, also DCv 18.6: 239;
L 43.11: 938). On the basis of a number of Scriptural arguments, many of which his contempo-
raries would have found unpersuasive,1 he concludes that this is “[t]he (Vnum Necessarium) Onely
Article of Faith” necessary to salvation and to entry into the kingdom of Heaven (L 43.11: 938).
The second is obedience to God’s laws, “which are the laws of the kingdom of heaven, in which
consisteth Christian obedience” (EL 2.6.10: 155; also DCv 18.3: 235; L 43.3: 930). God’s laws,
as already noted, are the laws of nature and require that one always obey one’s civil sovereign
(L 43.5: 932). By obedience, Hobbes notes, he means not actual obedience but the sincere attempt
to obey. If God required unfailing obedience to the law no person would be saved, Hobbes
argues, since “wee are all guilty of disobedience to Gods Law, not onely originally in Adam, but
also actually by our own transgressions” (L 43.3: 930). This is precisely why we must have faith in
Christ and why obedience to the law is no sufficient condition for salvation. Our faith in Christ is
rewarded by remission of our sins (L 43.3: 930; DCv 18.3: 236; DCv 18.12: 244; EL 2.6.10: 155;
although God only forgives the sins of those who repent and obey [DCv 18.3, p.236]).
Faith in Christ and obedience to the laws, then, are required for salvation. Is simple obedi-
ence to one’s earthly sovereign consistent with one’s salvation? The answer is straightforwardly
affirmative if one is subject to a Christian sovereign. A Christian sovereign would never compel
subjects to renounce the faith that is required for their salvation. “As long as sovereigns profess
to be Christians,” Hobbes submits, “they cannot command their subjects to deny Christ or to
treat him contemptuously” (DCv 18.13: 245; also EL 2.6.11: 157). In a Christian common-
wealth, in other words, it is impossible that the demands of the civil law are inconsistent with
the demands of God (L 43.22: 952).
Things are more complicated when one is subject to a non-Christian ruler. Hobbes’s answer
in this case reveals a development in his thinking about the nature of spiritual obligations. In
both The Elements and De Cive, Hobbes maintains that Christian faith, as condition for salva-
tion, requires its public profession. Besides atheism Hobbes classifies idolatry and apostasy – the
“renunciation of the article, that Jesus is the Christ” – as treason against God (DCv 18.11: 244).
If an infidel sovereign compels subjects to “renounce” (EL 2.6.11: 157) their faith, they cannot
do so without committing a sin that endangers their entry into the kingdom of Heaven. That
is why Hobbes admits that Christians may rightfully and without sin forbear obedience to com-
mands to commit apostasy or idolatry, even if it means they die as martyrs in apparent contra-
vention of the moral law requiring self-preservation. It cannot be expected that “a man should
perform that, for which he believeth in his heart he shall be damned eternally” (EL 2.6.14: 159).
In De Cive, Hobbes clarifies that this exception to the requirement of simple obedience to one’s
earthly sovereign does not justify violent resistance. “Are princes to be resisted when they are
not to be obeyed?” asks Hobbes rhetorically. “Of course not! This is contrary to the civil agree-
ment. What then must one do? Go to Christ through Martyrdom” (DCv 18.13: 245). One
must accept the punishment the civil sovereign has in store for those unwilling to “deny Christ
or to treat him contemptuously” (DCv 18.13: 245). Indeed, Hobbes points out, someone who
really believes with “his whole heart that JESUS IS THE CHRIST” will “long to be dissolved
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and to be with Christ” (DCv 18.13: 245; a reference to Philippians 1.23 where Paul says that he
has a “desire to depart, and to be with Christ” See McClure 2016: 96).
In Leviathan Hobbes no longer maintains that the public profession of faith in Christ is a nec-
essary condition for salvation. He now writes that “Faith, it is internal, and invisible; They have
the licence that Naaman had, and need not put themselves into danger for it” (L 43.23: 954). He
had from the outset argued that God is concerned with individuals’ righteousness in conscience
when it comes to obedience to the law. He now increases the coherence of his theory by main-
taining the same for the requirement of having faith. If one is required to publicly denounce
one’s faith under an infidel sovereign it is not a sin as long as one sincerely believes that Jesus is
the Christ. Public worship and professions of faith are “but an externall thing” (L 42.11: 784).
The view that idolatry and apostasy are no obstacle to salvation requires an idiosyncratic read-
ing of Scripture. Hobbes draws on the story of Naaman, who converted to the “God of Israel”
while publicly worshiping the “Idol Rimmon,” as required by his Syrian sovereign. While “he
denyed the true God in effect, as much as if he had done with his lips,” Hobbes argues that the
verse shows that the prophet Elisha granted him this liberty by saying that “the Lord pardon thy
servant in this thing” (L 42.11: 784, also AB: 48).
Hobbes’s readers are very skeptical of this argument, which may explain why he was initially
hesitant to defend it. Thomas Tenison objects that Hobbes misunderstands “the Faith of the
Gospel, which is not complete, unless the outward profession answereth to the inward act of
assent” (Tenison 1670: 199), a mistake that Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, calls a “mon-
strous Impiety” (Clarendon 1676: 250). John Whitehall objects that this one passage is too
slender a textual basis for such a controversial doctrine, “for the Prophet’s bidding Naaman go
in peace might be an Error in the Prophet” (Whitehall 1679: 63). In the Appendix of the Latin
Leviathan Hobbes nevertheless refuses to change his position. He asks if the prophet, by declar-
ing to Naaman, “Go in peace,” may mean to be “saying goodbye” rather than giving license to
Naaman’s idolatry, and answers in the negative. In the passage “those words cannot be under-
stood in any way other than as a permission” and he references the Nicene Council in support
of his view (LLA 3: 1239–41).
His changing views on the nature of faith also impact his assessment of martyrdom. Where
he had in De Cive explicitly endorsed martyrdom, in Leviathan his stance is more equivocal. He
still permits disobedience, saying that if individuals decide to disobey the civil sovereign “they
ought to expect their reward in heaven and not complain of their Lawfull Sovereign; much lesse
make warre upon him” (L 43.23: 954; L 45.28: 1038). However, he now notes that a true mar-
tyr is a “Witnesse of the Resurrection of Jesus the Messiah” and therefore only those who were
instructed directly by Christ to profess their belief openly and gave their lives for it could be
properly called martyrs (L 42.12: 786). Those who disobey the civil sovereign merely because
they are asked to renounce their faith are “not obliged to suffer death . . . because being not
called thereto, tis not required at his hands; nor ought hee to complain, if he loseth the reward
he expectedth from those that never set him on work” (L 42.14: 788). Hobbes’s assessment of
martyrdom in Leviathan, as response to the rule of an infidel sovereign, then, is ambiguous; by
disobeying their lawful sovereign they do not just risk dying a natural death but also forgoing
eternal felicity (Chadwick 2018).
Free will, moral evil, and God’s omnipotence

I now turn to consider the implications of Hobbes’s ontology for his treatment of the nature
of evil. While he is from the outset committed to denying the existence of “free will,” it is
only when he becomes embroiled in a long-running intellectual dispute with Bishop John
77
Bramhall (1594–1663) that he considers in Of Liberty and Necessity (1645, published 1654) and
The Questions of Liberty Necessity and Chance (1656) the philosophical and theological implica-
tions of his materialistic-necessitarianism. Hobbes does not deny that we can attribute freedom
to individuals; they are free when they are unconstrained by external impediments to act as
they want (LN § 29: 38, also QLNC: 273–4; L 21.2: 324). Neither does he deny that individu-
als can act voluntarily; they act voluntarily when their action follows, or is informed by, their
will or choice (LN § 25: 37). What he denies is that their will or choice itself is voluntary, that
they have the capacity to determine their own will or, in other words, have “Free-will” (L 21.2:
324, also QLNC: 143). Their will, which is ultimately but a physical motion in the body, is
determined by necessary antecedent causes as any other motion in the universe (LN § 30: 38).
Bishop Bramhall raises several philosophical and theological objections to this form of com-
patiblism, based on the traditional view that individuals are the appropriate object of moral
approbation and blame only by virtue of having free will. He thinks that Hobbes can defend his
account of human freedom only by destroying the very foundation of morality and Christian
faith. I discuss the philosophical and the theological issues in turn, starting with the former.
Bramhall is persuaded that by denying freedom of the will Hobbes is no longer justified in
attributing to individuals culpable evils. Hobbes in the first instance invokes the agent-relativity
of value to defend the appropriateness of such judgments. Why do we blame a person who was
necessitated to steal? “I answer,” responds Hobbes, “because th’y please us not” (QLNC: 39).
There is in this sense, he admits, no distinction between blaming a person for having sinned and
blaming fire for laying waste to a house, although in the former but not the latter case would
we “seek to be revenged” (QLNC: 40). Bramhall retorts that when we blame a person we are
concerned with a specific kind of evil, namely the “moral evil of an action,” which consists in
“the bad use of liberty” (QLNC: 130), when individuals freely act against right reason or the
moral law. That is why we admonish those with the use of reason, “men of understanding,”
but not “fools, children, or madmen,” because the former but not the latter “have the use of
reason, and true liberty, with a dominion over their own actions” (QLNC: 144). Hobbes in
turn replies by invoking his formal definition of a sin as violation of the law and a consequen-
tialist argument about the appropriateness of blaming those who have the capacity to reason.
We admonish “men of understanding,” he observes, because their rationality allows them to
change their behavior. They, unlike fools and madmen, can come to see the error of their ways
(QLNC: 145). Additionally, moral blame is not, as Bramhall suggests, “from the bad use of liberty,
but from disobedience to the laws,” since to say “a thing is good, is to say it is as I, or another
would wish, or as the State would have it, or according to the Law of the Land” (QLNC:
146–7). In this answer, Hobbes returns to his position from the first edition of De Cive, where
he had maintained that sins are actions aimed at what is evil (i.e., that displease us) according
to right reason, with right reason being the judgment of the state (i.e., the civil law). One may
wonder if Hobbes would have been able to provide a similarly persuasive reply for his mature,
relational, account of sin from Leviathan.
Hobbes’s defense of the appropriateness of punishment for sins follows a very similar struc-
ture. Bramhall objects that Hobbes is committed to a view that renders civil laws “unjust and
tyrannical” since the laws “prescribe things absolutely impossible in themselves to be done,
and punish men for not doing them” (QLNC: 118). Hobbes responds, first, by reiterating his
account of justice. Laws are just, simply by virtue of the fact that they are the commands of the
civil sovereign in whom all citizens have “consenteth to the placing of the Legislative Power”
(QLNC: 133; also QLNC; 115, 138). Second, Hobbes reminds Bramhall of his consequen-
tialist, forward-looking justification of penalties. In his political works Hobbes had as one of
the laws of nature derived the principle that in punishment (“retribution of Evil for Evil”)
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Hobbes on evil
(L 15.19: 232) one ought only to “consider future good, not past evil” (DCv 3.11: 49; also
L 15.19: 232; L 28.6: 484). Penalties are justified because and insofar as they have a correc-
tive and preventative function (QLNC: 115–16). Revenge for the sake of revenge is without
purpose and only apt to increase the likelihood of renewed war contrary to the fundamen-
tal law of nature (DCv 3.11: 49). Bramhall, Hobbes objects, has a retributivist account of
punishment; he:
taketh punishment for a kind of revenge, and can never therefore agree with me that
[I] take it for nothing else but for a correction, or for an example, which hath for end
the framing and necessitating of the Will to virtue.
(QLNC: 134)
The enforcement of laws prevents individuals from committing sins, and is so a “cause of
Justice” (QLNC: 116).
Finally, Hobbes notes that the sovereign is not subject to any civil law and acts with an undi-
minished right of nature. The sovereign may inflict harm on a subject in a way that is contrary
to natural law, and therefore without right and unjust in relation to God, but it cannot be unjust
in relation to the subject (QLNC: 116; also L 28.2: 482). Again, Bramhall is wrong to com-
plain that the law that sanctions punishment could be unjust because it allows for punishments
of crimes or sins that were necessitated, since the sovereign punishes by natural right. While
Hobbes accordingly shows that his moral and political philosophy provide him with resources
to counter Bramhall’s objections – by foregrounding his idiosyncratic definitions of terms like
justice and sin – it is difficult to see how Hobbes can defend the contractualist basis of the com-
monwealth, and the practice of rights transfers, in the face of his materialistic-determinism,
except by definitional fiat (Riley 1973).
I now turn to the second set of objections, related to the theological implications of Hobbes’s
views. In the theological context the most serious issue confronting him, as a scandalized
Bramhall observes, is that he “makes the first cause, that is, God Almighty, to be the intro-
ducer of all evil, and sin into the world” (QLNC: 84; also QLNC: 174–5). Hobbes is intent
on defending this claim while denying the heretical implications that Bramhall thinks follow
from it, namely, first, that God’s introduction of evil in the world should be reprimanded as
itself sinful, and, second, that individuals, whose actions are necessitated by God, are innocent
and may not justly be subject to God’s punishment (QLNC: 85). In doing so he emphasizes the
similarities between his view and those of Reformation theologians such as Luther and Calvin.2
Hobbes argues, first, that God can never sin. Bramhall thinks that if an evil action is neces-
sitated we should blame God, not the person, as ultimate cause of the sin (QLNC: 223). Hobbes
responds by denying the equivalence of causing a sin and sinning itself (QLNC: 235). The
argument is based on his conception of culpable evil as actions against the law. He admits that
God has ordered the world in such a way that a person may be necessarily caused to commit
an act against the law. However, since God “is not subject to some higher Power,” and thus
not subject to any law, he himself cannot sin (QLNC: 234–45; also QLNC: 105; LN § 12: 23).
Additionally, Hobbes denies that God lacks the right to anything. In De Cive, he had introduced
the view that God’s right to rule derives from his omnipotence seemingly to explain the non-
contractual basis of God’s sovereignty (DCv 15.5: 173). In response to Bramhall’s objections, he
employs it to deny that God’s actions can ever be censured as sinful or unjust. “Power irresist-
ible justifies all actions,” and accordingly God “must needs be just in all his actions” (LN § 12:
22–3; also QLNC: 87–9). That is why the mere fact that God does something “makes it just and
consequently no sin” (LN § 12: 23; QLNC: 79, 105; LL 46: 1091–3).
79
Second, Hobbes defends the claim that, even if God causes all actions, a person can be
accused of culpable evil. Bramhall objects that Hobbes makes God “the Author of all the defects
and evils which are in the world” (QLNC: 174–5). Hobbes responds by noting that, if God
really is the author of the sins of individuals, he must have authorized or given warrant to those
sins. This response is prompted by his account of authorization and personification in chapter 16
of Leviathan. There he argues that a person is the “AUTHOR” of an action when the person is
represented in the action, either because the person represents himself, or because he authorizes
and is represented by another who accordingly “is said to beare his Person, or act in his name”
(L16.3: 244). He denies that we have reason to think that God has authorized us to act in his
name. Nowhere in Scripture, “which is all the warrant we have from God,” do we find an
authorization to commit sins. Therefore, Hobbes concludes, “God is the cause (not the Author)
of all Actions” (QLNC: 175; also QLNC: 105–6; LL 46: 1091–3). Furthermore, he notes, if
it were the case that God did authorize an action against the law, it would no longer be sinful
(QLNC: 106). He has two reasons for saying this. First, natural law is the command of God,
and if God authorizes an action contrary to his own command it cannot be understood that the
law was his command in the first place. Second, even if it were, in authorizing the action God
(not the individual) is now the author of the action, and God, as we have seen, is not subject to
any law and therefore cannot sin.
The resulting view gives rise to the objection that God nevertheless causes evil action that
he subsequently punishes with eternal damnation. Bramhall dismisses this conception of God
as dishonorable, since it makes God a “Tyrant” who imposes laws on his subjects that they are
unable to obey (QLNC: 85; also QLNC: 13, 87, 91). Hobbes has what should now be a famil-
iar response: God’s omnipotence is a sufficient justification for the punishment. God’s right to
punish sinners is not formally dependent on the sinfulness of the action. Even if God punishes
a person “because he sinned, one must not say that he could not justly have afflicted or killed
him even if he had not sinned” (DCv 15.5: 173; DCv 15.6: 174; but see DCv 4.9: 61–2, where
Hobbes suggests that the “only purpose” God had in introducing “eternal punishment” was
“that men should fear to sin in the future”). This means that God may indeed “command a
thing openly, and yet hinder the doing of it, without injustice” (QLNC: 79); he may demand
that individuals act in accordance with natural law while simultaneously cause them to violate
it. He does all this with right and it is “no dishonour to believe that God is a greater Tyrant than
ever was in the world; for he is the King of all Kings” (QLNC: 175).
Conclusion
Hobbes’s engagement with the nature of evil is wide-ranging. His political preoccupations lead
him to consider the nature of evil both in temporal and spiritual matters, arguing that if citizens
obey their civil sovereign, they do not sin nor risk eternal damnation. He emphasizes death as
the chief evil that can befall individuals in this life, and maintains that sinning consists in actions
that frustrate the end of self-preservation, either because they are in contravention of the civil
law or because the person acting does not believe that they contribute to their self-preservation.
This position, he argues, is consistent with revealed religion, since the Bible teaches that salva-
tion requires only a sincere belief that Jesus is the Christ and obedience to the laws of the civil
sovereign. In the debate with Bishop John Bramhall, Hobbes confronts the question whether
his treatment of evil is consistent with a denial of free will, as entailed by the metaphysical com-
mitments that had formed the bedrock of his moral philosophy from the outset. It is in this
context that the inflammatory implications – both philosophical and theological – of his treat-
ment of evil and sin are most clearly in view. It is also the location where he is perhaps most
80
Hobbes on evil
audacious, attributing the capacity to commit culpable evil to individuals who lack free will, and
describing God as a “Tyrant” who, by virtue of his omnipotence, can do no wrong. In doing so,
Hobbes shows himself to be a formidable thinker whose views, however disagreeable, demand
the close attention of the reader that chances upon them.
Abbreviations of cited works of Hobbes

AB Hobbes, T. (1682) An Answer to a Book Published by Dr Bramhall. . . Called The Catching of the
Leviathan, London: W. Crooke at the Green Dragon.
DCo Hobbes, T. (1839) De Corpore, trans. as Elements of Philosophy. The First Section, Concerning Body,
in W. Molesworth (ed.) The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, vol. I, London: John
Bohn.
DCv Hobbes, T. (1998) De Cive, trans. as On the Citizen, ed. R. Tuck and M. Silverthorne, Cambridge:
DH Hobbes, T. (1991) De Homine, trans. in Man and Citizen, ed. B. Gert, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
EL Hobbes, T. (1969) The Elements of Law, ed. F. Tönnies, London: Frank Cass.
L Hobbes, T. (2012), Leviathan, in N. Malcolm (ed.) Leviathan: The English and Latin Texts, Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
LL Hobbes, T. (2012), Latin Leviathan, in N. Malcolm (ed.) Leviathan: The English and Latin Texts,
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
LLA Hobbes, T. (2012), “Appendix to Leviathan,” in N. Malcolm (ed.) Leviathan: Thee English and
Latin Texts, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
LN Hobbes, T. (1999), “Of Liberty and Necessity,” in V. Chappell (ed.) Hobbes and Bramhall on
Liberty and Necessity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
QLNC Hobbes, T. (1656), The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance, London: Andrew
Crook.
References to DCo, DCv, DH, and L are given by chapter, section and page number. References to the
notes added to the second edition of DCv include “n” after the section number. References to LN
are given by paragraph and page number. References to LL and LLA are given by chapter and page
number.
Notes
1 Somos 2014: 110 concludes that “most of its hundreds of biblical interpretations are . . . conspicuously
untenable and where recognised as such by Hobbes’ contemporaries.” See e.g., Tenison 1670: 207.
2 Some recent commentators see Hobbes as being engaged in a sincere reconstruction of a reformation
theology (Overhoff 1997). Others are more skeptical, dismissing his references to reformation theolo-
gians as opportunistic and polemical (Pacchi 1989) or more moderately, as having no constitutive role
to play in his philosophical development (Collins 2005: 265). As Cromartie (2018) points out, it seems
indeed clear that his use of protestant positions, even if held sincerely, was aimed to support and justify to
a religious audience metaphysical and political views that he was committed to for independent reasons.
References
Chadwick, A. (2018) “Hobbes on the Motives of Martyrs,” in L. van Apeldoorn, and R. Douglass (eds.)
Hobbes on Politics and Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Clarendon (1676) A Brief View and Survey of the Dangerous and Pernicious Errors to Church and State, In
Mr. Hobbes’s Book, Entitled Leviathan, Oxford: Theater.
Collins, J. (2005) The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cromartie, A. (2018) “Hobbes, Calvinism, and Determinism,” in L. van Apeldoorn and R. Douglass (eds.)
Hobbes and the Politics of Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Duncan, S. (2005) “Hobbes’s Materialism in the Early 1640s,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy
13(3): 437–48.
McClure, C. (2016) Hobbes and the Artifice of Eternity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McNeilly, F. (1966) “Egoism in Hobbes,” The Philosophical Quarterly 16(64): 193–206.
81
Murphy, M. (1995) “Hobbes on Conscientious Disobedience,” Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophie 77:
263–84
Murphy, M. C. (2000). “Hobbes on the Evil of Death,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 782(1): 36–61,
Olsthoorn, J. (2014) “Worse than Death: The Non-Preservationist Foundations of Hobbes’s Moral
Philosophy,” Hobbes Studies 27(2): 148–70.
Overhoff, J. (1997) “The Lutheranism of Thomas Hobbes,” History of Political Thought 28(4): 604–23.
Riley, P. (1973) “Will and Legitimacy in the Philosophy of Hobbes: Is He a Consent Theorist?” Political
Studies 21(4): 506–22.
Pacchi, A. (1989), “Some Guidelines into Hobbes’s Theology,” Hobbes Studies 2(1): 87–103.
Somos, M. (2014) “Mare Clausum, Leviathan, and Oceana: Bible Criticsm, Secularisation and Imperialism
in Seventeenth-Century English Political and Legal Thought,” in C. Crouch and J. Stökl (eds.), In the
Name of God: The Bible in the Colonial Discourse of Empire, Leiden: Brill.
Strauss, L. (1952) The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Tenison, T. (1670) The Creed of Mr. Hobbes Examined in a Feigned Conference between Him and a Student in
Divinity, London: Francis Tyton.
Tuck, R. (1979) Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Whitehall, J. (1679) The Leviathan Found out: Or the Answer to Mr Hobbes’s Leviathan, In That Which my Lord
of Clarendon Hath Past Over, London: A. Godbid, and I. Playford.
82
6
LEIBNIZ ON EVIL
God’s justice in the best of all possible worlds
Introduction1
In his novella Candide, or Optimism, Voltaire introduces a character named Pangloss, a German
professor who teaches that one should be content with the calamities that occur in the world,
since this is the best of all possible worlds. Pangloss’s naïve optimism is considered a caricature
of the positions G.W. Leibniz defended.2 These views were greatly discredited in European
intellectual circles after the spectacle of natural and moral evil shown during Lisbon’s earth-
quake in 1755. The intellectual environment of the critics of the mid-eighteenth century,
however, differed sharply from the context of concerns that gave rise to the release of Essays
of Theodicy in 1710, Leibniz’s main work on the problem of evil. The term Theodicy, coined
by Leibniz himself, is a compound of “justice” (in Greek, diké) and “God” (in Greek, theós),
meaning “the justification of God.” The primary aim of the book was to reply to the fideistic
arguments of Pierre Bayle, who, in his Historical and Critical Dictionary (and more precisely in
the entry on Manicheans), defended the position that human reason cannot give a satisfactory
answer to the problem of the apparent incompatibility between the existence of evil and God’s
goodness and wisdom. Leibniz’s Theodicy, however, is the highlight of a continuous reflection
that lasted his entire life. His concern with the problem of evil appears in his very early works,
such as On the Omnipotence and Omniscience of God and the Freedom of Man (1670–1671?) and
The Confession of a Philosopher (1672–1673?), reappearing constantly in every stage of his philo-
sophical production. In this context, rather than earthquakes and natural evils,3 Leibniz’s main
concern was to make compatible the different theological positions of his time concerning the
justice of God given the unequal dispensation of grace, salvation, and damnation.4 As he states
in The Confession of a Philosopher:
If God is delighted by the happiness of everyone, why did he not make everyone
happy? If he loves everyone, how is it that he damns so many? If he is just, how is it
that he presents himself as so unfair that from matter that is the same in every respect, from
the same clay, he brings forth some vessels intended for honor, others intended for
disgrace? And how is it that he is not a promoter of sin if, having knowledge of it (though
he could have eliminated it from the world), he admitted it or tolerated it? Indeed,
how is it that he is not the author of sin, if he created everything in such a manner that
83
sin followed? And what of free choice, when the necessity of sin has been posited, and
what of the justice of punishment, when free choice has been taken away? And what of
the justice of reward, if grace alone brings it about that some are distinguished from
others? Finally, if God is the ultimate ground of things, what do we impute to men and
what to devils?
(A VI 3: 118; trans. CP: 33)5
In spite of the theological character of these questions, Leibniz’s approach to the problem of
evil is eminently metaphysical, and his solution is a consistent philosophical system, allegedly
acceptable to all Christian confessions, aiming at the simultaneous preservation of divine justice
and human free will. In this chapter I will systematically present Leibniz’s doctrine on evil, as it
appears in his works taken as a whole, only mentioning the usual minor differences and nuances
between the different stages of his writings when necessary. The exposition will be divided in
three parts. In the first part I will introduce Leibniz’s understanding of the nature of evil and its
different kinds. In the second part, I will show how Leibniz places the origin of the possibility of
evil in the divine intellect, as a strategy to exonerate God from being the author of evil. In the
third part, I will deal with Leibniz’s concept of God’s election of the best of all possible worlds
and the meaning of God’s allowing for evil.
The nature of evil and its different kinds

Even though Leibniz does not have an extensive systematic approach to the nature of evil, it is
possible to find two main characterizations of evil in his writings, corresponding roughly to two
different stages in his thought: the characterization of evil as “dissonance” and the description
of evil as “privation.” The characterization of evil as dissonance is more frequent in Leibniz’s
early writings, and progressively disappears toward his mature works.6 This characterization has
its clear roots in the neo-Platonic tradition, and in particular in Saint Augustine, who frequently
compares evil not with dissonance but with silence in music.7 Leibniz’s Conversation with Steno
Concerning Freedom gives a good example of this description:
the ultimate ground of sin is not the will itself of a loving God but the nature of
the universal perfection of things, which requires that a picture should be set off by
shadows and that a melody should be enlivened by dissonances.
(A VI 4: 1383; trans. CP: 129)
Leibniz’s conception of evil as dissonance, present in many other works,8 is not a mere metaphor.
In Leibniz’s metaphysics the universe itself constitutes a “universal harmony” (A VI 3: 130), in
which every substance is connected with the others (A VI 4B: 1618), and in which the variety
and multiplicity of things is reducible, through reciprocal relations of expression, to a fundamen-
tal unity (A VI 4B: 1542). Harmony is, thus, a fundamental ontological law of reality. In this
context, the characterization of evil as a dissonance that increases harmony implies that evil has
the role of a sort of ontological booster of harmony and, thus, of the perfection of the universe.9
The second characterization of evil that we find in Leibniz’s works corresponds to the clas-
sical Augustinian definition of evil as privation. In his early writings, such as The Author of Sin
(1673?), Leibniz rejects this definition, because he considers that it makes God the author of evil.
Indeed, he explains that, if God is the author of everything that is real and positive in the act of
sin, it would seem that He is also the author of the disconformity between the action and the
law, in the same way that a painter is the author of the disproportion between two different-sized
84
Leibniz on evil
paintings, since “the privation is nothing but a simple result or infallible consequence of the posi-
tive aspect, without requiring a separate author” (A VI 3: 151; trans. CP: 113).10
From the 1680s onward, once Leibniz settled his main strategy to arguing about the problem
of evil, he begins to use the concept of privation positively to give an account of evil. Leibniz
commences to use the term “privation” as a synonym for “limitation,” affirming that the original
limitation of creatures – which they have naturally by the fact that they come from “nothing” –
is the root of every evil. As he points out, “the cause of evil [must be placed] in no-being or
privation, that is, in the natural limitation or weakness of things, which is the same as the original
imperfection prior to original sin” (A VI 4C: 2321–2).11 In his mature writings, Leibniz uses the
term “privation” to refer to evil in itself, and not just to its metaphysical root: “The Platonists and
Augustine himself have shown that the good has a positive cause, but evil is a defect, that is, a
privation or negation and, hence, it comes from nothing or not-being” (Grua I: 364).
These passages reveal some particularities of Leibniz’s definition of evil as privation that
relate to the sources of his doctrine. Indeed, although Leibniz quotes Augustine and sometimes
Aquinas on this issue,12 his immediate source is actually Eilhard Lubin, a Lutheran theologian he
read and explicitly quotes (GP VI: 449). Lubin’s Phosphorus, On the First Cause and Nature of Evil
(1596),13 directly influenced Leibniz’s understanding of the nature of evil. This influence is visi-
ble in at least two ways. In the first place, it is visible in the idea, frequently reiterated by Leibniz,
that evil has its root in the fact that all creatures are metaphysically composed by “being” but also
by “not-being.”14 Sadly, Leibniz does not develop this doctrine technically, though he expresses
it comparing the creaturely constitution from “being” and “nothingness” with the origin of
binary numbers, which are represented by the numerals 1 and 0.15 Second, Lubin’s influence is
noticeable in Leibniz’s use of the terms “privation” and “negation.” Augustine16 and Aquinas17
usually distinguish between privative absence – i.e., the absence of a perfection that is owed
to certain nature – and negative absence – the absence of a perfection on a subject absolutely
considered. For instance, being blind is a privative absence for a being naturally provided with
eyes, while not being able to fly is just a negative absence for a being not naturally provided
with wings. Lubin18 and Leibniz, in their turn, tend to use “privation” and “negation” as syno-
nyms (A VI 4A: 405).19 This terminological identification reveals a metaphysical ambiguity in
Leibniz’s thought, making it hard to distinguish between privative and negative absences, and
thus making it hard to distinguish between the condition of possibility of evil (found in the
creature’s limitation) and the cause of its effective realization. One can find this ambiguity in
Leibniz’s later writings, in which he uses the theory of privation to explain divine concurrence
with creaturely evil actions. Contrary to what he expressed in his early writings, in the Essays
of Theodicy he states that, while God is the author of every perfection or entity in creatures
(including the entity of actions), He does not produce the lack of perfection that comes from
the natural limitation of the creature:
God is the cause of perfection in the nature and the actions of the creature, but the
limitation of the receptivity of the creature is the cause of the defects there are in
its action. Thus the Platonists, St. Augustine and the Schoolmen were right to say
that God is the cause of the material element of evil which lies in the positive, and
not of the formal element, which lies in privation. Even so one may say that the
current is the cause of the material element of the retardation, but not of the formal:
that is, it is the cause of the boat’s speed without being the cause of the limits to this
speed. And God is no more the cause of sin than the river’s current is the cause of
the retardation of the boat.
(GP VI: 120–21, trans. H: 141)
85
The characterization of evil as privation in Leibniz’s later works is intimately related to the
threefold classification of “metaphysical,” “physical,” and “moral evil.” This division, remi-
niscent of that one offered by William King in his De origine mali (1704),20 has an ambiguous
meaning. Indeed, in his Causa Dei (1710) Leibniz presents this classification as exclusive,
dividing three different kinds of evils, and corresponding to the different kinds of goods
found in reality:
metaphysical good and evil consist in the perfection and imperfection of beings, even
the non-intelligent ones. . . . Physical [good and evil] is applied in particular to the
pleasant and unpleasant in intelligent substances, to which the evil of pain corre-
sponds. . . . Moral [evil] is applied to virtuous and vicious actions, to which the evil of
fault corresponds: and in this sense physical evil usually arises from moral evil although
not always in the same subjects.
(GP VI: 443)
In the Essays of Theodicy, in its turn, the classification seems to refer to three different modes
of consideration that can correspond in some cases to identical realities: “Evil may be taken
metaphysically, physically and morally. Metaphysical evil consists in mere imperfection, physical
evil in suffering, and moral evil in sin” (GP VI: 115, trans. H: 136).
Taken in this second sense, every evil, physical or moral, would be an instance of meta-
physical evil, insofar as they all represent a certain lack of perfection. Taken in the first sense,
the distinction recovers the existence of instances of “pure” metaphysical evil. Paragraph 20 of
the Essays of Theodicy, in which Leibniz defines the original imperfection of the creatures as the
root of evil, in continuity with paragraph 21, in which he presents the classification of evil, led
to the frequent identification of the original limitation with metaphysical evil.21 Some scholars
have challenged this identification,22 suggesting that “metaphysical evil,” in its pure state, cor-
responds to the natural evil that affects irrational creatures.23 In any case, it seems plausible that,
for Leibniz, even if it is not univocally identifiable with metaphysical evil, the creature’s original
limitation is, at least, one of its species.
God’s intellect as the root of the possibility of evil

On the one hand, Leibniz, as a Christian thinker, holds that all contingent beings (creatures)
have their ultimate origin in a necessary being (God), which is the first principle that creates
them. Thus, Leibniz cannot attribute the origin of evil to a different first principle – for instance,
prime matter – like Manichaeans and Platonists do. On the other hand, he cannot ascribe the
origin of evil to God’s intention. To solve this problem, Leibniz sets a clear strategy by establish-
ing a sharp distinction between divine intellect and will, and attributing the origin of evil to the
former, and not to the latter. As he states in the Essays of Theodicy:
The ancients attributed the cause of evil to matter, which they believed uncreated and
independent of God: but we, who derive all being from God, where shall we find the
source of evil? The answer is, that it must be sought in the ideal nature of the creature,
in so far as this nature is contained in the eternal verities which are in the understand-
ing of God, independently of his will.
(GP VI: 115; trans. H: 135)
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Leibniz on evil
Indeed, for Leibniz, the divine intellect is not only where the necessary truths of reason are
found, but also the realm of the essences of the possibility of things. God does not create the
possibility of things – which does not depend on His will – but finds it as the necessary object
of His intellect. As he states in his very early Letter to Magnus Wedderkopff, “the essences of
things are just like numbers, and they contain the very possibility of entities, which God does
not bring about, as He does existence, since these very possibilities—or ideas of things—
coincide rather with God himself” (A II 1, 117; trans. CP, 3).24 He echoes this idea in his later
Essays of Theodicy:
In the region of the eternal verities are found all the possibles, . . . these very truths
can have no existence without an understanding to take cognizance of them; for they
would not exist if there were no divine understanding wherein they are realized, so
to speak,
(GP VI: 229; trans. H: 246)
For Leibniz, the essences (or possibility of things) are the result of the combinatory activ-
ity of the divine intellect that establishes all the possible and infinite connections between
all the possible subjects and all the possible predicates.25 This is precisely the meaning of
Leibniz famous statement: “While God calculates and exercises His thought, He produces
the world” (A VI 4A: 22). The combinations and connections between all the possible
subjects and predicates are the ground of God’s omniscience, that is, the knowledge not
only of possible things, but also of existing things, and of the subjunctive conditionals of
created free will:
All the propositional knowledge that is in God, be it of simple intelligence (concerning

the essences of things), be it of vision (concerning the existences of things), be it mid-
dle knowledge (concerning the conditional existences), emerges immediately from the
perfect understanding of each term that can be subject or predicate in a proposition;
that is, all the a priori knowledge of the complex [terms] emerges from the understand-
ing of the non-complex.
(A VI 4B: 1515)26
For Leibniz, all possible beings are represented in God’s intellect, and distributed in maximal
series.27 At least from the mid-1680s, Leibniz explicitly begins to call these series “possible
worlds” (A VI 4B: 1612). These possible worlds are not the result of God’s arbitrary will or
decree but are constituted by God’s intellect, following the criteria of logical non-contradiction
and compossibility, since “[t]here are as many possible worlds as are imaginable series of things
that do not imply contradiction” (Grua I: 397).28 As Leibniz explains in the tale of the “palace
of destinies,” at the end of the Essays of Theodicy, these possible worlds are infinite in number,
different in their degree of perfection, and hierarchically ordered in such a way that there is a
“best possible world” placed at the top of the pyramid:
amongst an endless number of possible worlds there is the best of all, else would God
not have determined to create any; but there is not any one which has not also less
perfect worlds below it: that is why the pyramid goes on descending to infinity.
(GP VI: 364; trans. H: 372)
87
Leibniz thus understands that every possible world is like a singular whole, so that every possible
individual substance belongs only to one possible world, with which it is intrinsically connected.
Therefore,
all things are connected in each one of the possible worlds: the universe, whatever it
may be, is all of one piece, like an ocean: the least movement extends its effect there to
any distance whatsoever, even though this effect become less perceptible in proportion
to the distance. Therein God has ordered all things beforehand once and for all, having
foreseen prayers, good and bad actions, and all the rest; and each thing as an idea has
contributed, before its existence, to the resolution that has been made upon the exist-
ence of all things; so that nothing can be changed in the universe (any more than in a
number) save its essence or, if you will, save its numerical individuality.
(GP VI: 252; trans. H: 128–9)
Every possible world has an essential setting-up that constitutes it in its individuality, so every
single thing each world contains is an intrinsic part of it. This implies that evil is included in
every possible world the possibility of which (i.e., its non-contradiction) includes it. In other
words, since in the divine intellect creatures are necessarily represented with all their essential
properties, including their original imperfection, God necessarily understands all the possible
evils that every possible world can contain. Thus, arguing against the Platonists who attribute
the metaphysical origin of evil to matter, Leibniz attributes it to the divine understanding:
therein is found not only the primitive form of good, but also the origin of evil: the
Region of the Eternal Verities must be substituted for matter when we are concerned
with seeking out the source of things.
(GP VI: 115–16; trans. H: 136)
Given that every possible world contains ontologically imperfect creatures, therefore certain
kind of metaphysical evil – namely, the original imperfection of the creatures – belongs to every
possible world. Nevertheless, while physical and moral evil are included in the possibility of
many possible worlds, they are not in the possibility of all of them. Hence, Leibniz argues, the
best of all possible worlds, which is the one that actually exists, includes some amount of the
three kinds of evil, so that even though God, absolutely speaking, could have created a world
without physical and moral evil, that world would have not been the best:
although physical evil and moral evil be not necessary, it is enough that by virtue of
the eternal verities they be possible. And as this vast Region of Verities contains all
possibilities it is necessary that there be an infinitude of possible worlds, that evil enter
into divers of them, and that even the best of all contain a measure thereof. Thus has
God been induced to permit evil.
(GP VI: 115, trans. H: 136)
In other words, without the evil it includes, this world would not be the best of all possible worlds:
if the smallest evil that comes to pass in the world were missing in it, it would no
longer be this world; which, with nothing omitted and all allowance made, was found
the best by the Creator who chose it.
(GP VI: 252; trans. H: 129)
88
Leibniz on evil
This last statement has significant implications with regards to role of God’s will in the actualiza-
tion of evil. Let’s consider now how a wise and benevolent God freely determines Himself to
choose a world that contains a great variety and quantity of evils.
God’s election of the best and the permission of evil

Against Spinoza, Leibniz considers that the existence of the actual world, or set of finite
things, is contingent, since it is the result of an act of God’s free will and not of an absolute
necessity (A VI 3: 581; A VI 4B: 1352). Leibniz grounds his claim that God is free when
He creates in the fact that other infinite alternatives to the actual world are conceivable, and
therefore possible, which means that God could have chosen any of them instead: “God
chooses among the possibles, and for that very reason he chooses freely, and is not com-
pelled; there would be neither choice nor freedom if there were but one course possible”
(GP VI: 258, trans. H: 272–3).29
Indeed, Leibniz continues, even though all possible things as such tend toward existence
according to their perfection or degree of essence (A VI 4B: 1443; GP VII: 303), not all of
them can be put into existence together, since they are not all “compossible.” This means
that they cannot coexist as a part of the same whole (A VI 3: 581–2; A VI 4B: 1354 and
1634). Hence, even in the realm of possible things there is a sort of struggle for existence
among possible beings (Couturat: 534). This struggle for existence, far from being a blind
and absolutely necessary process, is a metaphor of God’s process of deliberation, which leads
to the election of the best possible combination of things.30 This notion is particularly clear
in the following passage of the Essays of Theodicy, in which Leibniz roots this process in
God’s faculties:
The wisdom of God, not content with embracing all the possibles, penetrates them,
compares them, weighs them one against the other, to estimate their degrees of
perfection or imperfection, the strong and the weak, the good and the evil. It goes
even beyond the finite combinations, it makes of them an infinity of infinites, that
is to say, an infinity of possible sequences of the universe, each of which contains an
infinity of creatures. By this means the divine Wisdom distributes all the possibles it
had already contemplated separately, into so many universal systems which it further
compares the one with the other. The result of all these comparisons and delibera-
tions is the choice of the best from among all these possible systems, which wisdom
makes in order to satisfy goodness completely; and such is precisely the plan of the
universe as it is.
(GP VI: 252, trans. H: 267–8)31
Even though God acts freely, He is also perfectly wise and good, and so His absolute
perfection guarantees that He always acts according to the principle of the best.32 Still,
Leibniz is always careful to highlight the free character of God’s first decree, which is the
origin of all the existential and contingent true propositions, and consists precisely in the
free decision of choosing the best (A VI 4B: 1548 and 1650).33 Leibniz resolves this appar-
ent tension in the Essays of Theodicy by appealing to the notion – already present in some
sixteenth-century Spanish Scholastic Jesuits – of “moral necessity.”34 Distinct from absolute
and “metaphysical blind necessity” (GP VI: 321), the opposite of which implies contradic-
tion, moral necessity is the necessity of the “wise” – for whom necessary and obligatory
are equivalent (GP VI: 386) – and its opposite implies “moral absurdity” (GP VII: 304).
89
By virtue of this moral necessity, God is morally obliged to create the best. If He created a
less perfect world, or not create one at all, He would be responsible for a greater evil than
the one he permits in the actual world:
if God had not chosen the best series of the universe (in which sin occurs), He would
have admitted something worse than the sin of all the creatures, since He would have
revoked His own perfection and, therefore, also else’s [perfection]: because divine
perfection should not renounce to choose the most perfect, given that the lesser good
has the nature of evil.
(GP VI: 449)
These ideas bring up more clearly the problem of the relation between God’s will and evil.
Leibniz always rejected the position of some extreme Calvinists who claimed that God is the
author of evil. Following the traditional Augustinian formula,35 Leibniz affirms that God does
not produce or will evil in the universe, but merely “permits” it.36 What is the real meaning
of this claim? In his early writings, Leibniz seems to interpret it as meaning that, insofar as evil
is included in the best series of things, God is the indirect or per accidens cause of evil, with-
out making any distinction between different kinds of evils present in the world. He uses the
following analogy:
Just as a musician does not seek dissonances per se but only per accidens, when, through
these very dissonances, subsequently resolved, a more perfect melody is created than
would have existed without them, similarly, God does not want sins, except under
the condition of punishment that corrects, and per accidens only, as a requirement for
completing the perfection of the series.
(A VI 4B: 1378, trans. CP: 119)37
From his commentary on Burnet’s article On Predestination (1701–1706) onwards, Leibniz

introduces in his mature writings a classical distinction, taken from Aquinas and Scotus,38
between God’s antecedent and consequent will (DPG: 47, 97 and 123). This distinction,
originally elaborated by John Damascene,39 was fashioned to make compatible God’s uni-
versal salvific will – according to which He wants every man to be saved (I Timothy 2, 4) –
with the fact that some men wind up eternally damned. Leibniz presents this distinction
with a completely new sense, consistent with his own metaphysical system.40 On the one
hand, he universalizes the object of God’s antecedent will, with which God does not sim-
ply want every man to be saved, but also tends to actualize every possible being, absolutely
considered – i.e., separated from the other things with which they could be combined –
and to reject every possible evil (GP III: 31; GP VI: 382). On the other hand, following
Arminius (a Dutch sixteenth-century moderate Calvinist theologian), Leibniz states that
a will of God can be called “consequent” not just with respect to the free action of the
creature but also with respect to other prior divine wills, which tend to partial combina-
tions of compossible goods (GP VI: 382 and 442). Thus, in the same way that there is a
struggle of possible beings in the divine intellect, there is also a struggle of divine wills
before creation, so that God’s antecedent will is not only conditioned by the free action
of the creature (considered beforehand in the realm of possible things), but also by other
conflicting divine wills (GP VI: 443). Then, the consequent will, which is God’s definite
and effective will, tends to the actualization of the best possible combination of goods, and
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Leibniz on evil
it is the resulting force of all God’s antecedent wills taken together, once all the series are
considered and weighted:
this consequent will, final and decisive, results from the conflict of all the antecedent
wills, of those which tend towards good, even as of those which repel evil; and from
the concurrence of all these particular wills comes the total will.
(GP VI: 116, trans. H: 136–7)
Therefore, and to conclude on these ideas, the permission of evil concerns God’s consequent
will, which, in order to actualize the best series, has to make place to evils that the best series
includes (GP VI: 444; GP VI: 117). This general scheme of the distinction of divine wills is
useful to understand the actualization of every evil. There are, however, some differences in
the way God exercises His permission with regards to the different kinds of evil. In the case of
natural evils and evils of pain, God wants them indirectly, and sometimes even as a means to
an end (GP VI: 444). In the case of moral evil of fault, or sin, God does not want them either
as means or as ends, but only admits them as a sine qua non condition for achieving the greatest
perfection of the universe (GP VI: 203–4, 255 and 444). As Leibniz makes clear:
God wills all good in himself antecedently, that he wills the best consequently as an
end, that he wills what is indifferent, and physical evil, sometimes as a means, but that
he will only permit moral evil as the sine qua non or as a hypothetical necessity which
connects it with the best.
(GP VI: 117; trans. H: 138)
In fact, even though God concurs with the actualization of the actions of rational creatures,
He cannot be considered to be the author of sin, for two different reasons. In the first place,
while God is the cause of every perfection or positive aspect in created substances, the cause
or creation of sin arises from the natural limitation of the creature, as it is represented in
the divine intellect:
when it is said that the creature depends upon God in so far as it exists and in so far
as it acts, and even that conservation is a continual creation, this is true in that God
gives ever to the creature and produces continually all that in it is positive, good and
perfect, every perfect gift coming from the Father of lights. The imperfections, on the
other hand, and the defects in operations spring from the original limitation that the
creature could not but receive with the first beginning of its being, through the ideal
reasons which restrict it.
(GP VI: 121; trans. H: 141)
In the second place, while God’s concurrence with the actions of the creature consists in the
actualization of the successive states of the substances as they are included in their complete
concepts considered as possible (A VI 4B; 1575; GP VI: 346),41 so that God does not decree
to create sin but decrees to actualize a rational creature who is certainly going to sin (A VI 4B:
1524 and 1579), since that decree is subordinated to the more general decree of creating the best
possible world which contains it (A VI: 1523; GP VI: 132; DPG: 117).42
Considering now Leibniz’s view concerning the ultimate reason for God’s permission of
evil, following Augustine and Aquinas,43 Leibniz states that God allows evil in order to achieve
91
some greater goods (Guhrauer: 412; GP VI: 377; A VI 4B: 1602), or, in other words, in order
not to eliminate some goods that otherwise would not exist (GP VI: 444; A VI 4C: 2321). This
thesis is directly linked with the final goals of God’s act of creation. Indeed, in creating, God
seeks to actualize the maximal amount of perfection, so that “he has attained the utmost good
possible, provided one reckon the metaphysical, physical and moral goods together” (GP VI:
264; trans. H: 279). Now, since God is not only the architect of the material world but also the
king of the spiritual world (A VI 4B: 1584–5; GP VI: 621–2), He has some preference for His
rational creatures over the rest, so He intends to produce the greatest amount of happiness or
pleasure for those creatures (A VI 4B: 1537 and 1586). Nevertheless, given that there seems to
be an opposition between the different kinds of goods, it is necessary to make room for some
evils – of each different kind – in order to achieve the most perfect combination overall. As
Leibniz points out:
There is a certain opposition between physical and moral goodness. It is necessary to

take into consideration both of them, besides a vast number of moral goods. Hence, in
trying to produce the greatest possible of both [kinds], this has been achieved allowing
some moral evil and some physical evil.
(Grua II: 492)44
In other words, the best possible world cannot be actualized without allowing some evils,
such as the sin and the freely deserved damnation of some rational creatures (A VI 4C: 2234).
Unfortunately, Leibniz does not explain why there is an opposition between the different kinds
of goods.45 He simply limits himself to affirm that we know this by experience (ex eventu),
because the actual world includes those evils and because God can only do what is best (A VI 3:
146; GP VI: 35). Indeed, if the actual world, with the evils it contains, were not the best of all
possible worlds, God would have not had any sufficient reason to choose it among the possible
worlds, and therefore to create it (GP VI: 364). In conclusion, for Leibniz, the perfection of the
world is greater with – and because of – the permission of evil than it would have been without
this permission: “since God chooses the best possible, one cannot tax him with any limitation
of his perfections; and in the universe not only does the good exceed the evil, but also the evil
serves to augment the good” (GP VI: 247; trans. H: 263).
Finally, Leibniz seems also to have theological reasons to affirm that evil contributes to the
perfection of the universe, which concerns the classical Christian idea of the “fortunate fall.”
Leibniz claims in several places – on occasions even citing the famous “Oh, felix culpa!” of the
Easter proclamation (GP VI: 108 and 377) – that there is a connection between the permission
of original sin and the reason for Christ’s Incarnation, so that the universe would have been less
perfect without sin (A VI 4C: 2312 and 2359).46 Indeed, Leibniz affirms explicitly in his Causa
Dei that the Incarnation of the Son of God, head of all creation, was the main reason for God
choosing this world among the other possible (GP VI: 446). Christ’s Incarnation is, then, the
ultimate reason for the permission of evil:
God has had infinite concurrent reasons to consider at the moment He judged that
this universe was worthy of His election. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the
main reason was that, in the perfect representation of this possible world in the idea
in the divine intellect, together with the fall of man was also surely the Incarnation
of the Son of God.
(Grua I: 343)
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Leibniz on evil
Leibniz’s theodicy is undoubtedly a project fully committed to providing a metaphysical

grounding for the defense of Christian theism. Nevertheless, given its metaphysical principles
and assumptions, it seems to take the form of system oriented toward the justification of the
existence of evil, rather than toward the justification of God’s perfection.
Notes
1 This chapter is an output of the project “The Problem of Evil: From Leibniz to Analytic Philosophy of
Religion” (FFI2017-84559-P: Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Gobierno de España).
2 On this identification see Korsmeyer 1977.
3 This doesn’t mean that, at least implicitly, Leibniz’s Theodicy does not contain a theistic reply to the
problem of natural evil. See, for instance, Strickland (2017).
4 On the theological context of Leibniz’s Theodicy see Murray 2002 and Rösler 2011.
5 Abbreviations: A, Akademie (ed.), Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe (Leibniz 1923–); Grua, Textes inédits
d’apres les manuscrites de la bibliothèque provinciale de Hannover (Leibniz 1948); H, Huggard (trans.), Theodicy
(Leibniz 1951); Couturat, Opuscules et fragments inédits de Leibniz. Extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque
royale de Hanovre (1961); GP, Gerhardt (ed.), Die Philosophischen Schriften (Leibniz 1965); Guhrauer,
Deutsche Schriften (Leibniz 1966); GM, Gerhardt (ed.), Die Mathematischen Schriften (Leibniz 1971); CP,
Confessio philosophi. Papers Concerning the Problem of Evil, 1671–1678 (Leibniz 2005); DPG, Dissertation
on Predestination and Grace (Leibniz 2011).
6 Although it never completely disappears, and one can find references to it in later works. See, for
instance, Grua II, 492, GP VI, 109 and 434.
7 Augustinus, De genesi ad litteram imperfectus liber (1865: 229).
8 See, for instance, A VI 1: 485 and 537–38; A VI 3: 146; GP VII: 306–7; Grua: 492; GP VI: 109 and 434;
GM III: 574.
9 As Belaval 1976: 102 states, “taken apart, evil and sin are realities, such as dissonance; put in the ensemble
of creation, they are not mere appearances, but they appear in their true role: that of increasing the
harmony of the best of all possible worlds.” Even though Rateau 2008: 645 has outlined the equivocal
sense of “appear” in this sentence, its meaning remains true.
10 On the evolution of Leibniz’s strategy on the problem of evil see Sleigh 2001.
11 See also A VI 4B: 1577 and A VI 4C: 2358. Where I don’t indicate otherwise, translations are my own.
12 See Latzer 1993.
13 Leibniz acquired a copy of the Phosphorus in February of 1663, and although he rejected its doctrines
at first (see AVI 1, 496) its influence is clear in later years.
14 See Lubin (1605: 5, 9 and 211–12).
15 See, for instance, A VI 4A: 158 and 625; Grua I: 364; Guhrauer II: 401 and 411.
16 Augustinus, Enchiridion IV, 12, 2–9 (1969: 54).
17 Summa Theologiae I, q. 48, a. 3.
18 See Lubin 1605: 6 and 209.
19 For a more complete account of the influence of Lubin in Leibniz’s conception of evil, see Echavarría
2011b, 91–97 and Newlands 2014. For Leibniz’s use of the terms “privation” and “negation” in relation
to evil, see Fernández Pérez 1995.
20 It is worth noting, however, that King uses the terminology of “evil of imperfection,” “natural evil,”
and “moral evil” (King 1704: 46). Grua 1953: 354, followed by Rateau 2008: 579, points to Tommaso
Campanella’s Atheismus thriumphatus as the source of this distinction. This is highly unlikely, both
because Leibniz only had an indirect knowledge of Campanella’s work (see Grua II: 507–8, note 480),
and because Campanella does not distinguish between three kinds of evil but between three modes of
existence of evil in physical, metaphysical, and moral entities (Campanella 1631: 32).
21 See, for instance, Russell 1992: 198 and Broad 1975: 159–60.
22 See, for instance, Latzer 1994 and Antognazza 2014.
23 Latzer 1994.
24 See also A VI 3: 122; A II 1: 298–9; A VI 4B: 1533; Grua I: 396–7; GP VII: 305 and GP VI: 440.
25 For a complete account of how the divine intellect constitutes the possible individuals and worlds, see
Nachtomy 2007: 9–50.
26 See also GP VI: 440.
93
27 The idea begins to take form in the notes Leibniz introduces in his Confessio philosophi, as a reply to
Steno’s objections (A VI 3: 124).
28 See also GP III: 558 and 573.
29 See also A VI 4B: 1352, 1446, 1453 and 2577; Grua I: 396 and II 493.
30 On this regard, see Blumenfeld 1973 and Shields 1986.
31 See also A VI 4C: 2232; A VI 4B: 1635.
32 This is a constant claim from Leibniz’s earlier writings to the more mature ones. See, for instance, A VI
1: 544; A II 1: 186; A VI 3: 124; A VI 4B: 1362, 1383 and 1541.
33 Nevertheless, Leibniz reaches this conclusion after some hesitations on whether rooting the first decree
on God’s nature or on His will. See A VI 4B: 1447 and 1455.
34 This relation is highlighted by Des Boses in his preface on the Latin edition of the Essays of Theodicy.
On the influence of Spanish Jesuits, like Diego Granado, Diego Ruiz de Montoya, and Antonio
Pérez, on Leibniz’s concept of moral necessity, see Knebel 1991 and 1992, Ramelow 1997, and
Murray 2004 and 2014.
35 Augustininus, Enchiridion VIII, 27, 53–4 (1969: 64).
36 On the evolution of Leibniz’s concept of God’s permissive will, see Echavarría 2011a.
37 On Leibniz’s early account of the concept of permission see Echavarría 2006.
38 See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q.19, a. 6, ad 1; John Duns Scotus, In I Sent., I, dist. 46, q. 1.
39 Damascenus, De fide orthodoxa 1864: 968–9.
40 For Leibniz’s transformation of the distinction between antecedent and consequent will, see
Echavarría 2014.
41 On Leibniz’s concept of divine concurrence see Lee 2004, McDonough 2007 Whipple 2010, and
Schmaltz 2014.
42 For a more detailed account of this see Echavarría 2017.
43 Augustininus, Enchiridion III, 11, 29–345 (1969, 53);Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 2, a. 3, ad 1.
44 Brown 1988, Blumenfeld 1994, and Rutherford 1995: 51 maintain that, for Leibniz, the greatest har-
mony and metaphysical perfection of the universe coincide with the maximal happiness and virtue of
rational creatures, while Wilson 1983 thinks that happiness and virtue are subordinated to the order
and regularity of the universe. Strickland 2006: 143 thinks that the metaphysical perfection of the
universe is not compatible with the maximal moral and physical perfection. Finally, Rescher (1979:
156–7) thinks that Leibniz never reached an appropriate balance between moral and metaphysical
perfection.
45 See Strickland 2006, 147.
46 Some scholars like Jalabert 1985 and Jolley 2014 have pointed out that Leibniz’s theodicy is not as
Christocentric as Malebranche’s. Even if this is true, Leibniz’s allusions to the Incarnation as the ulti-
mate reason form the permission of evil are constant.
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7
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
ON THE ORIGIN AND
NATURE OF EVIL
Jason Neidleman
Rousseau’s interest in evil was – like his interest in most everything – practical rather than
metaphysical. He wanted to understand where evil came from in order to understand how
it could be overcome. He has little to offer to those interested in many of the formal ques-
tions that predominate in the academic literature on evil. He has little to contribute, for
example, to those interested in distinguishing conceptually between evil and those lesser ills
which might be described as bad or wrong but not as evil. He likewise was not preoccupied
with identifying the necessary and/or sufficient conditions for evil action or evil character.
Rousseau invoked evil (le mal) in its broad sense, and was little inclined to engage in the
kind of specific questions of language that drive much of the contemporary philosophical
inquiry into evil. Indeed, it was philosophers’ affinity for these kinds of questions that moved
Rousseau to castigate philosophers for their preoccupation with “metaphysical quibbles and
subtleties” (R, i:1018; viii:23).1 Rousseau vowed instead to filter his inquiries through the
lens of happiness. And when he finally agreed to write about moral and political questions –
at the urging of his friend Denis Diderot and against his own professed better judgment – he
did so on the grounds that he had finally encountered a question of urgent relevance to the
problem of human happiness:
Here is one of the greatest and finest questions ever debated. This discourse is not
concerned with those metaphysical subtleties that have prevailed in all parts of litera-
ture and from which the announcements of academic competitions are not always
exempt; rather, it is concerned with one of those truths that pertain to human
happiness.
(DAS, iii:6; ii:3)
The question to which Rousseau was responding – “Has the rise of the arts and sciences con-
tributed to the purification of morals?” – had been proposed by the Dijon Academy as an
invitation to compete for a prize. Upon seeing the question, Rousseau claimed to have had a
quasi-religious epiphany. This epiphany was the basis for what Rousseau would later call his
“system,” and the epiphany was, in a fundamental sense, about the origin of evil. Here is how
Rousseau described it in a letter to Malesherbes:
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Jason Neidleman
Oh Sir, if I had ever been able to write a quarter of what I saw and felt under that
tree, how clearly I would have made all the contradictions of the social system seen,
with what strength I would have exposed all the abuses of our institutions, with what
simplicity I would have demonstrated that man is naturally good and that it is from
these institutions alone that men become wicked [méchant].
(i:1135–6; v:575)
This was what Rousseau came to call his “great principle” or his “fundamental principle” –
that “nature made man happy and good but society depraves him and makes him miserable”
(D i:934; i:213).2 Rousseau’s position was a radical departure from existing theories on the sub-
ject, which maintained that human nature was at best mixed if not tending toward what Thomas
Hobbes called “nasty,” and that society was required to restrain these dangerous inclinations.
On the contrary, Rousseau asserted, the origin of evil lies not in nature (or, on the Christian
account, in the Fall) but in society. In a letter to Christophe de Beaumont, the archbishop of
Paris, Rousseau agreed with the archbishop that humanity was “in the hands of the Devil,” but
he disagreed about how we “fell into them” (iv:940; ix:31). Indeed, it could be argued quite
plausibly that the primary purpose of Rousseau’s moral and political philosophy was to describe
precisely how humanity’s corruption occurred, and, in so doing, to demonstrate that the pre-
dominant political and moral philosophies of his time were wrong insofar as they were based
on the premise that human beings were in any way evil by nature. This error had been made –
most prominently by Hobbes – because previous writers on the subject had ascribed to human
beings in the state of nature characteristics that could only have emerged in society. Imagining
themselves to have described human nature, these writers had actually described how people
with traits born only in society would behave without the constraints of society.3
So Rousseau had a story to tell about evil. It was not an etymological story, neither was
it a metaphysical or linguistic analysis. It was something closer to a historical anthropology
or, perhaps most accurately, a genealogy. It was a story about the origin of evil, intended
ultimately to illustrate for people living in corrupt societies a time in which evil had not yet
come into existence. Rousseau’s genealogy of evil had two purposes: first, to demonstrate
that evil is not a constitutive element of human nature; and, second, to suggest the possibility
of evading or transcending the evil that had become so pervasive in modern societies. Evil,
Rousseau argued, is not inherent in the world but rather originates in us, which in turn gives
us the power to overcome it.
If evil is not inherent in Creation, it followed for Rousseau that evil could not be the respon-
sibility of the Creator (about whom more below); evil originated later, after human beings made
the fateful decision to leave their natural state. The responsibility for evil lies with humanity and
humanity alone, and – what was perhaps most important for Rousseau – evil has a history that
can be traced. It is a history that can reveal an alternative to the corruption that is currently so
prevalent, a history that can show us a time when we were not yet evil. It is a history that can
point the way toward a future in which we renounce evil in favor of good.
Rousseau’s theodicy
It is helpful to situate Rousseau’s account of evil within the context of the debates over theod-
icy from which it emerged. How is it, many began to ask in the early eighteenth century, that
a good and all-powerful God could permit evil to occur? Those who had previously reflected
on this question, Gottfried Leibniz and Alexander Pope to take two prominent examples, had
argued that there was no evil in the world or that evil was merely apparent. On this view, evil
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was part of a larger order that was the best of all worlds, such that anything in the world could
be justified as necessary to make that world as it is.4 In order to make this case, they had recourse
to various strategies for redescribing ills as good. Rousseau shared these thinkers’ concern to
absolve the Creator of responsibility for evil, but, unlike them, he did not resort to the implau-
sible claim – famously ridiculed by Voltaire in Candide – that “all is for the best in the best of all
possible worlds.” Rousseau’s “great principle” gave him room to acknowledge the evil in the
world without either reinterpreting it as good or making God culpable for it.
Rousseau’s fundamental principle absolved God of responsibility for originating evil, but it
does not account for why God allowed evil to enter into Creation. In a letter to Franquières,
written in 1769, Rousseau took up the question of theodicy: How could evil exist if everything
is “the work of an intelligent, powerful, and beneficent being?” (iv:1140; viii:265) Interestingly,
he initially claims – rather implausibly given that he had published both Discourses and Emile by
that point – that he had not thought much about the question. Though he could not say exactly
why he had neglected this question, he suspected that it had been for one of two reasons. Either
he had not adequately understood the extent of the problem, or the problem itself is much less
significant than it was generally assumed to be. Having made the decision to deal with the ques-
tion directly, he first considered denying the existence of evil:
But when I suffer, is this not an evil? When I die, is this not an evil? Not so fast: I am
subject to death, because I received life. . . . When I looked closely at all that, I found,
perhaps I proved, that the sentiment of death and that of pain is almost nil in the order
of nature.
(LF, iv:1141; viii:265–6)
Here Rousseau speaks of what might be called natural or physical evil, and he quite plainly dis-
misses it, not on the grounds that the God bears no responsibility for it but rather on the grounds
that, evaluated in context, it is not in fact evil at all. Moral evil, however, is something else.
Moral evil – evil perpetrated by human beings upon one another – Rousseau wanted neither
to deny nor to negate. But God bears no responsibility for moral evil either, Rousseau decides,
not this time because it is not in fact evil – as Leibniz and Pope had maintained – but because it
is exclusively a “work of man” and has nothing to do with God. And, yet, as we have already
said, even if God is not responsible for the creation of evil, God is responsible for the creation
of human beings and so, it could be argued, must bear at least some indirect responsibility for
the presence of evil in the world. God made people with a capacity for evil, this argument goes,
and could have presumably made them otherwise. But this too is not the case, Rousseau insists.
And here we come to the principle upon which Rousseau’s theodicy turns: to be human is to be
free. There is nothing more fundamental to a dignified human existence: “To renounce one’s
freedom is to renounce one’s status as a man” (SC, iii:356; iv:135). Freedom is a constituent
quality of a human being, and freedom must include the possibility of choosing to do ill; other-
wise it could not meaningfully be said to include the possibility of doing good. As Mark Cladis
has put it, “morality and moral evil . . . require the same condition: freedom” (1995, 189). God
had no choice but to create us with the capacity for evil, or else we would lack the capacity for
the moral agency that is the very essence of our humanity.
Freedom, the quality that redeems this world for human beings, cannot exist except in coex-
istence with the possibility for evil. Our freedom to choose the good is meaningless unless we
are equally free to choose its opposite. In the Letter to Beaumont, Rousseau wrote that the evil
we experience is not an “absolute evil” because, “far from directly combatting the good, it con-
tributes along with it to universal harmony” (iv:955; ix:43). Here Rousseau’s view touches the
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position taken by Leibniz and Pope. There are not two separate forces – good and evil – there is
rather a universal order into which everything fits. This makes existence itself good, even if evil
is woven into it. Evil has some role to play in the larger order, for without it there could be no
good. So, while Rousseau did not subscribe to the Leibnizian view that evil does not exist, he
did deny the existence of what he here calls absolute evil, a notion that would be incompatible
with belief in the fundamental goodness of existence. Absolute evil would have no redeeming
qualities whatsoever. Since all things have their place in the harmony of Creation, produced by
the Will that directs everything, and since absolute evil could have no place in such an order, it
follows for Rousseau that there can be no such thing as absolute evil.
Rousseau’s conception of evil

Up to this point, we have focused on two aspects of Rousseau’s account of evil: (1) evil emerges
as a byproduct of a choice made by human beings (i.e., to enter into society) and is not therefore
inherent in Creation itself; and (2) once this choice has been made, the freedom to act morally
necessarily requires the possibility of an equal and opposite option to act against morality. We
have not yet specified what it is that qualifies an action, occurrence, or individual as evil. What,
to state the question plainly, did evil mean in Rousseau’s philosophical vocabulary? What did he
use the term evil (le mal) to denote? In this regard, it is useful to begin by drawing three distinc-
tions, the first two of which can be found in Rousseau’s work and a third that comes out of the
contemporary scholarship on evil.
Physical and moral evil

In the Letter to Voltaire, Rousseau’s most sustained treatment of evil, he defended and extended
the project of the Discourse on Inequality, which he characterized as showing his audience “how
they caused their miseries upon themselves, and consequently how they might avoid them”
(LV, iv:1061; iii:109). One of the problems with this claim is that, even if it applies to the ills
that human beings perpetuate upon one another (moral evil), it seems impossible to claim that
it applies to the ills that arise from nature alone (physical evil). Nevertheless, Rousseau argues
that physical evils, such as the earthquake at Lisbon – a seminal event in the history of theo-
rizing about evil and the occasion for the work to which Rousseau is reacting in the Letter to
Voltaire – do not seriously undermine his great principle:
as for physical ills, if, as it seems to me, it is a contradiction, as it seems to me, they are
inevitable in any system of which man is a part; and then the question is not at all why
is man not perfectly happy, but why does he exist? Moreover I believe I have shown
that with the exception of death, which is an evil almost solely because of the prepara-
tions which one makes preceding it, most of our physical ills are still our own work.
(iv:1061; iii:109–10)
Here Rousseau is applying to physical evil the argument that we witnessed him making with
regard to moral evil in the previous section. Physical ills are an essential element of physical
existence, Rousseau argues. Thus, in challenging the existence of physical evils we are chal-
lenging the very idea of existence itself. We cannot experience pleasure without knowing pain;
we cannot know love without the possibility of heartbreak; and even death – which Rousseau
concedes is not an ill of our own making – is an essential element of all physical life and is expe-
rienced as an evil mainly because of the weak and cowardly ways in which we dispose ourselves
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toward it. All in all, Rousseau argues, the physical ills to which nature subjects us are as nothing
compared to the ills – both physical and moral – that we impose upon ourselves.
Rousseau’s argument with respect to physical evil was threefold. First, the ills to which
nature exposes us are minimal. Second, the extent to which we experience suffering from physi-
cal evil is mostly a consequence of our own actions. We have cultivated an unwarranted fear of
death and a weakness in life that makes us feel sharply pains that were largely unknown to us in
our natural state. And, third, physical existence itself is not possible without the concurrent pos-
sibility of physical evil. This latter claim is a variant of the argument Rousseau used to explain
the existence of moral evil, which we reviewed in the previous section.
Particular and general evil

General evil refers to existence itself, while particular evil refers to instances of evil suffered
by particular individuals. In the Letter to Voltaire, Rousseau accused Voltaire of conflating
the two and, in so doing, confusing optimists like Alexander Pope – with whom Rousseau
here identifies – with those who would claim “everything is good.” The optimists’ position,
Rousseau clarified, is not “everything is good”; it is, rather, “the whole is good” or “every-
thing is good for the whole” (LV, iv:1068; iii:115). In order to understand this distinction it
is necessary to distinguish particular evil from general evil.
To return, Sir, to the system that you attack, I believe that one cannot examine it suit-
ably without distinguishing carefully particular evil, whose existence no Philosopher
has ever denied, from the general evil that the optimist denies. It is not a question
of knowing whether each one of us suffers or not; but whether it be good that the
universe exists, and whether our ills be inevitable in the constitution of the universe.
(LV, iv:1068; iii:115)
It would be ridiculous to deny that particular evils occur, but Rousseau argued that pessimists
like Voltaire were wrong to take the existence of particular evils for proof of the existence of
general evil. It would be wrong, in other words, to take the existence of particular evils as proof
that there exists a general evil in the universe. On the contrary, Rousseau believed that the
universe was characterized by a general order and that the particular evils perpetuated by human
beings were subversions of that order.5 General evil, Rousseau has the Savoyard vicar argue, can
only exist in the absence of order, and, he continued, “I see in the system of the world an unfail-
ing order” (E, iv:588; xiii:443). On this matter, if not on everything else, Rousseau employed
the vicar to express his own view.6
Broad and narrow evil

The contemporary literature on evil distinguishes between a “narrow conception,” which is
reserved only for the most inhuman and monstrous suffering that human beings perpetrate
upon one another, and a “broad conception,” which encompasses all of the ills that we suffer
rather than only those that are most extreme. Since Auschwitz, the literature on evil has been
preoccupied with evil understood in the narrow sense, defined as, to take one representative
example, intentional, unjustified suffering imposed by one person or group of people upon
another person or group of people (Calder, 2013). This has raised a series of questions (discussed
below), which have in turn raised concerns about the very idea of evil itself. As noted above,
Rousseau employed evil in the broad sense, inclusive of all ills suffered by human beings, a usage
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that escapes many of the concerns about evil currently pushing it toward obsolescence. In this
sense, a Rousseauean conception of evil could be useful in theorizing a revised, less theoretically
problematic approach to evil, as I suggest at the end of this chapter.
Rousseau, to summarize, used the concept of evil to encompass all of the ills suffered by
human beings, including both those that are avoidable and those that are inherent byproducts
of things that are otherwise good, such as existence and morality. There are essentially no
physical evils, with the possible exception of death. For all intents and purposes evil did not
exist in the state of nature and only came into being with the inception of society. This is
because evil only comes into being as the necessary accompaniment of morality, which itself
only emerges in society. Once in society, individuals acquire the capacity for moral action,
and this capacity must necessarily carry with it the capacity to act against morality, that is, to
act in opposition to that which morality demands. Most importantly, the source of moral evil
is in human beings alone, which means that it can be overcome. The capacity to opt for
evil is inherent in moral agency, but culpability for evil lies entirely in decisions – collective
and individual – made by moral agents.
Rousseau’s genealogy of evil

Once we know that evil arises not from nature but from human beings, we will next want to ask
what it is that causes us to become evil or to commit evil acts. The general concept Rousseau
used to account for this dynamic was amour propre, which is sometimes translated as vanity but is
best understood as esteeming oneself based on the opinions of others. Rousseau contrasts amour
propre with amour de soi, which refers to the benign desire shared by all living things to secure
their authentic (self-originating) needs. As long as we allow ourselves to be guided by these
authentic needs, we will be able to avoid evil. But, if we allow artificial needs to proliferate,
we open a space into which wickedness may enter. Rousseau makes the point in replying to
criticism of his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences: “It is believed I am much embarrassed by being
asked to what point it is necessary to limit luxury. My sentiment is that there must be no luxury
at all. Everything beyond physical necessity is a source of evil” (Final Reply, iii:95; ii:128).7 Evil
is commonly defined as the imposition of unnecessary suffering. For Rousseau, the imposition
of unnecessary suffering can itself be traced back to the development of unnecessary desire.
So, broadly speaking, moral evil arises from a desire to distinguish oneself, to be recognized
as richer, handsomer, cleverer, or more fashionable.8 This desire results in a variety of behaviors
that qualify as evil by virtue of the fact that they subvert or subjugate the good of others to the
good of the perpetrator(s). Rousseau famously said that the most general will is also the most
just.9 It follows from this that those things that most subvert the general will are the most evil.
Moral evil, then, can be understood as the willful subversion of the welfare of others to one’s
own. As the vicar puts it, “the good man orders himself in relation to the whole, and the wicked
one orders the whole in relation to himself” (E, iv:602; xiii:455).10 In the state of nature, evil
had not yet manifested, as people, animated by amour de soi, secured their own good without
compromising the good of others. At the other end of the spectrum, in Rousseau’s ideal repub-
lic of virtue (discussed later in this chapter), evil will be overcome, as citizens generalize and
transform amour propre, such that, in pursuing their own good, they are simultaneously pursuing
common good of their compatriots. But, in the in-between state we currently occupy, evil pre-
dominates, as inflamed amour propre inspires individuals to secure their own good at the expense
of everyone else’s.
In the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau set for himself the task of explaining how this sad
state came to be: “Men are wicked; sad and continual experience spares the need for proof.
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However, man is naturally good; I believe I have demonstrated it. What then can have depraved
him to this extent. . .?” (iii:202; iii:74). Rousseau’s answer was that, when human beings came
into regular contact, they began to compare themselves to one another. This faculty of compari-
son enabled them to make relative judgments about their own worth and the worth of others.
They measured themselves against what they perceived in others. On the positive side, this ena-
bled moral agency, as individuals could for the first time judge their actions based on the effect
of those actions on others. But it also enabled more dangerous comparisons, in which people
esteemed themselves based on what distinguished them from others rather than on the basis
what they held in common. This, in turn, led to a proliferation of needs, as people continually
sought new ways of setting themselves apart.
If we want to be happy, the Savoyard vicar tells us, we need only be “satisfied to be what we
are.” The problem, alas, is that we are not satisfied, that we pursue “an imaginary well-being,”
and in so doing we “give ourselves countless real ills” (E, iv:587–8; xiii:443). The most signifi-
cant of the ills we inflict upon ourselves is the need for the approval of others. “The wicked
man is wicked,” Rousseau writes in the Dialogues, “only because he needs others, because some
don’t favor him enough and some put obstacles in his path. He can neither use them nor put
them aside at will” (i:824; i:127). This inflamed form of amour propre (which Rousseau opposed
to the benign form discussed below) eventuates in societies that put people into conflict with
one another by making it necessary for them to do harm to others in order to secure their own
good. The natural inclination to secure their own interest while doing the least harm to others
is overwhelmed by:
maxims . . . in which each man finds his profit in the misfortune of others. . . . There is
perhaps no well-to-do man whose death is not secretly hoped for by avid heirs and of
his own children; no Ship at Sea whose wreck would not be good news to some mer-
chant; no firm that a debtor of bad faith would not wish to see burned along with all the
papers it contains; no People that does not rejoice about the disasters of its neighbors”
(DI, iii:202; iii:74–5).
In society, we are alienated from our nature. This alienation creates the opening for evil, as we
scramble to recapture the wholeness we once had and now want desperately to reclaim. In our
desperation, we engage in behavior that can become so terribly misguided as to qualify as evil.
In the Letter to Beaumont, Rousseau describes this as the “last stage” of corruption, in which
“none finds his own good except in someone else’s ill,” conscience is stifled by baser passions,
and people only want the public good when it coincides with their own (iv:937; ix:29).
We can summarize Rousseau’s position as follows:
1 Morality requires the ordering of one’s particular will to the common good or general will;
2 Evil actions are those that subvert the common good for the sake of a particular interest;
3 The impulse to evil originates in a socially-constituted desire for distinction.
At this point we have Rousseau’s account of what evil is, where it comes from, and how it pro-
liferates. The obvious next question is what, if anything, we might do to overcome it?
Overcoming evil
In the Dialogues, Rousseau calls amour propre “the principle of all wickedness [méchanceté],” on
the grounds that wickedness is possible only when one compares oneself to others (i:789–90;
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i:100). But amour propre need not always lead us to wickedness. Comparison is the basis for
morality as well as wickedness, and, if we can cultivate amour propre from those things that unite
us with our fellows rather than from the things that distinguish or differentiate us, we can trans-
form the source of wickedness into its remedy. Amour propre, when directed only “in relation
to ourselves,” is a source of evil, but, when extended to other individuals, amour propre can be
a source of virtue.
I have shown that the only passion born with man, namely love of self, is a passion
in itself indifferent to good and evil; that it becomes good or bad only by accident
and depending on the circumstances in which it develops. . . . Man is not a simple
being. He is composed of two substances. . . . Once that is proved, the love of self
is no longer a simple passion. But it has two principles, namely the intelligent being
and the sensitive being, the well-being of which is not the same. The appetite of
the sense conduces to the well-being of the body, and the love order to that of the
soul. The latter love, developed and made active, bears the name of conscience.
But Conscience develops and acts only with man’s understanding. . . . Conscience
is therefore null in the man who has compared nothing and who has not seen his
relationships. In that state, man knows only himself. He does not see his well-being
as opposed to or consistent with that of anyone. He neither hates nor loves anything.
Restricted to physical instinct alone, he is null, he is stupid. That is what I have
shown in my Discourse on Inequality.
(LB, iv:936; ix:28).
This passage makes several important points with respect to the genealogy of evil. First, evil is
not natural to man but emerges only in society. Second, the capacity for evil is coeval with the
capacity for morality. The savage, while possessing an innocent goodness, is governed only by
instinct and is “stupid,” as Rousseau puts it, with respect to good and evil. Third, the capacity
for both moral good and evil emerges from the faculty of comparison, the very same faculty that
accounts for amour propre. So, the task of civilized people is to find the remedy in the disease.11
Rousseau believed that, once in society, we become engaged in an ongoing battle for good
and against evil. Our compensation for the decision to form societies lies in the chance we have
to arrive at something beautiful and redemptive, but that something is premised on the same
freedom that makes evil possible as well. The struggle to resist evil is therefore a permanent part
of our existence. Rousseau gives us several models of how we might do so, all of which involve
overcoming the divisiveness and fragmentation characteristic of modern society. Unfortunately,
none of these models is wholly successful. Under ideal circumstances – the republic of virtue,
a small country estate, or a solitary nature walk – we might transcend or escape evil for a time.
But these moments are rare. More often, we will be compelled to settle for half measures, which
merely divert us from evil deeds instead of moving us to eschew evil altogether.12 The arts and
sciences are a good example. It would have been best, Rousseau argues in the Discourse on the
Arts and Sciences and in the Letter to D’Alembert, if the arts and sciences had never been born, as
they have a corrosive effect on public morality. Their effect is to cause reputation and talent to
be prized over virtue and probity. Once the arts and sciences have been born, however, our best
option is to tolerate them, not because they move people to do good but because they “occupy
them with foolishness to turn them away from bad actions.” It is better, Rousseau writes, to
“live with rogues than with brigands” (PN, ii:972; ii:196). Sometimes, lesser evils can save us
from a greater one. This is why, for example, Rousseau argued in the Letter to D’Alembert that
the theater – while bad for a good people – is good for a bad one.
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But, if we hope to do more than simply blunt the effects of moral corruption, if we hope,
in other words, to overcome evil, we will need to redirect amour propre such that we come to
esteem ourselves based on that which we have in common with our fellows rather than on that
which distinguishes us. Patriotism, friendship, and a love of order, God, and justice must sup-
plant the pernicious forms of amour propre that cause us to subvert the interest of others in pursuit
of our own. The impulse that produces evil cannot be erased; it must rather be rechanneled. It
can either be rechanneled into frivolous amusements, such that evil is attenuated, or it can be
rechanneled into a generalized love, such that evil is overcome.
The vicar uses the example of religious enthusiasm to suggest how the passions might be
rechanneled to overcome evil. Fanaticism, he argues, can be “sanguinary and cruel.” Our
response, however must not be irreligion, as many of those who Rousseau disparaged as “phi-
losophers” had argued. “If atheism does not cause the spilling of men’s blood, it is less from love
of peace than from indifference to the good.” This is a state of mind that the vicar characterizes
as akin to the “tranquility of the state under despotism.” It risks being “more destructive than
war itself” (E, iv:632–3; xiii:479–80). In order to overcome evil, passion should not be repressed
but rather redirected. The natural religion espoused by the vicar prevents religious enthusiasm
from becoming destructive of the social bond by rechanneling it into a love of the whole.
Rousseau makes a similar case with respect to love of the patria, which must be generalized until
it encompasses the entirety of the social body but not so much that it becomes dissolute and can
no longer motivate virtuous action.
It should be clear by now that the path to redemption lies less in reason than in sentiment.
The self-love that is the source of evil cannot be simply repressed; it must rather be rechan-
neled into a noble love of the whole. In the Letter to Voltaire, Rousseau claimed to have over-
come the temptation to see the world as constitutively evil. “You find only evil,” he wrote to
Voltaire, while I “find that all is good” (LV, iv:1074; iii:120). Whatever the evils, Rousseau
argued, our goods are greater. Philosophers forget this because they do not account for the
“sweet sentiment of existence” (LV, iv:1063; iii:111). It is this sentiment that accounts for
the fundamental goodness of existence. Likewise it is this sentiment – along with those that
flow from it – that enable us to overcome evil, when we are able to overcome it. We do not
overcome evil by the coolness of reason. Reason pushes us toward a posture of detachment;
sentiment attaches us to God, Creation, and our fellow sentient beings. It is from sentiment,
Rousseau maintains, that we develop a concern for the well-being of others, culminating – in
a well-ordered society – in love of the patria, which Rousseau described as “a hundred times
more ardent and delightful than that of a mistress” (PE, iii:255; iii:151). But, in order to stay
in touch with the sentiment of existence, we must not allow ourselves to be consumed by
the norms and manners of civilized society. A part of us must remain anchored in our past, in
the prelapsarian era of our history, prior to the development of reason, inequality, and amour
propre – prior, that is, to the emergence of the distinction between moral good and evil. If we
can do this, we have a chance to reassemble the constituent elements of civilization, such that
we might reclaim the harmony inherent in the state of nature which must now be constituted
out of the crooked timber of modern societies.
Rousseau and our problem with evil

There may no longer be any such thing as evil, at least not if some contemporary philosophers
and neuroscientists have their way. The elements of evil that have brought it to the verge of
banishment are its immateriality (which is the particular bête noire of the neuroscientists) and its
totality (which worries philosophers). Here, we are speaking of what we might call metaphysical
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evil, understood as an immaterial, malevolent force. This understanding of evil, which I think it
is fair to call the ordinary understanding, implies that individuals – when they act with malevo-
lent disregard for the welfare of others – have somehow been overtaken by a metaphysical force.
From the neuroscientists, we are offered evidence that evil is better understood as a physiologi-
cal rather than a metaphysical phenomenon (Rosenbaum, 2011). And, from the philosophers,
we are confronted with a litany of dangers that follow from construing evil as wholly mon-
strous and, therefore, wholly foreign to ordinary human interaction. Evil, they argue, is best
understood as a social construct applied to behavior antecedently deemed to have transgressed
conventional boundaries (Bernstein, 2002). When we construe evil as metaphysical, there is a
perilous consolation with which we may be tempted to comfort ourselves, inasmuch as that
construct allows us to distance ourselves from evil, to sequester it as something alien, an abnor-
mality against which we are able to cast ourselves as “normal.”
Hillel Steiner defines evil acts as “wrong acts that are pleasurable for their doers” (2002, 189).
This restrictive use of evil limits it to only the most diabolical of actions. Steiner’s definition is
what we referred to as the “narrow conception” of evil earlier, and it presents at least two diffi-
culties. It justifies (1) complacency with respect to ourselves and (2) eliminationism with respect
to adversaries. It accomplishes this by placing the phenomenon it is meant to name outside of
the bounds of human comprehension. In fact, conveying inscrutability is part of the raison d’être
of the narrow conception to of evil. If we are motivated by a desire to believe that our world is
governed by reason, we will need a category for that which we could not otherwise assimilate
to a rational universe. For that we create a box, a repository, to which we can then assign a label
(evil) and use for anything that we cannot explain or (more dangerously, as Nietzsche empha-
sized) prefer not to understand. This conception of evil satisfies the desire to distance ourselves
from that which we cannot comfortably comprehend and to preserve a sense that the world is
ordered. It names that which is unassimilable.
The existence of metaphysical evil exempts us from much.13 We no longer, for example,
need to think about – much less actually address – what might be causing the behavior that we
have decided to deal with instead by designating as “evil.” Indeed, labeling behavior as evil in
the metaphysical sense acts as a substitute for thinking about it. And, perhaps more critically,
the designation of evil allows the designator to distance herself from the various ways she may
be implicated in the phenomenon at issue. Once evil has been characterized as monstrous, it
becomes all too easy to imagine oneself as immunized from it by virtue of one’s “normal” or
nondefective character. On the other hand, when deployed against an adversary, the narrow
conception of evil conjures a moral imperative to respond with overwhelming force, in fact to
destroy. This conception of evil creates an incentive to put more and more things into our box,
because we want to justify a policy of violence and extermination, which is all that can be done
about those things we have adjudged metaphysically evil.
None of this is particularly Rousseauean. For Rousseau, evil was always very close to us. It
was lurking in the background of every good thing we did. It came to the surface every time we
acted deceptively, failed to act when circumstances demanded it, or privileged our own good
to the common interest. Conversely, because Rousseau did not conceive of evil in the narrow,
totalizing sense, there were no monsters in his moral universe, no one born inherently evil and
no one beyond redemption. Evil can never be the exclusive or final verdict on a person’s char-
acter. No one can be dismissed as possessed by an alien or diabolical force, nor can anyone be
described as inhuman or a monster. This is at odds with the way evil is most commonly invoked
in contemporary public discourse and philosophy. We tend now to describe as evil only those
who embody the very worst of humanity. This conception of evil allows whoever invokes
it to distance herself from the phenomenon she is condemning. But this was not Rousseau’s
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conception. Rousseau’s account of evil disallows the complacency that accompanies detach-
ment. The capacity for evil, on the Rousseauean account, is always lurking in all of us and
emerges every time we subordinate the welfare of another to our own.
That Rousseau’s account of evil escapes some of the problems associated with contemporary
theorizations of evil is an advantage. Before concluding, however, we should also acknowledge
one serious concern, not so much with Rousseau’s specific account of evil but rather with
his broader attitude toward moral corruption. Rousseau, in his moral and political writings,
tended to be extremely judgmental about corruption and vice. He was not particularly tolerant
of human frailty and imperfection, leaning often toward an all or nothing approach, in which
political life in particular must be totally pure or else irredeemable. Though it would require a
different kind of essay, it is worth thinking about how demanding too much from the world
might itself furnish a justification for evil. Fair or not, Rousseau’s political thought was deployed
in favor of the Terror in France, an event now frequently invoked as a paradigmatic example of
evil and one, it must be acknowledged, motivated in large part by a quest for purity. This is not
the place to assess the Revolutionaries’ appropriation of Rousseau, but we might use the Terror
as a reminder that evil can emerge equally from an overzealous pursuit of the common good
as it can from the privileging of selfish interests. Rousseau had his guard up against the various
ways in which personal ambition and political usurpation could produce evil consequences,
but he was less attuned to the ways in which evil may result from the overzealous pursuit of its
eradication, from a rigid insistence on moral purity and from a politics that demands the same.
Notes
1 References to Rousseau are, first, to Œuvres complètes Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1959–1996 and,
second, to The Collected Writings of Rousseau, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1990–2009.
I have used the following abbreviations: C = Confessions; D = Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues;
DAS = Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, also referred to as the first Discourse; DI = Discourse on the Origin and
Foundations of Inequality Among Men, also referred to as the second Discourse; E = Emile; L = Essay on the Origin
of Languages; LB = Letter to Beaumont; LF = Letter to Franquières, 15 January 1769; LM = Letters Written
from the Mountain; LV = Letter to Voltaire, 18 August 1756; NH = Julie or the New Heloise; PE = Discourse on
Political Economy; O = Observations by Jean-Jacques Rousseau of Geneva On the Reply Made to his Discourse;
PN = Preface to Narcissus; R = Reveries of the Solitary Walker; SC = On the Social Contract.
2 See also LB, iv:935–6; ix:28 and E, iv:322; xiii:225.
3 They “spoke about savage man and they described Civil man.” (DI, iii:132; iii:19)
4 Prior to Rousseau, Neiman writes, there were only two options: either there was no such thing as evil
or there was nothing to be done about it (2002, 42).
5 Cladis calls this “Enlightenment optimism,” which he distinguishes from Augustinian optimism. While
Augustine held that creation is fundamentally good, Rousseau’s optimism, by virtue of locating sole
responsibility for evil in the voluntary actions of human beings, maintains that “‘All will be good
someday’ – that is, when even the human will shall be healed through education and other reformed
social institutions” (1995, 194). For Augustine this kind of redemption could arrive only upon death.
6 In the Letter to Beaumont, Rousseau says that this is what the vicar has “explained best” (iv:941; ix:31–2).
7 “It cannot be said that it is an evil in itself to . . . carry an enameled box. But it is a great evil to attach
some importance to such finery” (O, iii:51; iii:49).
8 Rousseau attributes evil to the drive for recognition and distinction. His account does not leave room
for evil as a genetic defect or inborn psychological pathology.
9 In every society there is a general will composed of the interests associates hold in common, i.e., as
citizens. Rousseau opposes this set of common interests to the private interest that an associate may have
“as a man” (SC, iii:363; iv:140). In his political theory, Rousseau makes the general will the sole basis
for the legitimate exercise of sovereign power.
10 Rousseau’s view presages Kant’s view that evil privileging self-interest over the moral law. Rousseau’s
view is also like Kant’s in that evil is not reserved for only the worst sorts of actors or actions. Evil
describes merely failing to do good.
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Jason Neidleman
11 For a discussion of this idea and the many ways in which it recurs in Rousseau’s corpus, see Chapter 5
of Starobinski (1993).
12 One exception could be the tightly circumscribed education described in Emile, which is designed to
insulate the pupil, the eponymous Emile, from social influences that might otherwise corrupt him.This
education will be “purely negative.” In consists “not at all in teaching virtue or truth but in securing the
heart from vice and the mind from error.” (E iv:323; xiii:226) Emile’s amour propre will be developed
very deliberately, on the basis of that which he has in common with his fellow human beings rather
than on the basis of that which distinguishes him.
13 In Radical Evil, Bernstein writes, “we must not see evil as a fixed ontological feature of the human
condition,” because that would mean that there is nothing to be done about it (2002, 229).
References
Bernstein, R.J. 2002. Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Calder, T. 2013. “The Concept of Evil.” Accessed November 21, 2016. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/
concept-evil.
Cladis, M.S. 1995. “Tragedy and Theodicy: A Meditation on Rousseau and Moral Evil.” The Journal of
Religion 75(2): 181–99.
Neiman, S. 2002. Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Rosenbaum, R. 2011. “Does Evil Exist? Neuroscientists Say No.” Accessed March 15, 2016. www.slate.
com/articles/health_and_science/the_spectator/2011/09/does_evil_exist_neuroscientists_say_no_.
html.
Rousseau, J-J. 1959. The Collected Writings of Rousseau. Edited by Roger Masters and Christopher Kelly.
14 vols. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.
Rousseau, J-J. 1959 Œuvres complètes. 5 vols. Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
Starobinski, J. 1993. Blessings in Disguise; Or, The Morality of Evil. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Steiner, H. 2002. “Calibrating Evil.” Monist 85(2): 183–93.
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8
KANT
The evil in all of us
Matthé Scholten
In contemporary English, we commonly distinguish between merely bad or wrong actions on

the one hand and evil actions on the other, where the attribute “evil” is understood to apply
only to the worst kind of wrongdoing and the worst kind of wrongdoers. In keeping with
this distinction, the prototypes of evil that readily come to mind are the serial killer, the mass
murderer, the terrorist, the child molester, and the rapist. Contemporary accounts of evil try
to capture the distinction between wrong and evil present in ordinary language by specify-
ing additional conditions that make an “ordinary” wrong action evil: evil actions are morally
wrong actions that are extremely wrong, incomprehensible, or performed from particularly base
motives. On these accounts, evil is essentially “wrongdoing plus.”
Evil may seem such a fascinating topic partly because of its extremity. For those who are
fascinated by the topic for this reason, reading Kant may turn out to be a disappointment. Since
Kant offers us an analysis not only of evil but also of “radical” evil, many have thought that his
theory of evil deals with the most extreme forms of wrongdoing. This is a serious misunder-
standing. By means of the adjective “radical,” Kant refers to the source of evil (in Latin, radix
means “root”) rather than to the most extreme forms of evil. Moreover, the German word böse
(evil) did not yet have any connotation of extremity in Kant’s time. Perhaps surprisingly to
present-day readers, Kant uses the terms “morally evil” and “morally wrong” synonymously and
for him the oppositional pair of good (gut) and evil (böse) fulfills the role that the oppositional
pair of morally right and morally wrong does for us today. For Kant, evil is thus nothing beyond
“ordinary” moral wrongdoing.1
Kant’s most influential and well-known treatment of the topic is no doubt his discussion of
radical evil in the first part of his 1793 Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. This text was
first published in 1792 as a separate essay in the Berlinische Monatschrift and immediately aroused
great controversy. In a famous letter to Herder, Goethe complained that Kant had “disgracefully
slobbered on his philosopher’s cloak with the shameful stain of radical evil, after it had taken him
a life time to cleanse it from many a wicked prejudice, so that even Christians would be enticed
to kiss its hem” (Goethe 1964: 536:5). I will try to show that Kant did not submit to Christian
dogmatism by the end of his career and that he developed an entirely secular account of evil,
remaining true to his Enlightenment ideals.
Kant’s interest in evil was first aroused by public discussions in the wake of the 1755 Lisbon
earthquake. Where many understood the earthquake as a punishment of God for the sins of
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modern life, Kant wrote three essays in the Köningsberger weekly paper in which he attempted
to explain the occurrence of the earthquake as a result of the movement of subterranean gasses.
In his 1791 essay On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy, he approaches this topic
from the other side, explaining why all theoretical attempts to reconcile human suffering in this
world with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient and morally perfect good are doomed
to fail. Kant also dared to give a secular interpretation of the Bible’s representation of evil. In his
1786 essay Conjectural Beginning of Human History, he ventures to go on what he calls a “pleasure
trip” through the biblical book Genesis, providing us with a philosophical interpretation of the
Fall in Rousseauean spirit.
In this chapter, I will focus on Kant’s systematic account of evil in his major works on moral
philosophy. I start by reconstructing Kant’s conception of evil as a property of actions and per-
sons and then discuss his account of radical evil in the Religion.
Kant’s criticism of the distinction between natural

and moral evil
Kant’s most elaborate attempt to define good and evil can be found in the second chapter of the
analytic of pure practical reason of the Critique of Practical Reason (KpV 5: 57–71).2 The chapter
can be seen as a criticism of an influential distinction regarding evil that goes back at least to
Augustine. This is the distinction between moral evil (malum morale) and natural evil (malum
physicum). According to this distinction, moral evil comprises morally wrong actions and vicious
character traits as well as bad events and states of affairs that result from intentional or negligent
actions of human agents. Natural evil, by contrast, comprises bad events and states of affairs that
do not result from intentional or negligent actions of human agents. Whereas earthquakes, hur-
ricanes, diseases, and epidemics provide notable examples of natural evil, moral evil is exempli-
fied by actions such as murder, theft, and deceit.
Although natural evils are explicitly defined as not being produced by the intentional or
negligent actions of human agents, they are still referred to as “evils” in this tradition because
they are seen as the side effects of the intentional actions of a nonhuman or divine agent, that
is, of God. In this view, God could not prevent bringing about natural evils insofar as they are
the unavoidable byproducts of the greater good of creation. In the attempt to reconcile human
suffering with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect God, proponents
of this view commonly interpreted natural evil as a deserved divine punishment for human sins.
It is to these people that Voltaire (2000: 99) in his Poem on the Lisbon Disaster cries out:
And can you then impute a sinful deed

To babes who on their mother’s bosoms bleed?
Was then more vice in fallen Lisbon found,
Then Paris, where voluptuous joys abound?
In line with his response to the Lisbon earthquake and his rejection of philosophical attempts
at theodicy, Kant rejects the traditional distinction between natural and moral evil. Where “the
[Latin] expressions boni and mali contain an ambiguity,” he notes, “the German language has the
good fortune to possess expressions which do not allow this difference to be overlooked. . . . For
bonum it has das Gute and das Wohl, for malum it has das Böse and das Übel” (KpV 5: 59). In other
words, whereas the term boni is ambivalent between the good and well-being (or the pleasur-
able), the term mali is ambivalent between evil and what we may provisionally call ill-being (or
the displeasurable). Where Kant’s predecessors understood the two senses of the Latin mali as
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denoting two different subclasses of evil (i.e., natural and moral evil), Kant reserves the adjective
“evil” exclusively for morally wrong actions and vicious character traits. Similarly, he reserves
the adjective “good” in its moral sense for morally right actions and virtuous character traits.
To be sure, Kant often retains the adjectives “moral” and “morally” in combination with the
noun or adjective “evil,” but he does so merely to remind his readers that he is not referring to
ill-being or the displeasurable.
In brief, Kant holds that evil refers only to things that are under our voluntary control. His
example of a Stoic in pain provides a vivid illustration of this point:
One may always laugh at the Stoic who in the most intense pains of gout cried out:
Pain, however you torment me I will still never admit that you are something evil
[malum]!; nevertheless, he was correct. He felt that the pain was an ill, and his cry
betrayed that; but he had no cause whatever to grant that any evil attached to him
because of it, for the pain did not in the least diminish the worth of his person but only
the worth of his condition.
(KpV 5: 60)
Evil and ill-being require different methods of explanation. If an event or states of affairs is to
count as evil, it must be explicable in terms of reasons and intentions of agents and evaluated in
light of practical laws. Ill-being must instead be explained in terms of preceding causes accord-
ing to natural laws. Displeasurable as his pain may be, the Stoic is thus right to see that it is does
not constitute an evil.
Yet Kant makes a further point based on the example. Since Kant’s contemporaries under-
stood natural evils as the effects of the intentional actions of God, it was not far-fetched for
them to interpret the Stoic’s pain as a divine punishment for past wrongdoing. Opposing this
interpretation, Kant claims that the pain gives the Stoic “no cause whatever to grant that any
evil attached to him” and that it “does not in the least diminish the worth of his person.” On
Kant’s analysis, then, the Stoic should interpret his pain as a consequence of his bodily condition
rather than as an intentionally punishment for past wrongdoing. What is true about the Stoic
holds for the citizens of Lisbon as well. On Kant’s account of evil, the Lisbon earthquake should
not be understood as an intentionally imposed divine punishment for human sins but rather as a
consequence of preceding causes in conjunction with the laws of nature.
Evil actions and evil persons

While the second chapter of the analytic of the second Critique can be read as a criticism of the
distinction between natural and moral evil, Kant’s criticism is more explicitly directed against
teleological accounts of morality. Teleological accounts of morality define the deontic status of
an action (i.e., whether it is obligatory, permissible, or wrong) in terms of the end (telos) served
by the action, or the consequences it brings about. Although Bentham and Mill developed
utilitarianism as a full-blown normative ethical theory only after the publication of the Critique
of Practical Reason, it is helpful for contemporary readers to take utilitarianism as an example of a
teleological account of morality.
For Kant, good and evil are moral categories, whereas well-being and ill-being are natural
categories. Although there are several analogies between these two oppositional pairs, shifting
from the one to the other category amounts to making a category mistake. In stark contrast
with this picture, utilitarians equate good with maximum aggregate well-being (or pleasure)
and evil with the absence of this state and hence with ill-being (or displeasure). That means that
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utilitarians conceive of good and evil primarily as properties of states of affairs. These properties
pertain to actions and persons only in a derivative way: actions are good or evil (i.e., morally
right or wrong) and persons are good or evil (i.e., virtuous or vicious) insofar as they produce,
or are disposed to produce, well-being or ill-being respectively.
According to Kant, attempts to derive a moral criteria for action from an independently
existing good can yield at most “practical precepts” but never practical laws (KpV 5: 62; GMS 4:
416). This is because whether an action promotes well-being or ill-being is always an empirical
question. Since the answer to this question depends on the particularities of the circumstances
of the action at hand, teleological accounts of morality can never provide us with an indubitable
answer to the question what we ought to do. Kant therefore proposes to reverse the method.
Rather than first identifying good with well-being and evil with ill-being and subsequently
attempting to derive moral prescripts for action, moral theory should proceed precisely in the
opposite direction: “the concept of good and evil must not be determined before the moral law . . . but
only . . . after it and by means of it” (KpV 5: 62–3).
It bears to note Kant does not use the term “moral law” as shorthand for a rational procedure
rather than as a reference to a codex of laws of the form “thou shalt not x.” The principle of this
procedure is, of course, the categorical imperative, of which the so-called Formula of Universal
Law is no doubt the most famous formulation. It runs as follows:
FUL: “Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it
become a universal law” (GMS 4: 421).
The categorical imperative primarily applies to maxims. I will say more about the notion of
maxims in a minute. First note that if good and evil is defined by reference to the categorical
imperative, and if the categorical imperative applies primarily to maxims, the properties of good
and evil must also pertain primarily to maxims. Indeed, Kant claims that “good or evil always
signifies a reference to the will,” and then proceeds to explain,
good or evil is, strictly speaking, referred to actions, not to the person’s state of feeling,
and if anything is to be good or evil absolutely . . . it would be only the way of acting,
the maxim of the will, and consequently the acting person himself as a good or evil
human being, that could be so called, but not a thing.
(KpV 5: 60)
While once more making explicit that good and evil are properties that pertain strictly speaking
to actions or persons rather than to things or states of affairs, Kant now adds the important point
that in their primordial sense good and evil are properties of maxims.
The passage suggests that maxims bear close connection to actions and persons. How exactly
are these notions connected? Let us start by taking a closer look at the notion of a maxim. Kant
defines a maxim as “the subjective principle of volition” (GMS 4: 400n.) or also as “the subjec-
tive principle of acting” (GMS 4: 420n.). In the passage quoted above, Kant provides us with
a further specification of this definition by equating “the maxim of the will” with “the way of
acting.” A maxim is thus a principle according to which we act that describes not merely what
we do but also how we do it.3 Although it is difficult to fit all Kant’s examples of maxims into
a single mold, the formal structure of maxims is roughly as follows (see Allison 1990: 89–90):
If I am in circumstances of the type C, then I perform an action of the type A
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Kant
The maxim of a false promise is no doubt Kant’s most famous example: “When I believe myself
to be in need of money I shall borrow money and promise to repay it, even though I know that
this will never happen” (GMS 4: 422).
Let us take this maxim through the categorical imperative procedure. The Formula of
Universal Law says that it is permissible to act on a maxim M just when we can will M and at
the same time will M as a universal law. Conversely, it says that it is impermissible to act on
a maxim M just when we cannot will M and at the same time will M as a universal law. Kant
claims that one cannot will the maxim of the false promise and at the same time will it as a
universal law because:
the universality of a law that everyone, when he believes himself to be in need,

could promise whatever he pleases with the intention of not keeping it would
make the promise and the end one might have in it itself impossible, since no one
would believe what was promised him but would laugh at all such expressions as
vain pretenses.
(GMS 4: 422)
In other words, I cannot will the maxim of a false promise and at the same time will it as a
universal law, because, if I were to do so, I would want to acquire ready cash by making a false
promise and at the same time want a world to exist in which false promises are impossible,
which amounts to a practical contradiction. It is therefore not permitted to act on the maxim.
In this way, we have found the criteria for good and evil action. An action A is good (i.e.,
morally permissible) in circumstances C if and only if A conforms to a maxim M and it is possi-
ble to will M and at the same time will M as a universal law. Conversely, an action A is evil (i.e.,
morally wrong) in circumstances C if and only if A conforms to a maxim M and it is impossible
to will M and at the same time will M as a universal law.
From here it is but a small step to the criteria for good and evil personhood. Note first that
there is a structural similarity between maxims and dispositions. Like maxims, dispositions can
be represented by means of a hypothetical sentence of the form “in circumstances of the type
C, an event of type E occurs.” By calling a glass “fragile,” for example, we attribute to it a
disposition that can be expressed as follows: in circumstances in which the glass is struck, it will
break. Agents, too, have dispositions. I have the disposition to fall into the water if you push
me from the edge of the pool, to mention but one example. But I also have the disposition to
arrive late whenever I have an appointment early in the morning. This disposition is a character
trait. Unlike the former disposition, the latter disposition or character trait is under my voluntary
control. Let us therefore call it an attitude. An attitude is a disposition that is under one’s vol-
untary control in the sense that, if one were to adopt a different maxim, the disposition would
at least gradually alter. Thus, I can change my disposition to arrive late whenever I have an
appointment early in the morning by adopting the following maxim: “If my alarm clock rings,
I will get out of bed immediately.”
Based on this structural similarity, good and evil personhood can be defined in the following
way: a character trait is good (i.e., morally virtuous) inasmuch as it expresses a maxim that passes
the categorical imperative procedure and evil (i.e., morally vicious) inasmuch as it expresses a
maxim that fails to pass this procedure. Thus, if a person is disposed to refrain from making false
promises whenever she needs ready cash, we call her “trustworthy” and appraise her attitude as
a virtue. By contrast, if a person is disposed to make false promises whenever she needs ready
cash, we call her “untrustworthy” and appraise her attitude as a vice.
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Matthé Scholten
Radical evil
Kant’s account of radical evil in the Religion with the Realm of Reason Alone is the most famous
part of his theory of evil, but at the same time it is also the part that is most often misunderstood.
One reason for this is that Hannah Arendt appropriated the term “radical evil” in her attempt to
give an account of the evils perpetrated by the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. In
The Origins of Totalitarianism, she claims that in the twentieth century evil “became the unpunish-
able, unforgivable absolute evil which could no longer be understood and explained by the evil
motives of self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power, and cowardice” (Arendt
1973: 459). This combination of being unpunishable, unforgivable, and incomprehensible, she
asserts in The Human Condition, “is the true hallmark of those offenses which, since Kant, we call
‘radical evil’” (Arendt 1998: 241). As will become clear in this section, Arendt is wrong when
she claims that Kant’s notion of radical evil refers to such extreme forms of moral wrongdoing.
As I have already indicated in the introduction to this chapter, Kant uses the term “radical evil”
to refer to the root or source of evil rather than to extreme forms of evil. “This evil is radical,” he
explains, “since it corrupts the ground of all maxims” (RGV 6: 37). Thus far, we have inquired
into the meaning of the term “evil” as a property of maxims, attitudes, and actions. Kant’s account
of radical evil in the Religion shifts the focus one level up. We could say that it is a transcendental
investigation into the conditions for the possibility of evil maxims. Its main question can accord-
ingly be formulated as follows: how is it possible that human agents adopt evil maxims?
One could wonder why this poses any problem at all. To understand why the answer to
the question is not trivial, we must take a brief look at Kant’s account of moral motivation. A
basic premise of Kant’s account of moral motivation is that the moral law is a sufficient incen-
tive of the will (GMS 4: 419; KpV 5: 19, 71, 72, 75, 79, 88). We can understand this premise
as saying that, if the moral law were our sole incentive, (objective) justifying reasons would
automatically be (subjective) motivating reasons for us; that is, we would always do the right
thing for the right reasons.
If the moral law is a sufficient incentive of the will, the deviation of our maxims from the
moral law cannot possibly be “the consequence of the lack of a moral incentive” but instead it
must be “the consequence of a real and opposite determination of the power of choice” (RGV
6: 23n.). This sets Kant apart from a long philosophical tradition in which evil is understood as a
privation or a lack of the good. Kant also parts ways with another long philosophical tradition of
identifying our sensuous nature as the source of evil: “The ground of this evil cannot be placed,
as is commonly done, in the sensuous nature of the human being, and in the natural inclinations
originating from it” (RGV 6: 34; see also 21, 32). If human agents are to be morally responsible
for evil, the source of evil must lie in freedom itself.
Kant introduces the concept of a propensity [Hang] to evil to explain how it is possible that we
adopt evil maxims. A propensity is defined as “the subjective ground of the possibility of an inclina-
tion,” where an inclination is defined as a “habitual desire” (RGV 6: 28). A propensity to evil, in
particular, is “the subjective ground of the possibility of the deviation of maxims from the moral law”
(RGV 6: 29). Let us try to understand this. In a footnote, Kant illustrates the concept of a propensity
by means of an example of a propensity to intoxicants. Such a propensity, he claims, may be assumed
even on the part of primitive people who are not acquainted with alcohol or other intoxicants:
Although many of them have no acquaintance at all with intoxication, and hence
absolutely no desire for the things that produce it, let them try these things but once,
and there is aroused in them an almost inextinguishable desire for them.
(RGV 6: 28n.)
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Similar considerations hold for the propensity to evil. Imagine that you never strayed from the
precepts of morality and never felt the desire to do so. If you happen to be a saint, just imagine
yourself to be as you actually are. Even if you are a saint, you may nonetheless be susceptible
to acquiring a habitual desire (i.e., an inclination) to disregard moral requirements. Such a pro-
pensity can be attributed to you just when it is true that, if you were to disregard the precepts
of morality once, the thought of doing so again would thereafter present itself as a tempting
option to you in a range of cases. If this counterfactual statement is true, we can attribute to you
a propensity to evil.
On this analysis, saying that a person is radically evil (in the technical sense of the term) does not
amount to saying that she is a vicious person or that she engages in moral wrongdoing on a first-
order level: “An action contrary to law and a propensity to such contrariety, i.e. vice, do not always
originate from it [from the propensity of evil]” (RGV 6: 37). Rather, it amounts to saying that
under certain hypothetical conditions the person is prepared to let nonmoral considerations trump
moral ones. Such a person’s second-order commitment to morality is thus not unconditional.
Sometimes, Kant seems to suggest that, owing to this half-hearted commitment to morality,
it is impossible for us to act for the right reasons, as a consequence of which moral worth and
moral virtue would be fully out of our reach. Yet I believe this cannot be his considered view.
The reason is that just as we can overcome our propensity to intoxicants and resist the tempta-
tion of an alcoholic beverage, so too “it must still be possible to overcome this evil” (RGV 6: 37)
and to act for the right reasons despite being tempted to do otherwise. As Kant puts it succinctly,
“an evil heart can coexist with a will which in is general good” (RGV 6: 37).
Kant claims that our propensity to evil is both natural and innate [angeboren]. At the same
time, he does not get tired of explaining that this does not mean that the propensity to evil is
a necessary feature of the human species or that it is somehow inherited from our ancestors.
The Christian doctrine of original sin, he claims, is “the most inappropriate” way of repre-
senting the origin of evil (RGV 6: 40). The propensity to evil is called “natural” and “innate”
only in the sense that it is “antecedent to every deed that falls within the scope of the senses”
(RGV 6: 21) and “antecedent to every use of freedom given in experience” (RGV 6: 22).
The reason for this is clear. If we want to arrive at a reasoned decision what to do, we must
weigh our reasons for action and consider individual maxims against the background of our
fundamental commitments and values. That means that our flawed commitment to morality
logically precedes the adoption of any particular maxim. For this reason, we are always already
affected by our propensity to evil.
Kant asserts that the propensity to evil is “natural” in yet another sense, namely in the sense
that “the propensity to evil among human beings is universal” (RGV 6: 30; see also 21, 32). In
other words, he claims that the propensity to evil is common to us all. With Timmons (1994)
we may call this the universality thesis. In the Religion, Kant is reluctant to give a proof of this
thesis, noting that “we can spare ourselves the formal proof in view of the multitude of woe-
ful examples that the experience of human deeds parades before us” (RGV 6: 32–3). He does,
however, provide us with some clues as to how the proof should look like.
These clues are highly contradictory. Sometimes, Kant claims that the truth of the univer-
sality thesis “transpires from anthropological research” (RGV 6: 25) and may be presupposed
on the basis of “the cognition we have of the human being through experience” (RGV 6:
32). At other occasions, he argues that such “experiential demonstrations” are insufficient to
establish the truth of the universality thesis and that its truth “must be cognized a priori from
the concept of evil” (RGV 6: 35; see also 39n.). Scholars have tried to lend Kant a helping
hand by reconstructing the proof. Just as Kant’s clues are ambivalent, so too these scholars are
divided on the question by which method the proof should proceed. Whereas some scholars
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attempt to develop an a priori argument for the universality thesis (Allison 2002; Morgan
2005), others try to justify it based on empirical premises about the nature of human beings
(Wood 1999: 283–90; Anderson-Gold 2001; Sussman 2005).
We have to face an important question at this point. If our propensity to evil is natural and
innate in the sense that it logically precedes any particular use of our freedom in time, how can
we possibly be responsible for it? Obviously our propensity to evil cannot be a mere disposition.
If it were a mere disposition, we would not be responsible for it any more than I am responsible
for my disposition to fall into the water if you push me from the edge of the pool. Kant accord-
ingly observes that “this subjective ground must, in turn, itself always be a deed of freedom,” and
he explains, “for otherwise the use or abuse of the human being’s power of choice with respect
to the moral law could not be imputed to him, nor could the good or evil in him be called
‘moral’” (RGV 6: 21). Instead of in a natural disposition, the propensity of evil must therefore
lie “in a rule that the power of choice itself produces for the exercise of its freedom, i.e., in a
maxim” (RGV 6: 21). In the terminology introduced in the previous section, we can say that the
propensity to evil is not so much a second-order disposition as a second-order attitude.
Kant introduces the doctrine of the “intelligible act” (intelligible Tat) to explain how this
second-order attitude toward moral considerations can be under voluntary control (RGV 6: 31).
Although I believe this strategy is ultimately misguided, I will here attempt to present it in
its best light. Kant’s exposition of the intelligible deed relies on his theory of transcendental
idealism. According to transcendental idealism, we can consider things in two different ways.
When we consider a thing as appearance, it appears to us as subject to the forms of intuition
(i.e., space and time) and the categories of the understanding (e.g., substance and causality).
When we consider it as thing in itself, we consider the thing as abstracted from these condi-
tions. What holds for things holds for agents as well. Analogous to the distinction between
appearance and thing in itself, Kant commonly draws a distinction between an agent’s “empiri-
cal character” and her “intelligible character” (A538–41/B566–9). Our empirical character is
subject to the conditions of time and causality and consists of our first-order dispositions and
attitudes. Our intelligible character, on the other hand, is not subject to the conditions of time
and causality and is determined by our second-order attitude toward moral considerations.
We can now turn to the notion of an intelligible act. An intelligible act denotes a timeless
act by which we choose our intelligible character, and in virtue of which our second-order atti-
tude toward moral considerations is under our voluntary control. Since such an intelligible act
is not subject to the conditions of time and causality, it is “inscrutable” and withstands all pos-
sible explanation (RGV 6: 21, 21n., 43, 44). If you consider your actions from this perspective,
it is true of each of your evil actions that you could have omitted it (RGV 6: 41). You could
have omitted the evil (i.e., morally wrong) action in the following sense: (1) if you had chosen
to commit yourself unconditionally to morality, you would have had only virtuous attitudes;
and (2) if you had had only virtuous attitudes, you would not have performed the evil action.
Importantly, these two counterfactual statements can be true even if, considered as appearance,
your evil action was necessary given your empirical character and the circumstances of the
action in conjunction with the laws of nature.4
Stages of evil and predispositions to the good

The development of the propensity to evil has three stages. Kant refers to these stages as frailty,
impurity, and depravity. The first stage, the frailty of human nature, consists in our susceptibility
to weakness of will. We are weak-willed when we fail to act according to our own best judg-
ment about what we all-things-considered ought to do. Our frailty consists in our regular failure
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to act in the morally required way despite our correct judgment about what we all-things-
considered ought to do and our adoption of the right maxim. While objectively speaking the
moral law provides us with a sufficient reason for acting in accordance with the maxim, in such
cases the motive of duty is “subjectively . . . the weaker [incentive] (in comparison with inclina-
tion) whenever the maxim is to be followed” (RGV 6: 29).
The impurity of the human heart consists in our propensity to adopt the right maxims partly
for the wrong reasons. Suppose that I adopt a maxim of the form “whenever someone is in
need, I do whatever I can to help her” for the reason that helping others gives me a feeling of
satisfaction.5 In that case my heart is impure. “Although the maxim is good with respect to its
object (the intended compliance with the law) and perhaps even powerful enough in practice,”
Kant notes, the will has not “adopted the law alone as its sufficient incentive but, on the contrary,
often (and perhaps always) needs still other incentives besides it in order to determine the power
of choice for what duty requires” (RGV 6: 30). Having an impure heart, we tend to act in
accordance with duty but at the same time fail to act from duty. One problem with noble, yet
impure motivations is that they will lead us to do the wrong thing in a range of circumstances.
For example, my maxim (adopted for the stipulated reasons) may lead me to help a bank robber
carry a heavy safe to the getaway car.
Finally, the depravity of the human heart consists in “the propensity of the power of choice to
maxims that subordinate the incentives of the moral law to others (not moral ones)” (RGV 6: 30),
that is, in our “propensity to adopt evil maxims” (RGV 6: 29). Given that the moral law gives us
a sufficient reason to adopt the right maxim, we can adopt evil maxims only if our second-order
maxim governing the adoption of first-order maxims makes compliance with the moral law condi-
tional on nonmoral considerations. Thus, our heart is depraved if our second-order attitude toward
moral considerations expresses a maxim of the following form: “I will adopt maxims in accord-
ance with the moral law unless doing so would be too much at my expense.” A person whose
second-order attitude toward morality expresses such a maxim may never have acted immorally.
Anticipating modern debates about moral luck, Kant however notes that the person has never
acted immorally merely because she was lucky never to have found herself in circumstances where
doing the right thing requires substantial self-sacrifice (RGV 6: 38).
Having discussed the stages of evil, let us now turn to our natural predispositions of the good.
Kant’s discussion of our natural predispositions to the good once more confirms that the root of
evil lies in our second-order attitude toward moral considerations rather than in a natural dis-
position. Human beings have a threefold predisposition to the good: a predisposition to animal-
ity, to humanity, and to personality. Each predisposition consists in a susceptibility to a certain
kind of incentive. Our predisposition to animality consists in our susceptibility to the desire for
food, drink, sex, and social community; our predisposition to humanity in our susceptibility
to the desire to gain recognition in the eyes of others; and our predisposition to personality in
our susceptibility to the incentive provided by the moral law (RGV 6: 26–8). Kant commonly
subsumes the former two types of desires under the header of “self-love,” contrasting the motive
of self-love with the motive of duty.
Importantly, Kant emphasizes that all three dispositions are conducive to morality: “all these
predispositions in the human being are not only (negatively) good (they do not resist the moral
law) but they are also predispositions to the good (they demand compliance with it)” (RGV 6:
28). Our susceptibility to the desire for food, drink, and sex is good inasmuch as it leads us to
strife for self-preservation and the preservation of the species; our susceptibility to the desire to
be esteemed by others is good inasmuch as it leads us to develop our talents and capacities; and
our susceptibility to being moved by respect for the moral law is good inasmuch as it leads us
to strive for moral perfection.
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Just as the root of evil does not lie in our susceptibility to the motive of self-love but in our
half-hearted commitment to morality, so too an agent is not evil on a first-order level because
she is motivated by a desire for food, sex, or social recognition. As long as the gratification of
these desires remains within the limits imposed by the moral law, being motivated in this way
is a good thing. Agents are properly called evil or vicious only if they are disposed to act on the
motive of self-love at the expense of morality. As Kant puts it,
the difference, whether the human being is good or evil, must not lie in the difference
between the incentives that he incorporates into his maxim (not in the material of the
maxim) but in their subordination (in the form of the maxim): which of the two he makes
the condition of the other.
(RGV 6: 36)
Subordinating the moral incentive to the desire for food and sex results in the vices of
gluttony and lust, whereas subordinating it to the desire for social recognition results in the
vices of envy, ingratitude, and joy in others’ misfortunes (Schadenfreude) (RGV 6: 27).
Kant’s exclusion of the diabolical will

A direct consequence of the idea that evil consists in the subordination of the motive of duty to
the motive of self-love is that human beings never wholly defy the moral law and choose evil
simply for evil’s sake. In the Groundwork, Kant insists that even in our moral transgressions “we
acknowledge the validity of the categorical imperative” and merely “take the liberty of making
an exception to it for ourselves (or just for this once) to the advantage of our inclination” (GMS
4: 424). In the Religion, he similarly claims that “the human being (even the worst) does not
repudiate the moral law, whatever his maxims, in rebellious attitude (by revoking obedience
to it). The law rather imposes itself on him irresistibly, because of his moral predisposition”
(RGV 6: 36).
Several authors have criticized Kant for excluding the possibility of a diabolical will (Silber
1960; Bernstein 2002: 36–42; Card 2002: 83–5, 211–13). According to these critics, Kant
is unable to account for many of the faces of evil that we know from experience due to his
assumption that agents are motivated either by self-love or by duty, an assumption that precludes
the possibility that evildoers do evil for evil’s sake. Suicide bombers provide a case in point.
Since suicide bombers choose to a morally wrong action that knowingly leads to their own
death, so the objection goes, they cannot possibly be motivated by either duty or self-love.
Consequently, it is necessary to postulate a different kind of motive.
Several things can be said in defense of Kant (see Caswell 2007). First, the objection seems to
rely on a too narrow construal of the motive of self-love. On Kant’s broader construal, nothing
seems to stand in the way of explaining a suicide attack as being motivated by self-love. Indeed,
it is quite plausible to assume that suicide bombers are motivated by a desire to gain esteem in
the eyes of others, even if they know that they will receive this recognition only posthumously,
of course. Although this takes the sting out of the objection, it is not yet a justification for
excluding the possibility of a diabolical will. After all, from the fact that a suicide attack can
plausibly be explained by reference to the motive of self-love it does not follow that a suicide
bomber cannot possibly be motivated by a desire other than self-love, and in particular by a
desire to do evil for evil’s sake.
To understand why Kant rejects this possibility out of hand, we must take a step back and
look at his account of agency. In Kant’s view, freedom is constituted by principles of practical
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rationality. This idea is expressed in its bear essence in what Henry Allison (1990) has called
Kant’s reciprocity thesis. This thesis says that “a free will and a will under moral laws are one and
the same” (GMS 4: 447) or that “freedom and unconditional practical law reciprocally imply
each other” (KpV 5: 29). Freely translated, the reciprocity thesis says that agents are free and
morally accountable if and only if they have the ability to step back from their desires and to
guide their behavior in the light of the categorical imperative. In a footnote in the Religion, Kant
puts the thought as follows: “This law [the moral law] is the only law that makes us conscious
of the independence of our power of choice from determination by all other incentives (of our
freedom) and thereby also of the accountability of all our actions” (RGV 6: 27n.).
Now imagine Jack. Let us, for the sake of the argument, assume that Jack has a diabolical will
and hence chooses to do evil for evil’s sake. By stipulation, Jack is motivated by the fact that
his action is morally wrong, that is, by the fact that the moral law disallows it. Note, however,
that if one is motivated to perform a morally wrong action by the mere fact that the moral law
disallows it, one cannot at the same time be motivated to omit that action by that very same fact.
From the assumption that Jack has a diabolical will, it thus follows that he cannot be motivated
by respect for the moral law. If we combine this result with the reciprocity thesis, we know a
priori that Jack does not have a diabolical will. Kant puts it thus:
To think of oneself as a freely acting being, yet as exempted from the one law com-
mensurate to such a being (the moral law), would amount to the thought of a cause
operating without any law at all (for the determination according to natural law is
abolished on account of freedom): and this is a contradiction.
(RGV 6: 35)
In other words, if agents are free and morally accountable just when they able to guide their
behavior by the moral law, agents who are insusceptible to being moved by respect for the
moral law are exempted from moral responsibility. Consequently, if Jack has a diabolical will,
then he is unfree and exempted from moral responsibility. But an unfree and morally unac-
countable will is not worth the name.
Relatedly, the case of the psychopath stirred up an intense philosophical debate. On the
most influential accounts, psychopaths suffer from emotional rather than cognitive deficits and
are incapable of experiencing moral emotions such as guilt and empathy. Although the reality
of psychopathy is far more complex, many philosophers interpret the psychopath as the real-life
incarnation of the philosophical fiction of the amoralist. On this construal, the psychopath under-
stands the requirements of morality all too well, but is simply not motivated to act accordingly.
A central question in this debate is whether psychopaths can be held morally responsible for
their actions. The Kantian answer to this question is clear. As Kant crudely puts it in the Metaphysics
of Morals, if a human being were “completely lacking in receptivity to [the moral feeling of respect]
he would be morally dead” (MS 6: 400). To put the same point more mildly, if the capacity to be
motivated by moral reasons is a condition for moral responsibility, and if psychopaths are incapable
of being motivated by moral reasons, then psychopaths are exempted from moral responsibility.
They are ill and in need of treatment rather than evil and morally blameworthy.
Conclusion
By way of conclusion, let me summarize the main points of this chapter. I started off the chapter
by showing that, in contrast to contemporary accounts of evil, Kant does not draw a qualitative
distinction between evil and moral wrongness. As such, evil is nothing beyond “ordinary” moral
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wrongdoing. In contrast to classic accounts of evil, Kant rejects the distinction between natural
and moral evil. Evil is a property that pertains only to persons, actions, and the consequences of
human actions; harmful events or states of affairs that are not caused by human actions must be
explained in terms of preceding causes according to the laws of nature. Rather than identifying
evil with some feature of reality, Kant defines evil by reference to the categorical imperative.
The categorical imperative procedure yields that an action is evil (i.e., morally wrong) just when
the maxim on which the action is based cannot be willed and at the same time be willed as a
universal law. A person is called evil (i.e., morally vicious) just when she has character traits that
are expressive of maxims that yield such practical contradictions.
The notion of radical evil refers to the source of evil rather than to extreme forms of evil.
In transcendental terms, radical evil is the condition for the possibility of the adoption of evil
maxims. Kant departs from a long tradition in which evil is seen as a privation of the good. At
the same time, he denies that the root of evil lies in our susceptibility to sensuous desires. The
source of evil rather lies in our half-hearted commitment to morality. Although Kant claims
that all human beings have a propensity to evil, this does not imply that we are all evil persons.
It does imply, however, that our moral record may be relatively unmarred merely because we
have been so lucky never to have found ourselves in dire circumstances.
Critics have objected that Kant’s exclusion of the diabolical will runs in the face of moral
reality, but on reflection the objection does not hold ground. Not only can many evil actions
plausibly be interpreted as being motivated by self-love, but it also seems reasonable to
assume that a person who lacks the capacity to be motivated by moral reasons is exempted
from moral responsibility.
At no point in this chapter it was necessary to invoke any religious ideas, which means that
Kant’s theory of evil is entirely secular. True, Kant may have “slobbered on his philosopher’s
cloak” by acknowledging that the stain of evil is common to us all, including himself. But this
acknowledgment is anything but a disgrace. It is a frank admission of the fact that being an
enlightened philosopher makes one no better than the rest of humanity.
Notes
1 Garcia (2002) attempts to formulate a Kantian theory of evil that accommodates a qualitative distinction
between evil and “ordinary” immoral actions, but he concedes that “Kant’s ethical theory itself might be
fairly interpreted as in fact opposed to such a distinction” (2002: 195).
2 All references to Kant’s works are to the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Numbers refer
to the volumes and pages of the standard edition of Kant’s works by the Royal German Academy of the
Sciences. Numbers in references to the Critique of Pure Reason refer to the page numbers of the original A
and B editions. I use the following abbreviations:
A/B Critique of Pure Reason, Kant (1998).
GMS Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in Kant (1996a).
KpV Critique of Practical Reason, in Kant (1996a).
MS Metaphysics of Morals, in Kant (1996a).
RGV Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, in Kant (1996b).
3 The reasons for which we act (i.e., why we do something) can be brought to the fore by posing questions
of the following form: “Would you still perform an action of the type A if the circumstances C were
different?”
4 Consider the example of the malicious lie in the Critique of Pure Reason (A554–8/B582–6) and his
example of the theft in the Critique of Practical Reason (KpV 5: 95–100). Wood (1984) provides a classic
defense of this type of altered-past compatibilism.
5 Consider Kant’s example of the philanthropist in the Groundwork (GMS 4: 398–99).
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References
Allison, H.E. (1990) Kant’s Theory of Freedom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Allison, H.E. (1996) “Reflections on the Banality of (Radical) Evil: A Kantian Analysis,” in Idealism and
Freedom: Essays on Kant’s Theoretical and Practical Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 169–82.
Anderson-Gold, S. (2001) Unnecessary Evil: History and Moral Progress in the Philosophy of Immanuel Kant,
Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Arendt, H. (1998) The Human Condition, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Arendt, H. (1973) The Origins of Totalitarianism, San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace.
Bernstein, R.J. (2002) Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Caswell, M. (2007) “Kant on the Diabolical Will. A Neglected Alternative?” Kantian Review 12 (2),
pp. 147–57.
Card, C. (2002) The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Garcia, E.V. (2002) “A Kantian Theory of Evil,” Monist 85 (2), pp. 194–209.
Goethe, J.W. (1964) Goethes Briefe, Hamburg: Christian Wegner Verlag.
Kant, I. (1998) Critique of Pure Reason, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kant, I. (1996a) Practical Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kant, I. (1996b) Religion and Rational Theology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Morgan, S. (2005) “The Missing Formal Proof of Humanity’s Radical Evil in Kant’s Religion,” Philosophical
Review 114 (1), pp. 63–114.
Silber, J. (1960) “The Ethical Significance of Kant’s Religion,” in I. Kant, Religion within the Limits of
Reason Alone, New York: Harper Torch, pp. cxxix–cxxx.
Sussman, D. (2005) “Perversity of the Heart,” Philosophical Review 114 (2), pp. 153–77.
Timmons, M. (1994) “Evil and Imputation in Kant’s Ethics,” Annual Review of Law and Ethics 2,
pp. 113–41.
Voltaire (2000) Candide and Related Texts, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Wood, A.W. (1999) Kant’s Ethical Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wood, A.W. (1984) “Kant’s Compatibilism,” in A.W. Wood (ed.), Self and Nature in Kant’s Philosophy,
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 73–101.
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9
SADE
Mushroom clouds and silver linings
Thomas Nys
Il faut toujours en revenir à de Sade, c’est-à-dire a l’homme naturel, pour expliquer

le mal.
(Charles Baudelaire)
Je n’arrive pas à le prendre au sérieux.

(Paul Bourdin)1
The link between Marquis de Sade and the topic of evil seems fairly obvious. First, there is the
man himself. Sade2 spent more than 30 years in confinement because of criminal behavior. He
became especially notorious for – allegedly – having kidnapped, raped, and tortured a woman
named Rose Keller, and, some years later, for performing illegal sexual acts (i.e., sodomy)
with several prostitutes and poisoning them in the process (Carter, 2011). So there is generous
evidence for supposing that Sade was an evil person. Second, he is the author of some very
offensive books. His 120 Days of Sodom, for example, is essentially a list of 600 scenarios of
wanton cruelty and torture involving infanticide, incest, bestiality, and necrophilia (to name
but a few. . .). The work is considered to be so vile and depraved that, even in 2013, in times
that appear far more tolerant and open-minded, there was some controversy over includ-
ing it in the famous Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Russell, 2014). So, it is also beyond
contestation that there is much that can be considered evil in his works. Third, and perhaps
most significantly, not only is there a wealth of simply immoral acts in Sade, but his name will
forever be associated with a particular type of moral wrongdoing: sadism. This term was used
by psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing to describe a category of psychological perversion in
which people would derive sexual pleasure from causing pain, injury, or humiliation to others.3
The sadistic motive to cause great or extreme4 suffering for purposes of one’s own sexual sat-
isfaction pushes us into a darker or deeper realm of immorality to which, some would say, the
label “evil” properly applies.5
However, this obvious association of Sade with the term evil only runs skin-deep. We
should acknowledge, for instance, that there are many more, and far more serious criminals
than Marquis de Sade. Although his acts were surely indecent and obscene, some perhaps
even deserving of legal punishment, it is less clear that he can appropriately be labeled a
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moral monster.6 At any rate, there are others – and, unfortunately, many others – that come
much closer to earning that dubious epithet. Also, focusing on the barrage of filth and brutality
within his works seems somehow misguided. For the same reservations hold in this area as well:
there are many books describing acts at the extreme end of immorality. So why focus on Sade
when there are better specimen to be examined? Surely, there must be something more than
just the unlucky combination of an unsavory man writing questionable novels?
There is at least one reason, I would suggest, why Sade indeed deserves a spot in any treatise
or handbook on the philosophy of evil. More than just showing us evil (in his life and works),
he also tried to deliver a philosophical justification of it, even of its most extravagant and sadistic
manifestations (Philips 2005: 5; also in Butler 2006: 170). Admittedly, many authors before him
tried to justify the reign of an all-powerful and beneficent God causing or allowing evil, but
Sade mounted his defense precisely on the ruins of the theodicy. In a world without God, “evil”
comes without sanction or guilt, and we can therefore vindicate the grossest immorality in the
name of man and man alone. The very attempt to justify what we hold to be so wrong, without
recourse to a higher being that moves in mysterious ways – a being we can point to and hold
accountable – adds insult to injury. It makes the Sadean project itself seem evil.
However, although it is tempting to consider Sade as the true Devil’s advocate, some res-
ervations are in place. First, Sade is most famous for his fiction, not his philosophical tracts,
and this focus leaves us in danger of taking fiction for philosophy. In fact, when we leave his
outrageous plays and novels aside, Sade’s own thoughts on morals and politics appear to have
been far more moderate and mainstream than the moral debauchery of his characters suggests
(Sade, for instance, was against the death penalty). Second, the very suggestion that Sade
tried to justify evil is highly deceiving. What he – or his characters – try to justify is what we
consider evil (e.g., sadism). Yet, to provide a justification means that Sade does not take these
practices to be evil at all. Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost famously cries out “Evil be thou my
good” (4:110) and Sade fits the satanic mold in that he indeed reverses the labels: our evil is
his good. But, at the same time, he might be as far removed from diabolical evil as Satan was
himself, because both of them do not pursue evil for evil’s sake; they do it in order to take
revenge on the Almighty or for the sake of personal pleasure (Scarre 2000). Therefore, they
are not committed to evil as such.
These reservations are relevant, but should be put into perspective. Many authors believe
that Sade’s fiction is, in fact, philosophically interesting. People like Beauvoir, Horkheimer
and Adorno, Lacan, Bataille, Klossowski, Camus,7 and Foucault, all think that there is some-
thing “revealing” about his work, whilst they are well aware that they are dealing with fiction
(Lauwaert 2014). In fact, the fictitiousness, the aspect of myth, of phantasy, of wish and desire,
is often key to their analyses. However, not all of these contributions are directly relevant to the
topic of evil. In this chapter, I therefore want to restrict myself to the aspect of sadism, the pecu-
liar type of evil-doing that made Sade so famous and that appears to have some pride of place
in contemporary Anglo-analytic treatments of evil.8 This leaves us with the second cautionary
remark raised above: the warning that Sade did not provide a genuine justification of evil. Some
would say that sadism goes a long way in offering us an image of evil for evil’s sake.9 Sadists in
the real world knowingly inflict suffering upon innocent people and this suffering constitutes an
integral part of their enjoyment.10 They really want them to suffer, as they need it for their own
sexual gratification. At the same time, we can fully admit that – in the final analysis – sadistic
actions are not committed for evil’s sake, but “just” for pleasure (an element of these actions
that seems to spur rather than diminish our moral outrage). In this chapter I want to reveal the
philosophical background that Sade believes would support the practice of sadism. It will turn
out, however, that this attempt for argumentative support leads him into trouble. Sadism is
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therefore much more of a problem for him than might appear. I will further try to argue that
the frustration that comes with the inability to deal with the problem of sadism is precisely what
gives the Sadean project its frantic character.
Adieu, mon dieu: a black theodicy

I mentioned that Sade built his defense of evil on the ruins of the project of theodicy, so that
seems a good place to start. A theodicy is essentially a defense of God in light of the problem
of evil. It is a puzzle that consists of three seemingly contradictory elements: (1) God’s benevo-
lence, (2) God’s omnipotence, and (3) the reality of evil. In order to defend God, one could try
to argue, for example, that His omnipotence does not imply that He could do the impossible,
or that what appears to be evil on the surface of things is actually for the best. The project of
the theodicy has a long tradition, ranging from Epicure until, arguably, John Rawls (Weithman
2010; Haddock et al. 2010: 86). Still, to contemporary and secular ears, it might sound like an
outdated and confusing project, because all authors engaged in it seem to refuse the obvious
conclusion. Mme Dubois, a character in Sade’s Justine, however, does feel the force of this
inevitable conclusion:
I believe . . . that if there were a God there would be less evil on earth; I believe that
since evil exists, these disorders are either expressly ordained by God, and there you
have a barbarous fellow, or he is incapable of preventing them and right away you
have a feeble God; in either case, an abominable being, a being whose lightning I
should defy and whose law contemn. Ah, Therèse! Is not atheism preferable to one
and the other of these extremes?
The puzzle of the theodicy leads Mme Dubois to prefer atheism. The reality of evil simply
belies the existence of an omnipotent and benevolent God. If we hold on to evil, unwilling
to take anything away from it, this simply leaves no room for him. In the famous words of
Nietzsche: “God’s only excuse is that he doesn’t exist.” Sade himself shared the position of his
fictional Mme Dubois: he was an outspoken atheist who dared to shout “what other philoso-
phers hardly dared to whisper” (Philips 2005: 9), and saw himself as a flag-bearer of a more
radical type of Enlightenment where reason is no longer used in the service of faith but as a
weapon to invalidate it.
Nowadays, we are less vulnerable to the shock of atheism. We might therefore believe that
the theodicies of Leibniz, Rousseau, and others are merely of historical interest, and that these
thinkers were not really dealing with the problem of evil as it presents itself to us now. Such
skepticism might be unwarranted (as the chapters in this handbook attest), but at least Sade,
we could say, puts an end to the “old problem” – from now on, we have to deal with evil in
the absence of God.
However, for someone who is keen on highlighting this absence, God is remarkably pre-
sent in the writings of Sade. Geoffrey Gorer has even suggested that Sade was more of a reli-
gious than a sexual fanatic (Gorer 1964: 93), a statement that should give us pause. So why
does God feature so prominently in the writings of an atheist? Why dwell on a being that one
does not believe in? The reason is perfectly simple. God appears as an object of ridicule or
insult; the mode of mentioning the supreme being is blasphemy. As such, Sade challenges God
where he does exists, namely in the hearts and minds of his believers. And, so, blasphemy also
fits within the general theme of sadism: his characters increase the suffering of their victims by
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offending what they hold dear. Not only does the libertine cause suffering; he also confronts
his victims with God’s absence in the affair. “Where is your God now?”
Yet, although it is true that blasphemy is an instrument in the hands of sadists, there is also
a stronger sense in which God is still present in the works of Sade, forever wandering in the
twilight. Not only does the Sadean man need victims who believe in God in order to torment
them with blasphemy; he also needs God himself to trespass against his laws. This is the central
truth in what is called “transgression,” a concept that we will further develop below.
For now, we should draw attention to another striking feature that sets Sade apart. In Mme
Dubois’s meditations, atheism is presented as a conclusion, drawn from the premise of evil.
With evil all around us, we can no longer defend God. Voltaire, in his famous Poem on Lisbon,
agrees on the absurdity of the defense: Leibniz’s theodicy becomes nothing short of cynical and
extremely cold-hearted in light of undeserved and unnecessary human suffering. But, whereas
Voltaire was truly outraged by the theodicy as a response to disaster and atrocity, Sade does not
seem so shocked. “How could one maintain that this is the best of all possible worlds when thou-
sands have perished in the Lisbon earthquake?” Voltaire would ask. “Sure,” Sade would respond
with a shrug of the shoulders, “But how could one still say anything about that earthquake, if
there is no longer any God to be blamed for it?” Such natural evil is part and parcel of living in a
cold and indifferent universe. So, in the final analysis, Sade does deny the reality of evil.
Sade makes one of his characters, Saint-Fond, also consider another option, an option in
which both evil and God remain very real.
I raise my eyes to the universe: I see evil, disorder, crime reigning as despots everywhere.
My gaze descends, and it bends upon that most interesting of this universe’s creatures.
I behold him likewise devoured by vices, by contradictions, by infamies; what ideal
results from this examination . . . there exists a God; some hand or other has necessar-
ily created all that I see, but has not created it save for evil; evil is his essence; and all
that he causes us to commit is indispensable to his plans.
Evil is all around us: very bad things happen to good and innocent people. So, if there is a God
(a big unsubstantiated “if” on Sade’s part) then he intends to bring such undeserved suffering
into the world. He would be, in Mme Dubois’s words, a “barbarous fellow” and this truth
would be particularly hard to swallow. Suppose that God is a criminal, making us suffer. What
would follow from that truth? Perhaps that we should find a way to appease the Black God. Yet,
clearly, moral innocence – i.e., good behavior – is not the key to our salvation, for, if it were,
the good and God-fearing people of Lisbon would not have been buried under the rubble of
churches and cathedrals. So, we should instead be less innocent and follow in God’s footsteps:
we should destroy creation and wreak havoc on the innocent. In a telling passage, the same
Saint-Fond imagines God scolding mankind for not being more like him: it is God’s hate for
man (instead of his love) that – in a perverse act of imitatio dei – should guide our behavior.11 We
are created in the image of God, and this means that we should become criminals too. Hence,
there might be a theological justification for something like sadism.
Although powerful as a piece of literary imagination, this represents a dubious line of argu-
mentation. Why should we do to each other what we condemn in God? Or, more generally:
what speaks in favor of being cruel and causing suffering? In order to truly persuade us, it is
not sufficient to just imagine a God that tells us to. And we know that Sade himself was an
atheist who did not believe in any gods. So, we need to look for other grounds for potentially
justifying “evil” and sadism.
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When nature calls: hedonism to the hilt

Atheism, in itself, does not yield any practical recommendations; it does not tell us what to do.
It merely denies the authority behind theories of divine law. Importantly, also in Sade’s case,
it removes the authority behind the Christian commandments. We should no longer tremble
before the Throne of God. But what should we do then?
Consider Sade’s preface to Philosophy in the Boudoir:
To libertines of all ages, and of every sex, and of every inclination; it is you to whom
I dedicate this work. Your passions, which the cold and dreary moralists tell you to
fear, are nothing more than the means by which Nature seeks to exhort you to do her
work; surrender to these passions, therefore, and let the principles enumerated herein
nourish you. . . .
To all: let us realize that we have been cast into this woeful life without our consent
and have been assailed from the dawn of consciousness with the sophistries of those
who would gain from our confusion; if we would snatch a brief moment of pleasure –
if we would plant an occasional rose along life’s rocky path – we must sacrifice eve-
rything to the demands of our senses; this is the lesson of the Bedroom Philosophers.
(Sade 2008: 208)
The point to note here is that we get some clear normative recommendations at the end of both
paragraphs, and that an appeal to nature is supposed to provide an argument for them. The point
Sade wants to argue is that the moralists – society in general – are wrong: we should not fear
and suppress our inclinations but, instead, we should give in to our desires and passions. Nature
has bestowed us with these desires. We find ourselves having these inclinations and urges; it is
simply who we are.
Many readers undoubtedly will have some sympathy for Sade’s argument against the stuffy
moralists who defend a cramped and outdated sexual morality, and who, for example, con-
sider sodomy a capital offense. Sade is sometimes heralded as a great defender of sexual
freedom, emphasizing the value and joy of sex beyond, or apart from, the goal of procrea-
tion (Butler 2006: 172) And perhaps some readers would even follow Sade in proclaiming
that sex should not be laden with moral taboos, because, after all, it is “only natural.” But,
as it stands, the argument is rather perplexing. In fact, if all desires are natural, then so is the
desire to condemn liberal sexual morality. . . The only thing which we can properly claim is
that nature does not condemn anything: it does not prevent us from performing actions that
society would consider wrong or even evil. Yet it does not tell us what to do either.
Indeed, Sade seems to say as much in his afterword to 120 Days of Sodom (when the reader,
remember, has just worked through the 600 scenarios of horror):
Would you scorn our libertines for practicing this or that vice? Well, they likewise
scorn you for practicing this or that virtue. In the last analysis, it matters not a jot to
anyone – least of all to Nature, who, in supplying us with our tastes, could not fail to
realize that we would act upon them . . .
Therefore, ye virtuous, go your way in comfort; hark unto the words of your cru-
cified leader, who said, if the message has been transmitted to me accurately, “Virtue
is its own reward.” As for we of voluptuous bent, we find our rewards in vice, and if
there be future punishments due, they shall be readily accepted by all libertines, not
the least of whom is your humble servant.
(Sade 2008: 301)
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Here, Sade appears to bite the proverbial bullet. Indeed, the virtuous should practice virtue,
while the vicious should pursue vice. “Do as you please shall be the whole of the law.”12
This is also related to Sade’s belief in the truth of materialism and determinism. We are
but “matter in motion” and we move from one moment in time to another with absolute
necessity. Nature takes its course and the course of nature is set: its laws are eternal and
determine what will happen. This is why Sade can claim that nature “exhorts us” to do “her
work”; we just move with the ebb and flow of matter in constant flux. Whether determin-
ism precludes moral responsibility is a hotly debated topic. One way to read Sade is to main-
tain that it is silly and unreasonable to hold people morally accountable in a deterministic
universe. People do what they are bound to do; and neither praise or blame are in order
for their actions.13
Importantly, however, the truth of determinism does not imply that we cannot make
choices, only that we can never make any different choices than the ones we actually make. For
us, individuals who are faced with choices – who do not know what we are bound to do; for
whom the future seems open-ended – pleasure can be a guideline. Determinism, even of this
“hard” responsibility-denying kind, need not deny that it would be better for us to enjoy life
rather than to suffer. This then is Sade’s view on nature: nature exonerates us all, yet it is better
to have pleasurable experiences than to be without them. The moralists’ emphasis on abstinence
and moderation precludes our chances for happiness. Nature is indeed cold and indifferent; it
does not prescribe or forbid anything, but satisfying our senses is pleasurable. That is also a “fact
of nature.” So, Sade seems to ask, why not make the best of it? Why forsake our few chances of
“heaven on earth” for the sake of some illusory afterlife?
Although this might seem like a happy-go-lucky type of laissez-faire morality, it is not. Our
sympathy for Sade’s argument against the sexual mores of his day contains the tacit assumption
that sex is quite innocent. We think, of course, of consensual sex, of sex in which no one is
wronged or harmed, of happy sex to the mutual enjoyment of all involved, but Sade’s argument
unfortunately extends further. We should all do as we please, and this means that the “vicious”
behavior of the vicious will not be without consequences for the virtuous.
At first sight, we might believe that Sade’s views on nature, this framework of materialism
and determinism, indeed validates the practice of sadism. But if pleasure is what human beings
should pursue, then why should the sadist’s desire for torture be more important than his
victim’s desire for not being tortured? So the Sadean defense of vice (i.e., evil as we, society,
see it) is still pretty limited. It is limited to those who happen to have a desire for such “evil”
things, as there is also no objection against those who desire delicious food, good literature,
and consensual sex. Put differently, Sade has not yet convinced us that there is something
appealing – or “recommendable” – about evil, only that there is nothing to hold against those
who happen to prefer what we would label “evil acts.” And even that might be false. Because
of the fact that each should pursue pleasure as he or she sees fit, this justification does not carry
very far because, on this account, the sadistic desire is just one desire among others, each of
which carries equal validity.
Still, it makes a difference what path people take in life. Justine, perhaps Sade’s most famous
protagonist, finds out that a life of virtue can be utterly miserable. She gets humiliated, tortured,
and abused by all who are so inclined, and her virtuousness does not help her in any way. In fact,
it seems to augment her suffering, for instance when she spares and saves the very people who
subsequently violate her. To be virtuous often means to squander your own chances for happi-
ness and to allow others – by turning the other cheek – to treat you very badly. Juliette, her twin
sister, does not have that problem. She has learned to be vicious. This means that she can engage
in a relentless pursuit of pleasure and is thereby able to plant some “roses” on life’s rocky path.
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So it is a matter of perspective: although it might matter “not a jot” to nature whether someone
is vicious or virtuous, it does matter to the individual in question. The question then becomes:
why are the vicious justified to pursue their pleasure at the expense of others?
Sade beyond sadism

French philosopher and writer Maurice Blanchot provides us with an extremely interesting
reconstruction of the Sadean argument. He shows us how a seemingly simple – what he calls
basic – philosophy runs into contradictions and therefore needs to evolve and develop into
something different. The feverish attempt on Sade’s part to make his philosophy fitting is also
what gives it a streak of madness. Here is how Blanchot describes Sade’s basic philosophy:
This philosophy is one of self-interest, then of complete egoism. Each of us must do

what pleases us, each of us has no other law but our own pleasure. This morality is
founded on the primary fact of absolute solitude. Sade said it and repeated it in all its
forms: nature creates us alone, there is no connection whatsoever linking one man to
another. Consequently, the only rule of conduct is that I favor all things that give me
pleasure, without consideration of the consequences that this choice might hold for
the other. Their greatest pain always counts less than my pleasure. What does it really
matter, if the price I must pay for even my slightest joy is an outrageous assortment of
hideous crimes, since this joy delights me, it is in me, yet the effect of my crimes do
not touch me in the least, they are outside me.
(Blanchot 2004: 10)
There a two constitutive elements of this basic philosophy. The first is hedonism: the only
thing that has intrinsic value is pleasure, that is, experiencing pleasurable states of mind. This
is the normative bedrock of Sade’s philosophy that we already discussed above.14 But, impor-
tantly, Blanchot points to another element in Sade, a metaphysical rather than normative aspect
that I will dub “metaphysical solitude.” This involves the claim that we are separated from
our fellow creatures because we can only experience our own experiences. On the one hand,
this should strike us as a self-evident, trivial, and tautological truth. But, on the other hand, it
should also strike us as patently false. When I commiserate with those I hold dear, I partake in
their misery: when they are sad, I am sad too. And when they are happy I take delight in their
happiness. This, however, does not refute the Marquis. For, even in these moment of commis-
eration and sympathy, I still only experience my own experience. I do not truly experience the
pain or joy of others. Their plight might be the cause of my condition, but it is not equivalent
to it. This implies that the link between my happiness and yours, between your misery and
mine, is contingent. I just might rejoice in your joy, but I need not. And I might feel awful
when you are in pain, but I need not. I might also take delight in it.
Sade’s basic philosophy amounts to, in contemporary analytic terms, egoist hedonism. The
element of metaphysical solitude in necessary to solve the quandary raised above of why any
particular desire or pleasure is more valuable than any other. From the vantage point of the
universe we are all equal (that is, equally insignificant) but from the individual’s perspective,
the way she experiences the world, her experience is infinitely more valuable than that of others.
G.E. Moore once argued that the position of egoism – as a normative theory – is self-refuting
because (1) it tells me to maximize my pleasure, (2) it tells everybody to maximize their
pleasure, and therefore (3) it would be impossible for me (and for all others) to maximize my
pleasure. People would get in each other’s way and this would preclude them from reaching
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maximum personal satisfaction. Others have argued, however, that this is not an objection to
egoism. Egoism just states that we should pursue our self-interest, and try to maximize it, not
that we should be successful in that endeavor.15 The result is indeed that people will get in each
other’s way, and that there will be a tremendous power struggle, but that is a consequence
of the theory, not its refutation. Some people take pleasure in torturing others but, equally,
many people abhor being victims of torture. Consequently, only some will be able to get what
they want, and it is obvious that, in this struggle, being virtuous might not be of any help in
achieving one’s desired ends.
The theory however remains limited. Although acts of sadism are justified, even when they
interfere with the well-being of the victims, there is still no reason for sadism. It does not tell us
why sadism is preferable over gardening or collecting post stamps. Philosophy is merely used
as an instrument to justify a certain pathology (because sadism is just another source of pleasure,
on a par with gardening or collecting post stamps). This remains a disquieting message as it
stands, for it would render the victims argumentatively powerless to the abuse of their oppo-
nents. And indeed, in contemplating this message, we tend to identify as the potential victims.
We would find evil in the pages, yet, in being worried as possible targets for abuse, we would
affirm to ourselves that we, at least, are not evil. We are no sadists; we are not sick in the head.
Geoffrey Gorer, however, grounds sadism in a far more general human proclivity. He believes
that human beings typically have a desire to leave an impression upon the world. We all want
to make a difference and to be acknowledged as the author of this difference. We want to be
recognized as subjects, as agents, capable of acting upon the world. This might be the source of
culture, art, science, and beauty in society, but, according to Gorer, the surest way to get such
recognition, to be acknowledged as the source of difference, is to inflict pain upon another:
“What is certain is that you can produce far greater, more varied, and more obvious modifica-
tions on other people by pain than by pleasure, and therefore greater satisfaction for the agent”
(1964: 157). In the eyes of our victims we see the immediate effect of our actions, and we relish
in the knowledge that it was us who were the cause of their condition. Nietzsche, in The Gay
Science, makes a different but related observation:
We hurt those to whom we need to make our power perceptible, for pain is a much
more sensitive means to that end than pleasure: pain always asks for the cause, while
pleasure is inclined to stop with itself and not look back.
(Nietzsche 2001: 38)
When in pain, we look for a cause, whereas, when we enjoy life, we tend to lose ourselves in
the moment. Suffering needs an explanation; happiness does not. So, when I suffer, I seek out
its cause: I look out for my tormentor, and by doing so I affirm his power. If there is any truth
to this mechanism, then the practice of sadism becomes a human affair: it is no longer a type
of pathology that we can hold at arm’s length, but it should be located much closer to home. I
will leave it up to the reader to determine whether these bold claims by Nietzsche and Gorer
contain any truth.16
Perhaps the biggest contribution of Blanchot is that, by revealing the foundations of Sade’s
basic philosophy, he also shows its inadequacy. What appears to be the argumentative under-
pinning for the evil of sadism is, in effect, ill-suited for this job, because, when carefully con-
sidering the nature of sadism, it contradicts the very premise from which is was supposed to
follow. The claim of metaphysical solitude was meant to support and justify the sadist’s disre-
gard for the well-being of his victims, but sadists have no such disregard. In fact, they are very
much dependent upon the subjective experience of their victims. Their pleasure depends on the
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others’ misery. What is sadism other than the attempt to experience the other’s experience, if
only to relish in the agony of another? If metaphysical solitude is real, then sadism becomes a
feverish attempt to gain access to a world that is otherwise foreclosed, an impossible longing
for unlocking the inner world of the other. If it is false, however, then we lose the necessary
element that would justify the moral disregard for the quality of the other’s experience. Put
differently, on Sade’s view, our fate of being created separately makes possible the practice of
sadism but this specific practice seeks to overcome that very predicament (the success of which
is premised on the untruth of the metaphysical claim). It should be clear that sadism and meta-
physical solitude make for an uncomfortable match.
From pathology to principle

And, so, the thing for which Sade became so famous and which features so prominently in his
writings – sadism – is the very thing for which he cannot account. In fact, trying to do so brings
up contradictions and tensions. One of Blanchot’s central insights is that this immense tension
within Sade’s work leads him to push further. The focus, for example, shifts from torturing
and killing individuals to the slaughter of thousands of nameless people, thereby suggesting that
the Sadean criminal is no longer attached – not psychologically “invested” – in the inner life
of particular persons. Also, the libertines in his novels sometimes tell their victims that they are
“dead already” well before the torture begins, thereby again denying that they care about their
experiences (Blanchot 2004: 24–5). In short, the embarrassment of the sadist’s connectedness to
his victim results in an attempt to, literally and finally, get rid of the Other.
If Blanchot is correct, then there is an interesting “reversal” in the work of Sade. The project
is now no longer to support sadism by the premise of metaphysical loneliness, but to use sadism
to establish the truth of such solitude. By performing acts of sadism we prove that we are not
moved or disturbed by the subjective experiences of our fellow men. The Sadean ideal is to
stand alone, and sadism is the means to accomplish that. In this context, Blanchot calls attention
to the theme of apathy in Sade’s work: the libertines, in acting out their scenes of cruelty, need
to remain unperturbed, which is different from the sadist frothing at the mouth and relishing in
his behavior (Blanchot 2004: 35–9). The challenge is to stand detached from the evil that they
do, and it is this ability to do so – to remain undisturbed – that gives them joy. Pleasure therefore
features differently within these two stories: there is pleasure in fulfilling my desires, but there
is also pleasure (operating at a higher level) in denying them, for this affirms my autonomy: i.e.,
my not being driven by desires, but instead being fully in control of them. Either I just happen
to enjoy the suffering of others (and then I am dependent upon their inner life) or, by commit-
ting acts of cruelty to others, I establish and affirm my independence and rise above my inclina-
tions, above nature, and become truly sovereign.
In this context, Jacques Lacan has most famously emphasized the affinity between Sade and
Kant – bien ettonnés de se trouver ensemble – arguing that both want to establish a principle that is
possibly, yet relentlessly, opposed to snug and comfortable desire-satisfaction (Lacan 1963). The
Sadean criminal is not just passively driven to his acts of madness; he is actively committed to
them. Others have noted this move from pathology to principle as well. Simone de Beauvoir,
for example, deliberately calls Sade’s philosophy an “ethic,” a project interrogating “the funda-
mental relations of self and Other, seeking to know their limits and the conditions of their pos-
sibility” (Butler 2006: 174–5). Beauvoir sees in Sade the truth of existentialist philosophy, being
centered on individual freedom and authenticity. Interestingly, for instance, Sade sets himself
apart from society, denouncing the way “evil” is used in it, but, by doing so, also calls attention
to the systemic evil that goes unnoticed in that community. The criminal act of murder, up
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close and personal, is put against the lawful genocide of hundreds, thousands, if not millions of
those the state puts silently to death.
Here, Beauvoir seemingly disagrees with Horkheimer and Adorno (2002), who see Sade
as an exponent of the Enlightenment and his work as a prefiguration of the totalitarian atroci-
ties of the early twentieth century, offering us a rational justification for murder. However,
Horkheimer and Adorno’s valuation of Sade is actually more subtle: precisely because Sade
is this fictional prefiguration he could serve as Enlightenment’s own warning sign, its own
medium for reflection, offering us a chance for contemplating its utter consequences.17 With
this subtlety in place, we could say that the difference with Beauvoir is that she locates the
glimmer of hope (of potential resistance to dark possibilities) elsewhere, interpreting his work
as a quest for authenticity, describing acts of rebellion, of refusing to go along with the rational
blueprint of the ideal society (and the horror and terror that comes with it). And what is even
more interesting, on Beauvoir’s account, is that this desire for authenticity operates through
the other (Butler 2006: 83–4).
Sade seeks to affirm his sovereignty in opposition, and even at the expense, of the other. The
Sadean man affirms his solitude, his superiority, his power, by negating the other and denying
whatever ties there might exist between him and his victims – thereby also overcoming and kill-
ing something within himself (and, importantly, whether that “something” is orgiastic excite-
ment or deep repulsion for the act becomes secondary). The goal is now not to be affected, not
to be moved in any way. In the act of killing, he rises above his own humanity, and becomes a
god. But every victory also gives testimony to his defeat. This is so because sadism requires us to
give up something, to deny something that has a hold on us (be it some pathological drive, the
moral law, the social mores, our natural revulsion. . .). Only then can sadism truly be liberating.
The strength of the libertine’s affirmation is therefore dependent upon the force of that which
he denies or overcomes. So, in proclaiming his victims’ nothingness he immediately destroys the
significance of his victory. The Sadean man needs to presuppose some connection to the other,
something that has a hold on him, for him to be able to deny it. His independence is parasitical
upon a more fundamental dependence.
So it appears, at first, that Sade seeks to differentiate himself from his lovers [sic] by
being the sovereign will who acts upon another’s body, it turns out that the only way
the “sovereign will” can take pleasure in its action is by imagining, even if only vicari-
ously and through displacement, the dissolution of its own sovereignty and will.
(Butler 2006: 185)
But, whereas for Beauvoir the possibility of real inter-subjectivity, of connecting with the other
through the flesh, should be fairly acknowledged, Sade remains stuck in this paradox: he is
unable to shrug of the other, which only makes him shrug harder, providing further evidence of
being so affected by the other, and so on. The result is the frenzy that we know from his work
(and, if not frenzy, then the tedious repetition of it all).
Fiction as reality’s rape

I already briefly mentioned the notion of “transgression” when commenting on the striking
presence of God in the works of a staunch atheist. This notion plays a crucial role in the writings
of George Bataille and it involves the “slippage” of a norm that we otherwise acknowledge as
valid and important (Surkis 1996). In rituals and festivals, for example, the rules and taboos of
everyday life are often loosened and transgressed (mostly symbolic), with these rituals themselves
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having strict rules and regulations (allowing for the “exception”). There is ecstatic joy, even
elation (the French jouissance that is often mentioned in this context has sexual connotations), in
the slippage, the overcoming of what one deems as being beyond the pale of ordinary conduct.
God, as the supreme lawgiver is therefore also the supreme target for transgression; in sacrilege
and blasphemy the Sadean man takes on his final opponent, a worthy adversary whose worth-
lessness should be shown at each and every occasion (but, as we now know, whose worthless-
ness would take away the very need for opposition).
The point about transgression is not just that there is joy in breaking the law. We could
perhaps interpret Sade as someone who transgresses a law that he himself finds silly and
oppressive (Scarre 2000), someone who finds a certain freedom in the bedroom that he
does not find outside. But although that might be true for Sade himself, this isn’t enough to
account for the immorality of his characters. For them, there is value and pleasure in doing
something they consider evil themselves: they believe they are beyond the law and the mag-
nificence of this “beyond” only makes sense if the law is something that should otherwise be
respected if not revered.
Bataille’s concept of transgression therefore neatly complements the analysis offered above.
But it also allows us to give the project a final surprising twist. We established that sadism
essentially constitutes a problem for Sade, because it implies a dependency he wants to deny. In
fact, Sade wants to overcome all dependencies because they, at once, mean a limitation of the
individual’s sovereignty and an opportunity to affirm it. Therefore all men must perish, and so
must God. But we are also dependent upon nature, as we indeed move with the ebb and flow
of matter in motion. We are not free from the laws of nature. It speaks in favor of the Marquis’s
consistency that this frustrates and infuriates him as well. In another famous passage he imagi-
nes a machine(!) that would disrupt the laws of nature: a human invention that would gainsay
the rule of Mother Nature and that would – as supervillains tend to do – plunge this ordered
“cosmos” back into chaos:
and Nature is the one I really want to outrage; I would like to upset its plans, to foil
its proceedings, to stop the orbit of the stars, to disrupt the planets that float in space,
to destroy all that serves it, to protect all that harms it, in a word, to insult the core
of Nature.
(quoted in Blanchot 2004: 33)
At first sight, this seems amusing proof of Sade wanting to deny the impossible, and of presup-
posing the truth of that which he wants to deny (how is this machine supposed to work if not by
the laws of nature?). But by doing so we would take Sade too seriously, or perhaps not seriously
enough. The machine is a piece of imagination, and Sade’s works are works of fiction. And fic-
tion is the ultimate form of transgression, as it allows us to move beyond the ordinary rules of
reality. So, in writing, Sade commits the absolute crime.
Sade wrote most of his works in prison or mental asylums. This was the only way in which
he could lash out at society and simultaneously create his own world. It expressed his wish to
become sovereign, a dream that was clearly impossible for him (being incarcerated) and that
remains so for us (at the level of philosophical theory) but that was nevertheless made real in the
act of creating fiction.
The vile characters in Sade’s books often try to justify their gross immorality with the
use of philosophical arguments. But these arguments are defective. Not only can certain
theoretical assumptions be questioned on their own grounds (e.g., the tenability of hedon-
ism, the implications of “hard” determinism) but the practice of sadism contradicts the single
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Sade
premise that would warrant such extreme moral disregard: our metaphysical solitude. But
the failure of this philosophical enterprise is at the heart of Sadean literature; it is an integral
part of it. It forms the eternal nub of frustration that provides Sade with infinite momentum:
truly overcoming all dependencies and boundaries in and through fiction, creating a genuine
nonphilosophy of evil.
But perhaps there is a lesson about real-life evil in it as well. Perhaps it can serve as a testa-
ment to human stubbornness, to our proclivity to resort to violence whenever rational argument
and persuasion do not get us where we want, and to affirm ourselves through easy negation and
destruction rather than the careful attention that is needed to truly connect to each other.
Notes
1 Both quotes are mentioned in Gorer (1964).
2 Some authors use “de Sade,” others just “Sade” (Carter 2011: 7–8). I prefer “Sade” in order to avoid the
confusing lower-cased “de.”
3 It is defined in the DSM IV as: “recurrent intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors
involving acts (real, not simulated) in which the psychological or physical suffering (including humilia-
tion) of the victim is sexually enticing to the person” (quoted in Stone 2010: 135). It is the disjunctive,
the “or,” that authors such as Stone find problematic: having these intense fantasies and urges does not,
by itself, constitute sadism – sadism requires action, i.e., causing the victim physical or psychological
injury and deriving sexual pleasure from it.
4 It seems that sadism is “dimensional” (Laws & O’Donohue 2008: 232) and that only the infliction of
more extreme forms of suffering would count as evil. However, some authors would not consider
extreme harm or suffering necessary for actions being evil (e.g., de Wijze 2017).
5 For a discussion how this motive relates to evil, see the chapters by Todd Calder and Luke Russell in
this volume.
6 As mentioned, Sade denied the accusations made by Rose Keller and there is some evidence that she
might have exaggerated the events (Carter 2011: 33–6). Also, the prostitutes involved in the Marseille
incident survived and Sade had no intention to either injure or kill them. The “poisoned” sweets were
meant as an aphrodisiac or to stimulate flatulence, but the girls became ill afterwards.
7 For an excellent account of Camus’s interpretation of Sade, see the contribution by Matthew Sharpe in
this volume.
8 Some theorists on evil consider sadism as the psychological “essence” of evil (McGinn 1997; Perrett
2002; Steiner 2002), whereas others would merely label it as sufficient for evil actions (Eagleton,
2010). Some believe that the sadistic motive is of such a particular malicious kind that it allows for
a qualitative distinction between some act being “very wrong” and actually “evil” (Calder 2013),
whereas others see it as an extremely aggravating factor pulling toward the evil spectrum of immoral
actions (Formosa 2013). Yet, despite all the differences between these various accounts, sadism is
highly associated with evil.
9 See, for example, the chapter by Leo Zaibert in this volume.
10 For a harrowing description of the evil that sexual sadists sometimes commit, see Stone (2010).
11 Quoted and discussed in Neiman (2002: 190).
12 A phrase attributed to Alistair Crowley.
13 This type of “hard determinism” is for example defended by Galen Strawson (1994). For a discussion on
evil and moral responsibility, see the chapters by Laurens van Apeldoorn and, especially, Lars Svendsen
in this volume.
14 The truth of hedonism, of course, can be questioned. The locus classicus here is Robert Nozick’s dis-
cussion of the Experience Machine (1974: 42–5).
15 “To desire that people behave selfishly is not to desire that any of them come out on top; nor is it the
desire that oneself come out on top; it is simply to desire a particular state of affairs, namely, that each
person follows a certain rule [that is] to do what is most in his self-interest” (Jesse Kalin quoted in Regis
1980: 56–7).
16 But consider: if sadism was so far removed from us, then why would we label Sade’s work as pornographic?
Where would the appeal – the danger, the need for censorship – come from?
17 I am thankful to Stefan Niklas for commenting on an earlier version of this paragraph.
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Thomas Nys
References
Blanchot, M. (2004) “Sade’s Reason,” in Lautréamont and Sade, translated by S. Kendall and M. Kendall,
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Butler, J. (2006) “Beauvoir on Sade: Making Sexuality into an Ethic,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Simone de Beauvoir, C. Card (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Calder, T. (2013) “Is Evil Just Very Wrong?” Philosophical Studies 163: 177–96.
Carter, D. (2011) Marquis de Sade, London: Hesperus Press.
de Beauvoir, S. (1953) “Must We Burn Sade?” in Marquis de Sade: An Essay by Simone de Beauvoir, trans-
lated by Annette Michelson, New York: Grove.
de Wijze, S. (2017) “Small-Scale Evil,” The Journal of Value Inquiry 52: 25–35.
Gorer, G. (1964) The Life and Ideas of Marquis de Sade, London: Cox and Wyman.
Eagleton, T. (2010) On Evil, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press.
Formosa, P. (2013) “Evil, Wrongs, and Dignity: How to Test a Theory of Evil.” The Journal of Value
Inquiry 47: 235–53.
Haddock, B., Roberts, P., and Sutch, P. (2011) Evil in Contemporary Political Thought, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Horkheimer, M., and Adorno, T. (2002) The Dialectic of Enlightenment, edited by Edmund Jephcott, trans-
lated by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Lacan, J. (1963) “Kant avec Sade,” Critique 191: 291–313.
Lauwaert, L. (2014) Markies de Sade: Essays over ethiek en kliniek, literatuur en natuur, Kalmthout: Pelckmans.
Laws, R.D., and O’Donohue T.W. (2008) Sexual Deviance: Theory, Assessment, and Treatment, New York:
Guilford Press.
Marchak, C. (1990) “The Joy of Transgression: Bataille and Kristeva,” Philosophy Today 34(4): 354–63.
McGinn, C. (1997) Evil, Ethics, and Fiction, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Neiman, S. Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Nietzsche, F. (2001) The Gay Science, translated by J. Nauckhoff and A. Del Caro, B. Williams (ed.),
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nozick, R. (1974) Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Oxford: Blackwell.
Perrett. R. (2002) “Evil and Human Nature,” The Monist 85: 304–19.
Philips, J. (2005) How to Read Sade, New York: W.W. Norton.
Regis, E. (1980) “What is Ethical Egoism?” Ethics 91(1): 50–62.
Russell, M.M. (2014) The Divine Marquis’ Ethical Project: Sade and the “Turn to Religion” in Postmodernist
Philosophy, PhD thesis defended at Curtin University.
Sade, D.A.F. (2008) The Complete Marquis de Sade, translated by P. Gilette, Los Angeles, CA: Holloway
House.
Scarre, G. (2000) “Can Evil Attract?” The Heytrop Journal 41: 303–17.
Steiner, H. (2002) “Calibrating Evil,” The Monist 85: 183–93.
Stone, M. (2004) “Sexual Sadism: A Portrait of Evil,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and
Dynamic Psychiatry 38(1): 133–57.
Strawson, G. (1994) “The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility,” Philosophical Studies 75(1/2): 5–24.
Surkis, J. (1996) “No Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an Eye: Transgression and Masculinity in
Bataille and Foucault,” Diacritics 26: 18–30.
Weithman, P. (2010) Why Political Liberalism? On Rawls’s Political Turn, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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10
NIETZSCHE’S CRITIQUE OF
MORALITY AND HIS EFFORT
TO CREATE AN EVALUATION
“BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL”
Paul van Tongeren
Introduction
From his earliest texts and until the very end of Nietzsche’s writing, evil constitutes an
important theme in his thinking. In his reflections on evil Nietzsche is almost always deal-
ing with moral evil. In the preface to On the Genealogy of Morals he writes that “the problem
of the origin of evil pursued me even as a boy of thirteen” (GM, Preface 3), and one can
still find hypotheses on the origin of evil in his final, posthumously published works (The
Anti-Christ and Ecce Homo). While his thoughts on evil developed over the years, they are
characterized by a great deal of continuity and consistency. That it is nevertheless not easy to
summarize his thoughts is, among other reasons, because Nietzsche’s writing is intentionally
unsystematic and experimental, often hyperbolic and always polemical.
One other reason why Nietzsche’s thoughts on evil are difficult to present and might be per-
plexing is because they do not easily fit in the main discussions as we find them in the history of
philosophy. On the whole one could say that, while traditional philosophy solved the problem
of (meta)physical evil (i.e., the evil that affects us and ultimately coincides with the imperfection
of reality) by labeling it as a moral evil (either as malum poenae or as malum culpae), and explaining
moral evil with the metaphysical notion of freedom, Nietzsche clearly heads in a different direc-
tion. He replaces metaphysics with anthropology (see Wulf 1999, p. 355) and labels moral evil as
a moral interpretation of what one rather should call physical evil: pain, oppression, cruelty, etc.
are not moral evil in and of themselves but rather are natural phenomena, condemned as moral
evil by those who suffer under them and who “invent” freedom to justify that condemnation.
That same mechanism has been employed with respect to natural phenomena such as light-
ning: “what is unpredictable, e.g. lightning, is evil” (NF 1880 4[122]). Amongst other ways,
Nietzsche criticizes this procedure by denying freedom and responsibility. That places him in
opposition to Kant, whose theory of radical evil has, however (and different to what is suggested
by Schulte 1988), hardly left any traces in Nietzsche’s thought. The most prominent interlocu-
tors and influences on Nietzsche’s views on evil are, apart from Schopenhauer (see Dews 2008,
ch.4), mostly contemporary authors such as Paul Rée and Herbert Spencer, who do not play an
important role in the history of philosophy.
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Paul van Tongeren
For all these reasons it comes to no surprise that in the secondary literature on Nietzsche,
which is vast, the concept “evil” itself receives remarkably little attention. The term does not
even come up in the index of The Oxford Handbook on Nietzsche, nor does it have its own entry
in both the Nietzsche Handbuch or in the Nietzsche Wörterbuch, and when one looks up the
term “böse” in the Weimarer Nietzsche Bibliographie it only brings up five entries of publications
between 1911 and 2010. Of course, this is partially explained by the way the term comes to the
fore in keywords like “good and evil,” “morality,” “slave morality,” etc. The literature on the
book On the Genealogy of Morals, in which Nietzsche elaborates his hypothesis on the genesis
and development of the distinction between “good and evil” most thoroughly, is extensive (see
Conway 2008, Hatab 2008, Janaway 2007, Leiter 2002, Owen 2007, Stegmaier 1994). But the
meaning of the term “evil” has itself not received any extensive research.
Three of Nietzsche’s terms are prominent and occur frequently: “böse,” “schlecht,” and
“übel.” The last of these terms occurs least, and mostly in letters. There it generally means
“bad” in the sense of bad weather, a painful feeling, a nasty smell, etc. In conjunctions like
“Übeltat” or “Übeltäter” it refers to the moral evil of the evildoer. But when used as a noun
it represents what has traditionally been taken as physical or metaphysical evil. As we will still
see, the term “schlecht” becomes important as a result of the way in which Nietzsche utilizes
it in his revaluation of the manner in which the third term, “böse,” is generally used. This
“böse,” used both adjectively and as a noun, is the most important term for our purposes and
the one that occurs most frequently in Nietzsche’s texts. The term almost always signifies moral
evil, which is the main focus of the following systematic overview, which is arranged in such a
way as to be largely chronological, but one should take into account that many of its parts will
return in subsequent phases.
Good and evil are interpretations, not realities

To make sense of what Nietzsche thinks about evil it is necessary to look at what he has to say
about the distinction between good and evil. This immediately demonstrates that Nietzsche
does not simply maintain a certain position within that distinction in order to develop a theory
of evil from that position, but rather that he sets out to question this very distinction. He does
not so much ask what evil is or where it comes from but rather asks why we have called some
things good and others evil, and what may have resulted from those designations.
Nietzsche’s earliest works already put forward the thesis that the moral distinction between
good and evil is a human interpretation with no grounding in reality: “[o]n their own neither
good nor bad actions exist” (NF 1876 23[152]). This thesis can take several forms. The early
Nietzsche tends to present this view as an insight of the pre-Platonic Greeks. Sometimes he
writes that the Greeks deified both good and evil; at other times he claims that their gods stood
beyond good and evil (NF 1884 26[193]). Of course, this does not mean that the Greeks did
not recognize a distinction between good and evil: they certainly did, but could do so without
renouncing what was deemed evil. Instead they recognized not just the reality but also the
necessity of evil:
[o]ne granted to the evil and suspicious, to the animal and backward . . . a moderate
discharge, and did not strive after their total annihilation. . . . [They had] no desire
to deny even evil altogether [but were] satisfied if it keeps itself within bounds and
refrains from wholesale slaughter or inner subversion.
(AOM 220)
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Nietzsche’s critique of morality
What Nietzsche is focusing on and what he tries to get rid of is the condemning implication
that accompanies the moral distinction.
It is really from Human, All Too Human onwards that the perspective of the Gods is replaced
by a “scientific” description of nature, from which the moral distinction is once again absent:
“it is quite obvious that the world is neither good nor evil, let alone the best of all or the worst
of all worlds, and that these concepts ‘good’ and ‘evil’ possess meaning only when applied to
men” (HAH 28). People call one thing good and another evil. But because they do so from
a human perspective, because “[a]ll ‘evil’ acts are motivated by the drive to preservation,”
these acts cannot be labeled evil in and of themselves: “so motivated . . . they are not evil”
(HAH 99). His naturalistic perspective really causes the distinction between good and evil to
disappear: “between good and evil actions there is no difference in kind, but at the most one
of degree. Good actions are sublimated evil ones; evil actions are coarsened, brutalized good
ones” (HAH 107).
Nietzsche argues that those actions which are called evil are in fact morally neutral, or even
“good,” since, as he points out, “people underrate the value of evil acts” (NF 1876 19[34]). “All
‘evil’ acts are motivated by the drive to preservation or, more exactly, by the individual’s inten-
tion of procuring pleasure and avoiding displeasure; so motivated, however, they are not evil”
(HAH 99). Matters usually described as being “evil” are in fact entirely natural and therefore
not evil (“Egoism is not evil, because the idea of one’s ‘neighbour’ . . . is very weak in us”: HAH
101), and may even turn out to be good: “it is often in vices . . . that our good inclinations
gather their springwater in order to break through more powerful” (NF 1876 18[18]). All “evil
affects” are required for an individual to come into being (NF 1880 6[153]). And it may even
be necessary for “mankind” and indeed for “humanity” that “evil tasks” are to be taken up: “the
frightful energies – those which are called evil – are the cyclopean architects and road-makers
of humanity” (HAH 246). And, as often, the ancient Greeks are for Nietzsche a case in point.
This view on evil does have important implications for the philosopher himself: As Nietzsche
points out, “he who became aware of how genius is produced, and desired to proceed in the
manner in which nature usually does in this matter, would have to be exactly as evil and ruth-
less as nature is” (HAH 233). Or: the person looking for knowledge “should be like nature,
neither good nor evil” (NF 1876 17[100]; also see HAH 56). This raises of course the question
what this “should” could mean if there is no longer any good or any evil. There is a prima facie
contradiction here since Nietzsche rejects all moral values as false in some sense, yet he seems
nevertheless still to be able to pronounce value judgments himself.
The task to account for this prima facie contradiction will reverberate in the further develop-
ment of Nietzsche’s thought. For these moral values, fictitious as they may be, do in fact exist
as judgments. At a specific point in time, specific actions have for specific reasons been called
“good” and others “evil.” These designations, false as they may be from a metaphysical point of
view, have nevertheless become both prevalent and self-evident: how is this possible? A pres-
entation of Nietzsche’s answer to this question requires a description and some further analysis
of the next phase of his thinking.
Diagnosis of the moral interpretation

In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche writes: “we do not accuse nature of immorality when
it sends us a thunderstorm and makes us wet; why do we call the harmful man immoral?”
(HAH 102). This formulation not only harbors criticism in the form of a rhetorical question
but also presents a real question, or even the declaration of the research question of the period
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Paul van Tongeren
to follow: if the notion of evil (and more broadly, the distinction between good and evil) is
not founded in some metaphysical reality, where does it come from? Nietzsche answers that
question in many ways, which may be characterized as being psychological (what motivates
the moral judgment?), sociological (in what kind of communities do they arise and what social
function do they fulfill?), historical (which development does it form part of?), and philosophi-
cal (what does it presuppose?) in nature. We must of course understand each of these disci-
plines in a Nietzschean manner, the one never sharply distinguished from the other. Eventually
all of these approaches will converge in what he designates (from 1887 onwards) as his project
of a “genealogy of morals” (GM), which the next section will take up. There we will find
that Nietzsche makes more explicit and elaborates on an important aspect that in his analyses
of the provenance of good and evil to which we turn now remains by and large implicit. Evil
again receives most of the attention, although it cannot be separated from the moral distinction
within which it is the opposite of the good.
In a note, Nietzsche writes that “when the satisfaction of a drive is always connected with
a feeling of prohibition and with anxiety, an aversion will be bred against it: we from now on
consider it to be evil” (NF 1880 6[204]). The question to be answered is how this connec-
tion of a drive with prohibition and anxiety is produced. From the start, and certainly from
his first aphoristic work (Human, All Too Human) onward, Nietzsche sketches all kinds of
hypotheses for a psychological explanation for the genesis of the moral fiction. People label
as “evil” that which is “incalculable” (NF 1880 4[122]), which is strange (NF 1880 4[147])
and “capricious” (D 17). The moral interpretation is used to try and get a hold on that which
escapes this control, thereby causing discomfort. By calling it “evil” it becomes something
that should not be there at all: “evil, hateful, worthy of annihilation” (GS 338). From the
perspective of a “religion of comfortableness” personal suffering is also described “as a defect of
existence” (ibid.) and personal desires only become “evil lusts” if looked at “from a Christian
predisposition” (NF 1880 7[184]).
Nietzsche reads Herbert Spencer and experiments with his utilitarian accounts for the moral
distinction, which he sometimes seems to copy (for example in Dawn 102: “what harms me is
something evil (harmful in itself); what is useful to me is something good (beneficent and advanta-
geous in itself)”) or incorporate into his own hypothesis (see HAH 39), but he will later repu-
diate this account because he picks up on a justification of morality in it (see GS 4, GM I.1).
Nietzsche’s analyses on the other hand are not aimed at a justification of morality, and instead
tend to abolish the moral distinction: “our benevolence, pity, sacrifice, our morality rests on
the very same foundation of deceit and disguise as our evil and egoism. This must be shown!”
(NF 1880 6[274]).
The philosophical analyses of the presuppositions on which the moral distinction rests con-
firm that we are dealing with deceit. The connection with primary drives like the drive for
preservation have already made clear that there is no free will to speak of. “The evil acts . . . rest
on the error that he who perpetrates them against us possesses free will, that is to say, that he
could have chosen not to cause us this harm” (HAH 99). But fictions like freedom and responsi-
bility are themselves motivated by drives that are precisely in conflict with morality: we “invent”
these fictions because they enable us to take revenge on those who harm us.
The man who experiences failure prefers to attribute this failure to the ill-will of
another rather than to chance. His incensed feelings are relieved if he imagines a
person, and not a thing, to be the cause of his failure; for one can revenge oneself on
people, while the iniquities of chance must be swallowed down.
(HAH 370)
138
It is these kinds of analyses that elucidate what Nietzsche means when he writes that “every
good originated out of an evil” (NF 1882 1[62]).
The criticism is still clearer in his sociological hypotheses, which designate evil as that which
goes against the “laws of custom” (HAH 96). The power of normality enforces itself by virtue of
the moral distinction, aided by metaphysics and religion (see HAH 141). This causes that which
is in fact individual and free to be condemned as evil, causing the “rarer, choicer, more original
spirits” to suffer as a result: “[u]nder the dominion of the morality of custom, originality of every
kind has acquired a bad conscience” (D 9). Here it becomes clear that the moral distinction
allows a certain group, namely the masses or the herd, to enforce its power at the expense of the
individual, which in turn allows the terms “good” and “evil” to have different meanings inside
and out of the dominant group. Nietzsche will elaborate on that in his later genealogy of morals
(see below). The prevalent interpretation mirrors the interests of the prevailing group, which is
in fact “the egoism of the herd” (NF 1884 25[495]).
Nietzsche does not only, and perhaps not even in the first place, criticize that interpretation,
but also and especially criticizes the fact that it self-evidently prevails as the only interpretation:
“plainly, one now knows in Europe what Socrates thought he did not know and what that
famous old serpent once promised to teach – today one ‘knows’ what is good and evil” (BGE
202). In opposition to this, he attempts to show how that which now self-evidently prevails
is in fact the product of a historical development, and thus liable to change. Outlines for such
a “history of moral sensations” can be found from his earliest aphoristic texts (see HAH 39),
always suggesting that these may eventually lead to an “overcoming of morality” and at least to
an overcoming of the (prevailing) moral distinction: “beyond good and evil” (BGE 32).
A different interpretation
An important new device for Nietzsche’s criticism of the prevailing interpretation of the moral
distinction between good and evil is his construction of a different interpretation. The fact that
certain people, communities, and cultures seek to sustain themselves and preserve their power
by calling certain things good and others bad portrays a certain element of those people, com-
munities, and cultures. But it does not mean that the manner in which they fashion the distinc-
tion is valid for other times or other kinds of people.
Nietzsche criticizes other historians and psychologists of morality for making the same mis-
take as moral philosophers have hitherto done: they overlook the actual problem of morality
because they remain within the belief in the prevailing morality (BGE 186 and GM I.1–3).
What they label as a scientific study of morality is in fact an expression of that same morality,
failing to see that it is “merely one type of human morality beside which, before which and after
which many other types, above all higher moralities, are or ought to be, possible” (BGE 202).
Nietzsche’s evocation of such a different morality receives its most definite form in his con-
struction of the so-called master morality, which contrary to the prevailing morality does not
distinguish between “good and evil” but between “good and bad.” But already long before he
develops this thought in On the Genealogy of Morals we find Nietzsche looking for a different
interpretation of morality. As early as Human, All Too Human he mentions the “twofold prehis-
tory of good and evil” (HAH 45) and posits that “higher and deeper conceptions of good and
evil” exist (HAH 56). In an elementary economy of power the strength of the one is the weak-
ness of the other, which allows for a situation where “man possesses the feeling of power he feels
and calls himself good: and it is precisely then that the others upon whom he has to discharge his
power feel and call him evil!” (D 189). This is where Nietzsche distinguishes between “[t]he evil
of the strong” and “the evil of the weak” (D 371). In this way different meanings of good and
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Paul van Tongeren
evil are quickly associated with a difference in strength or in power: “[t]he excess of strength seeks
conflict and thus becomes evil; this evil, however, is merely instrumental and therefore much less
harmful in comparison to the weak, who are evil in order to inflict damage” (NF 1880 3[114]).
This distinction between “the strong evil ones and the weak evil ones” (“die starken Bösen
und die schwachen Bösen”: NF 1882 1[35]) is developed from Beyond Good and Evil and
particularly in the Genealogy of Morals, with the aid of the distinction between (good and) evil
on the one hand and (good and) bad on the other; between “(gut und) böse” and “(gut und)
schlecht” in German.1
Where the latter term belongs in the morality of the strong or “master morality,” the former
is a part of “slave morality” (BGE 260). Nietzsche postulates that the strong first called them-
selves “good” as an expression of their self-sufficiency. Those whom they subjugated counted
as “bad.” The German “schlecht” is etymologically related to “slicht,” meaning “common,
plebeian, low” (GM I.4). Therefore “bad” does not so much express a judgment as it expresses
disdain and distancing: “[I]t should be noted immediately that in this first type of morality the
opposition of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ means approximately the same as ‘noble’ and ‘contemptible’: –
The opposition of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ has a different origin.” (BGE 260, translation adjusted; PvT).
Those that were weak and suffering under the oppression of the strong sought to free themselves
by the only means available to them: the imagination. They took imaginary revenge on their
oppressors by condemning them as “evil”: “an act of the most spiritual revenge” (GM I.7). In
turn, they could call themselves “good,” in opposition to these evil strong ones.
This “bad” of noble origin and that “evil” out of the cauldron of unsatisfied hatred –
the former an after-production, a side issue, a contrasting shade, the latter on the
contrary the original thing, the beginning, the distinctive deed in the conception of
a slave morality – how different these words “bad” and “evil” are, although they are
both apparently the opposite of the same concept “good.”
(GM I.11)
Aside from the differing meanings of “schlecht” (insignificant) and “böse” (malignant), it
is also of importance that, for the strong, “good” is the first term of the distinction, where it is
secondary for the weak. For the strong, the evaluative distinction begins with affirmation (of
themselves), where it stems from a condemnation (of the other) for the weak: “[w]hile every
noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset
says No to what is ‘outside’, what is ‘different’, what is ‘not itself”” (GM I.9).
Nietzsche’s formulation of his hypotheses in On the Genealogy of Morals is highly polemical
(the book’s subtitle identifies it as “a polemic”). He describes the two types of morality as being
in conflict with each other. “The two opposing values ‘good and bad’, ‘good and evil’ have been
engaged in a fearful struggle on earth for thousands of years” (GM I. 16). Nietzsche thinks the
slaves could in the end carry themselves through and it is they who have gained the power:
the people have won – or ‘the slaves’ or ‘the mob’ or ‘the herd’ or whatever you like
to call them. . . . The masters have been disposed of; the morality of the common man
has won. One may conceive of this victory as at the same time a blood-poisoning . . . –
I shan’t contradict; but this intoxication has undoubtedly been successful.
(GM I.9)
This victory was made possible through the mediation of the “priest,” who succeeded in
mobilizing the ressentiment of the herd (GM I.6,7 en 10).2
140
But Nietzsche is not only delineating a scene of battle; he is himself actively engaged, ener-
getically fighting against the prevailing interpretation of the time:
[w]as that the end of it? Had that greatest of all conflicts of ideals been placed ad acta
for all time? Or only adjourned, indefinitely adjourned? . . . Must the ancient fire not
some day flare up much more terribly, after much longer preparation? More: must one
not desire it with all one’s might? even will it? even promote it?
And he assumes that:
it has long since been abundantly clear what my aim is, what the aim of that dangerous
slogan is that is inscribed at the head of my last book Beyond Good and Evil. – At least
this does not mean “Beyond Good and Bad.” – –
(GM I.17 translation adjusted; PvT)
We can now take a more detailed look at the reasons for his critique of the moral (or slave
morality’s) distinction and the meaning of evil within it.
Critique
We can distinguish two strands within Nietzsche’s critique of the moral (or slave morality’s) dis-
tinction of evil: a theoretical, epistemological strand that seeks to show that that interpretation
does not correspond to reality, and a practical, normative critique showing that it is moreover
disadvantageous or even harmful for human development.
In 1876 Nietzsche already wrote that “being honest, even where evil is concerned, is bet-
ter than losing oneself in traditional morality” (WB 11), which is repeated practically verbatim
in 1882 (GS 99). The prevailing morality should not hinder knowledge. On the contrary, we
should be wary of that morality making itself master of our interpretations too easily. When we
try to understand nature, and that includes human nature, we should actually try to “be like
nature, i.e. neither good nor evil” (NF 1876 18[58]).
After stating, in Human All Too Human 28, “that these concepts ‘good’ and ‘evil’ possess
meaning only when applied to men,” Nietzsche adds that they “perhaps even here are, as they
are usually employed, unjustified.” At times Nietzsche seems to conclude from this that we
should describe nature separate from any moral valuation, but it more often leads him to a dif-
ferent conclusion. For it would be an equally poor representation of reality to deny these factual
evaluations, not only because they factually exist but also because humans are simply evaluating
animals, even “the evaluating animal as such” (GM II.8), and Nietzsche the author is no excep-
tion to this. We will see how his description becomes tangled up in an evaluation.
Nietzsche will in the first place analyze both that which is called “good” and what is called
“evil” and seek to understand why value is attributed in the way it is. Because what is called evil
is often swept under the carpet, he will proceed to pay special attention to it. It might be called
the core motivation of Nietzsche’s thoughts on evil, that he is after “a greater honesty in the
effort to make the evil characteristics come to light” (NF 1880 3[6]).
It might seem difficult to combine this “honesty” with a peculiar characteristic of Nietzsche’s
work on evil that has often lead to misinterpretations and an unmerited criticism: on the one
hand he seems to adopt the utilitarian hypotheses on the genesis of moral evaluations (see above)
but on the other hand he seems to criticize them. To explain this we have to recall the way he
distinguishes between different types of morality as we saw in the previous section. The reason
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for his paradoxical combination of criticism and adoption of utilitarian hypotheses lies after all in
the fact that he understands the evaluation from the perspective of the type of person making it.
What is thought useful to one kind of person does not necessarily make it advantageous for the
other. And because Nietzsche, as we have seen, himself chooses a side in the battle of morals,
he is both able to criticize a normative discourse that does not recognize itself as partial while
engaging in normative discourse himself. Whosoever immediately labels “every natural inclina-
tion” as a “sickness,” whoever posits “that man’s inclinations and instincts are evil” commits a
“great injustice against our nature, against all nature” (GS 294).
This brings us to the second strand of Nietzsche’s criticism: the practical normative strand.
The slave morality interpretation, which sees nature as evil, is not only false when it identifies
nature with its interpretation thereof, but is also harmful to and dangerous for the development
of that nature. After all, the condemnation of evil is effective, however unjust it may be. It frus-
trates the expression of what presents itself from out of nature. And the continual frustration of
a powerful striving makes a person malicious (WB 2). This goes for the pessimistic expectation
(the person “who always expects the worse, will become evil, hostile, suspicious, agitated; that is
the result of pessimistic ways of thinking” NF 1880 3[46]), but even more so for the moral judg-
ment that makes humankind responsible for its own failing: “[h]ow evil mankind made itself by
ascribing its lack of ability to its will” (NF 1880 3[127]). And it goes most strongly for the moral
condemnation of personal desire. That desire becomes evil because it is condemned: “the pest
of passion is not that troublesome if one does not consider it evil: just as the movement of the
bowels fails to thrust us into an existential crisis” (NF 1880 7[8]). “To think a thing evil means to
make it evil” (D 76). The “evil eye” of moralists like St. Paul is aimed at the “annihilation of the
passions” and causes humans to be angry and unhappy (GS 139).
Nietzsche does not only criticize the repression of passions because repression causes them to
become painful and malicious. With his “evil wisdom” (NF 1883 12[1]), he will also praise the
most strongly condemned desires as being good, because “[e]vil must be preserved” (NF 1882
1[48]), i.e., what is – undeservedly – called “evil,” but in fact is natural force and creativity, must
be salvaged from annihilation through moral condemnation. Zarathustra’s speech “on the three
evils” is the most elaborate version of this:
What are the three best cursed things in the world? I shall put them on the scales. Sex,
the lust to rule, selfishness: these three have so far been best cursed and worst reputed
and lied about; these three I will weigh humanly well. . . . Sex: for the rabble, the
slow fire on which they are burned; for all worm-eaten wood and all stinking rags, the
ever-ready rut and oven. Sex: for free hearts, innocent and free, the garden happiness
of the earth, the future’s exuberant gratitude to the present. . . . The lust to rule –
but who would call it lust when what is high longs downward for power? . . . oh,
who were to find the right name for such longing? “Gift-giving virtue” – thus
Zarathustra once named the unnamable. And at that time it also happened – and
verily it happened for the first time – that his word pronounced selfishness blessed,
the wholesome, healthy selfishness that wells from a powerful soul – from a power-
ful soul to which belongs the high body, beautiful, triumphant, refreshing, around
which everything becomes a mirror. . . . The self enjoyment of such bodies and souls
calls itself “virtue.”
(Z III Evils)
The condemned passions may be evil for the weak and for the herd, but they are virtues for the
strong individual (“in order for the individual to appear splendidly, all evil affects must be there”
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NF 1880 6[153]). One must be strong enough to be able to enjoy one’s natural desires without
being corrupted by them. These passions are moreover desperately needed in battle against the
prevailing morality and its dominion. For “whoever must be a creator in good and evil, verily,
he must be an annihilator and break values. Thus the highest evil belongs to the highest good-
ness: but this is creative” (Z II Self-Overcoming). According to Nietzsche destruction is the
necessary complement of creation. And “[t]he evil ones are venerable as destroyers, for destruc-
tion is necessary” (NF 1883 16[84]).
An alternative ideal and the trouble of realizing it

Nietzsche’s criticism of the morality of good and evil is guided by an ideal of liberation:
to free humankind of its bad conscience (D 148), of its shame for its own evil (NF 1882
4[56]) and of the disastrous consequences they have. And by its liberation nature too will
be set free (Z III Evils). This liberation is to bring us “beyond good and evil,” or “at least a
point beyond our good and evil” (GS 380). Difficult as this already may be, this perspective
“beyond good and evil” is subsequently the condition of possibility and preparation for a
view on the actual ideal:
the ideal of the most high-spirited, alive, and world-affirming human being who has
not only come to terms and learned to get along with whatever was and is, but who
wants to have what was and is repeated into all eternity
(BGE 56)
Nietzsche is not so much describing an ideal that he knows already, let alone presenting it in
terms that are easily understandable to everyone, but he is rather pointing at something that he
is hoping for without even knowing exactly what it is himself.
It is therefore no accident that it is primarily the fictional figure of Zarathustra who is initially
staged as this liberator (see Z I Passions, Z I Criminal and many other places), where Dionysus
fulfills this role later on. As Zarathustra did earlier on (NF 1883 17[13], Z III Convalescent 2),
Dionysus later becomes the one to try and make humans “more evil” (“böser”):
“I often reflect how I might yet advance him and make him stronger, more evil, and
more profound than he is.” “Stronger, more evil and more profound?” I asked star-
tled. “Yes,” he said once more; “stronger, more evil, and more profound; also more
beautiful” – and at that the tempter god smiled.
(BGE 295)
Both in his thesis that good and evil are not given in nature but exist only as human interpre-
tations and in his ideal of total affirmation, Nietzsche feels akin to both Heraclites and Spinoza.
According to Wulf (1999, p. 360), this affirmation of life is a radical aestheticizing. Thomas
Mann was one of the first to confront Nietzsche’s ideas on evil with the holocaust, dismissing
them as misplaced romanticizing (Niemeyer 2009; cf. Visser 2012 for a more constructive con-
frontation between Nietzsche’s thoughts and the evil of the holocaust). Goedert (1981) points
out the danger Nietzsche’s thought on evil runs to be taken up in an elitist ideology.
The fact that the ideal is represented by fictional figures such as Zarathustra and Dionysus
has to do with a problem that becomes increasingly clear to Nietzsche. He has distinguished
the evaluation of the slaves from that of the masters, and he is anticipating new life-affirming
values, but he sees ever clearer how hard it is to prevent the nihilistic tendency of traditional
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morality, which consists of denying, ignoring, and annihilating real, actual life, from returning
in this new evaluation:
Once one has developed a keen eye for the symptoms of decline, one understands
morality, too – one understands what is hided under its most sacred names and
value formulas: impoverished life, the will to the end, the great weariness. Morality
negates life.
(WA, preface)
But it is not easy to get rid of this seductive Circe (see D, Preface 3). If morality is harmful
to a thriving life because it denies natural reality on behalf of an ideal, how could new values
avoid doing the same? Nietzsche himself wonders whether or not his critique of morality did
not “simply carr[y] the contempt for man one step further” (GS 346).
How does one prevent the new evaluation from being nihilistic once more? Amongst other
things, Nietzsche will formulate his ideal as a total affirmation, condemning nothing. But is
the detachment of good and evil not the ideal of Buddhism too (NF 1887 10[190]), a straight-
forwardly nihilistic religion according to Nietzsche? He even finds the figure of Jesus to be
reminiscent of an ideal that is almost identical to what he himself strives for: “no longer resisting
anyone or anything, neither the evil nor the evil-doer – love as the sole, as the last possibility of
life” (AC 30); “[n]ot to defend oneself, not to grow angry, not to make responsible . . . But not
to resist even the evil man – to love him. . .” (AC 35). Is Nietzsche’s ideal of total affirmation
not once more an “ascetic ideal,” the concept at the hand of which he analyses nihilism in the
third essay of On the Genealogy of Morals?
Nietzsche seems to become increasingly aware of this problem himself: “Beyond Good and
Evil: these things spell trouble” (NF 1885 1[211]). One the one hand, this leads to a type of
humility. In the third part of the book that bears his name, Zarathustra discovers that he too
must still learn to free himself of it (see Z III Vision, Gravity, Convalescent), and one might
question the extent to which he manages to do so. Nietzsche himself writes in a note that “I
only imagined to get beyond good and evil” (NF 1882 6[1], my italics PvT). It is not without
reason that the book that bears that last expression as its title is but a “prelude to a philosophy of
the future” (BGE, my italics PvT). In one of the strongest expressions of Nietzsche’s ideal of
total affirmation, it simultaneously becomes clear how far he is still removed from it:
I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even
want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all-
in-all on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.
(GS 276)
“Some day,” which is to say: not for a while.

The rift between this “some day” and the present situation, on the other hand, leads to an
extreme aggression. In one of his final texts, The Anti-Christ, he appears to identify Christianity
with the morality of good and evil, and combats it with the fiercest of expressions:
morality as a fundamental degradation of the imagination, as an “evil eye” for all

things. What is Jewish, what is Christian morality? Chance robbed of its innocence;
misfortune dirtied by the concept “sin”; well-being as a danger, as “temptation”; phys-
iological indisposition poisoned by the worm of conscience.
(AC 25)
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Extreme aggression and humility, scathing criticism and total affirmation: how can these be recon-
ciled? A note from 1888, titled “on the asceticism of the strong,” may provide us with a suggestion:
[s]tep by step learn to find one’s way to the “Beyond Good and Evil”. First step: to
endure cruelties / to commit atrocities / Second step, more difficult: endure disgusting
things / commit disgusting things: including as preliminary practice: become ridicu-
lous, making oneself ridiculous.
(NF 1888 15[117])
Notes like these do not solve the problems of Nietzsche’s thoughts on morality, but indicate
that he himself was very much aware of these problems. And what they do make clear is that we
cannot simply evaluate his thoughts on the basis of the morality he is criticizing.
Conclusion
In conclusion we may establish that there is much continuity in the manner in which Nietzsche’s
engagement with the theme of evil is developed. Good and evil are human interpretations of
something that is of itself neither good nor evil. In the first place, this interpretation provides
insight into the kind of person providing it. From the outset Nietzsche is interested in the
question of where the prevailing interpretation originates from and how it could become so
domineering. In order to answer that question he positions himself outside of that morality for
as much as is possible. Starting from the ideals of the prevailing morality (equality, charity, com-
passion) he determines the needs of those who have shaped it. What the weak call evil is that
which they deem harmful or experience as painful. Their judging it to be evil is a condemna-
tion aimed at exterminating or destroying it. This holds both of the evil threatening them from
within (the strong urges and desires) as for that which comes from outside (those ruling over
them). Both because of the fact that this morality rules solely and self-evidently and because of
its destructive effect on strong instincts and character, Nietzsche combats this interpretation of
the moral distinction by placing against it a different one. His battle with this morality generates
the problem of his seeking to develop an affirming stance on the one hand, while vigorously
attacking that morality on the other.
While new aspects appear in the course of the development of his thought, they don’t sig-
nificantly alter the structure of the argument. His polemic becomes fiercer to the extent that
he focuses more narrowly on the self-evident rule of the one type of morality. His criticism
of the utilitarian explanations of morality he had himself previously adhered to relates to the
distinction between two kinds of people (masters and slaves), causing what is useful for the one
to be extremely detrimental to the other. And his critique of the prevailing moral distinction
becomes ever more problematized in the course of Nietzsche’s discovering that the structure
of nihilism (the judgment of factual reality in the name of an ideal) threatens to impose itself
on his own evaluations too.
A good understanding of Nietzsche’s texts on (good and) evil is impeded by his speaking
“meta-ethically” on the emerging, developing and functioning of the moral distinction on the
one hand (they inspired Michel Foucault to perform his own analyses of the mental institutions,
prison, and sexuality), while on the other he engages “ethically” with an evaluation different to
the one that came to expression in the moral distinction. The term “evil” sometimes designates
that which is condemned in the analyzed and criticized morality (pain, cruelty, discomfort),
but can also refer to Nietzsche own self-effacing critique thereof (his “böser Blick” or “böse
Weisheit”), which condemns precisely the condemnation and seeks to positively reevaluate evil.
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He moreover criticizes the prevailing interpretation with arguments that appear to hold
ground against his own interpretation too. When he combats the prevailing morality by show-
ing it “merely” to be an interpretation, this threatens to undermine his appeal to nature when
he argues for his own interpretation. Nietzsche refutes that criticism, as is well known, in
Beyond Good and Evil 22, after having there described nature as will to power: “[supposing]
this is also interpretation – and you will be eager enough to make this objection? – well, so
much the better.”
Because such interpretations are themselves expressions of will to power, for that reason
always to be in conflict with each other, Nietzsche’s own text must always be read as polemic,
even when this is not explicitly stated. But the dynamic of the polemic also makes clear that
the nihilist tendency of the prevailing morality may easily slip back into any critique thereof.
This discovery comes to expression in the ever more prominent self-referentiality of Nietzsche’s
thought (see Van Tongeren 2018).
Notes
1 Nietzsche only differentiates between the terms “böse” and “schlecht” from 1883 onwards: “[t]o be
distinguished: bad (contemptible) and evil” (NF 1883 7[69]). Until that time, he uses the terms more or
less synonymously. In 1882, for example, he still writes that “when we link the harmful with horror and
disgust, the feeling evil, bad emerges” (NF 1882 4[135], italics added; see also HAH 141 and WS 285).
2 The identification of the role of priests is related to the fact that Nietzsche connects the slave revolu-
tion in morality with the introduction of Judaism and Christianity into European culture: “the Jews,
that priestly people, who in opposing their enemies and conquerors were ultimately satisfied with
nothing less than a radical revaluation of their enemies’ values” (GM I.17). Nietzsche, in his critique
of the Jews, seems coincidentally to mainly have Christianity in mind (see GM I.17: “Which of
them has won for the present, Rome or Judea? But there can be no doubt: . . . three Jews, as is known,
and one Jewess (Jesus of Nazareth, the fisherman Peter, the rug weaver Paul, and the mother of the
aforementioned Jesus, named Mary”). Consequently, his critique of the prevailing morality and its
notion of “evil” becomes ever more entwined with his critique of Christianity (see, e.g., M 68) until
it eventually coincides with it (AC).
References
Primary sources: Nietzsche’s writings
Nietzsche’s published texts have been cited according to the English translations of the editions
listed below. I have made slight adjustments to these translations on one or two occasions. The
quotations from the unpublished notes (NF, for Nachgelassene Fragmente) have been taken from
the Kritische Studienausgabe: I have translated them myself. The sigla provide an abbreviation of
the book’s title, and the relevant part or chapter therein and the number of the section of the
note where applicable, or, in the case of the unpublished notes, the year and fragment number.
The index of the texts consulted is listed alphabetically according to the sigla.
(AC) The Anti-Christ, in: F. Nietzsche, Twilight of The Idols / The Anti-Christ, translated by R. Hollingdale.
London: Penguin, 1990.
(AOM) “Assorted Opinions and Maxims,” in: F. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free
Spirits [HAH], Part II, pp. 215–99.
(BGE) Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, translated by W. Kaufmann. New
York: Vintage, 1966.
(D) Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, translated by R. Hollingdale. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1986.
(EH) Ecce Homo, translated by W. Kaufmann and R. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1969.
146
(GM) On the Genealogy of Morals, translated by W. Kaufmann and R. Hollingdale. New York:
Vintage, 1969.
(GS) The Gay Science, translated by W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974.
Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, translated by R. Hollingdale. New York:
(HAH)
Cambridge University Press, 1986a.
(NF) Nachgelassene Fragmente. Kritische Studienausgabe. Munich and Berlin: dtv/de Gruyter, 1980,
Vol. 7–13.
(WA) The Case of Wagner, in: F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, translated by
W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1967.
(WB) “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,” in: F. Nietzsche, Unfashionable Observations, translated by
Richard T. Gray. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995, pp. 257–331.
(WS) “The Wanderer and His Shadow,” in: F Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free
Spirits [HAH], Part II, pp. 301–95.
(Z) Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in: The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by W. Kaufmann, New
York: Penguin, 1968, pp.103–439.
Other references
Conway, Daniel (2008) Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality. A Reader’s Guide, London: Continuum.
Georges Goedert (1981) “Zur Notwendigkeit des Bösen in Nietzsches Projekt vom Übermenschen,” in:
Perspektiven der Philosophie 1981, pp. 89–101.
Janaway, Christopher (2007) Beyond Selflessness. Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Hatab, Lawrence J. (2008) Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality. An Introduction, Cambridge:
Leiter, B. (2002) Nietzsche on Morality, London and New York: Routledge.
Niemeyer, Chr. (2009) “das Böse,” in: Chr. Niemeyer (Hrsg.), Nietzsche-Lexikon, Darmstadt: Wissen
schaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
Owen, David (2007) Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality, Stocksfield: Acumen.
Schulte, C. (1988) radikal böse. Die Karriere des Bösen von Kant bis Nietzsche, Munich: Fink.
Stegmaier, W. (1994) Nietzsches “Genealogie der Moral,” Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
Van Tongeren, Paul (2018), Friedrich Nietzsche and European Nihilism, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars.
Visser, Gerard (2012) “Het kwaad als moreel verzinsel,” in: G. Visser, In gesprek met Nietzsche, Nijmegen:
Vantilt 2012, pp. 215–36.
Wulf, C. (1999) “Das Böse im Denken Nietzsches,” in: A. Schirmer and R. Schmidt (Hg.), Entdecken und
Verraten. Zu Leben und Werk Friedrich Nietzsches, Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, pp. 353–60.
147
11
HANNAH ARENDT’S
DOUBLE ACCOUNT OF EVIL
Political superfluousness and moral
thoughtlessness
Peg Birmingham
the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in
Europe—as death became the fundamental problem after the last war.
(Arendt 1994: 134)
Hannah Arendt’s thought seemingly provides two different accounts of evil. In her seminal work,
The Origins of Totalitarianism, she claims that evil is radical, tied to the systematic production of
superfluousness, while in Eichmann in Jerusalem she claims that evil is banal, emerging out of the
thoughtlessness of its perpetrators. On the face of it, these two accounts seem very different and
impossible to hold together in one coherent account of evil. Arendt herself suggests that she did
not hold the two accounts together, but instead moved from her initial claim of evil’s radicalness
to her later claim of its banality. Arendt’s response to Gershom Scholem, who was highly criti-
cal of her notion of the banality of evil, supports the view that she rethought her notion of evil:
You are quite right: I changed my mind and do no longer speak of “radical evil.” . . . It
is indeed my opinion now that evil is never “radical,” that it is only extreme, and that
it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension.1
(Arendt 2007: 470–71)
Arendt’s reply to Scholem, however, is nuanced and does not indicate a simple reversal of
her initial position on the nature of evil. While Arendt gives up the language of radical evil
insofar as it is neither demonic nor deep, she never changes her mind that evil is extreme and
is tied to the systematic political production of superfluousness. Still further, Arendt augments
her initial account of extreme evil with her later account of evil’s banality, thereby giving a
double account of evil. This double account of evil claims that the political evil of producing
worldly superfluousness is inseparably bound to the moral evil of Eichmann’s thoughtless voice
of conscience. More precisely, Arendt’s double account of evil claims that banal perpetrators are
themselves produced by the radical evil of superfluousness.
In what follows, I first take up Arendt’s discussion of radical evil in Origins of Totalitarianism,
arguing that Arendt provides a genealogy of the political-economic production of superfluousness
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Hannah Arendt’s double account of evil
that begins at the outset of modernity and finds its extreme form in the Nazis’ death camps.
In the second part of the chapter, I turn to Arendt’s account of Eichmann’s reversal of moral
conscience, a reversal that accounts for his thoughtless banality. I argue that his thoughtless
banality emerges from the political-economic production of superfluousness. As just stated,
Arendt’s double account of evil reveals that political-economic superfluousness is the condition
for Eichmann’s moral thoughtlessness. In conclusion, I argue that this inseparability of superflu-
ousness and banality is the reason why Arendt argues that extreme evil was not defeated with the
defeat of totalitarianism and continues to be the fundamental problem of our age.
Radical evil and the systematic production of superfluousness

At the conclusion of Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt writes,
We may say that radical evil has emerged in connection with a system in which all men
have become equally superfluous. . . . The danger of the corpse factories and holes of
oblivion is that today, with populations and homelessness everywhere on the increase,
masses of people are continuously rendered superfluous if we continue to think the
world in utilitarian terms.
(Arendt 1951: 459)
She goes on to note, “Factories of annihilation . . . demonstrate the swiftest solution to the
problem of overpopulation, of economically superfluous and socially rootless human masses,
and are as much of an attraction as a warning” (Arendt 1951: 459). While it might be comfort-
ing to think that Arendt is describing the systematic production of superfluousness of the death
camps, she allows for no such comfort. The death camps were the final step of a genealogy of
superfluousness that:
owes its start to a monstrous process of expropriation such as has never occurred before
in history in this form—that is, without military conquest. Expropriation, the initial
accumulation of capital—that was the law according to which capitalism arose and
according to which it has advanced step by step.
(Arendt 1969: 211)
Importantly, Arendt argues that the law of expropriation not only marks the beginning of the
“monstrous process of accumulation” (Arendt 1969: 211) but continues to animate the process
as it picks up increasing force with the political emancipation of the bourgeoisie, whose desire
for unlimited acquisition and accumulation moves imperialist politics from the nation-state to
the global stage, a move in which the economically superfluous within the nation-state align
themselves with the very capitalist forces that created them, the alliance producing thousands of
politically and economically superfluous human beings globally.
Before proceeding further, we need to linger over two important points regarding Arendt’s
account of radical evil. First, her account of the production of superfluousness is genealogical,
not causal. While her account moves from the imperialist production of superfluousness in
which “all is permitted” to its totalitarian production in the death camps in which “everything
is possible,” no causal necessity links imperialism and totalitarianism. Instead, the imperialist
production of economic and political superfluousness is one of the elements that crystallizes
in the event of totalitarianism and the perfect superfluousness of the death camps. That said,
Arendt claims that, without imperialism’s claim to world politics, “the totalitarian claim to
149
Peg Birmingham
global rule would not have made sense” (Arendt 1951: 164). We can add that without imperial-
ism’s unleashing of worldly superfluousness and its accompanying violence on the world stage
the radical evil of totalitarian superfluousness would not have attempted a global foothold.
Second, it is important to keep in mind Arendt’s distinction between the political and the
moral. Her claim that radical evil is inseparable from the emergence of imperialism and global
politics indicates that for her radical evil is a political rather than a moral phenomenon. While
Arendt does not argue for a strict separation of the two spheres (as we will see in our analysis
of Eichmann and the problem of conscience), nevertheless, she insists on their distinction. The
concern of the moral sphere, she argues, is a concern with the self, a concern for one’s individual
conscience and its voice that tells one “not to do anything that you will not be able to live
with.” Somewhat idiosyncratically, Arendt claims that morality’s concern is unworldly:
conscience is unpolitical. It is not primarily interested in the world where the wrong
is committed or in the consequences that the wrong will have for the future course of
the world. It does not say, with Jefferson, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that
God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.”
(Arendt 1969: 61)
By contrast, the concern of politics is for the world and not the individual self. Faced with
the injustice of slavery, Jefferson trembles for his country, not for his own conscience. A politi-
cal wrong, she argues, is committed against the world and the possibility of its future endur-
ance. Arendt’s double account of evil reveals that when the political concern is no longer with
worldly endurance, as is the case with the political production of worldly superfluousness, the
perversion of the moral voice of conscience follows, moving from a voice that cannot live with
itself if it does evil to a voice that cannot live with itself if it does good.
Turning then to imperialism’s production of superfluousness, Arendt begins with the eman-
cipation of the bourgeoisie, which for her is a political event: “The central inner-European
event of the imperialist period was the political emancipation of the bourgeoisie which up to
then has been the first class in history to achieve economic pre-eminence without aspiring
to political rule” (Arendt 1951: 123). To be sure, on her reading, the bourgeoisie did not turn to
political interests out of a concern with politics but instead:
turned to politics out of economic necessity; for if it did not want to give up the capi-
talist system whose inherent law is constant economic growth, it had to impose this
law upon its home governments and to proclaim expansion to be an ultimate political
goal of foreign policy.
(Arendt 1951: 123)
At the same time, this new political principle of unlimited expansion requires that imperialism
move beyond a politics of the body politic. As Arendt puts it, “What imperialists wanted was
expansion of political power without the foundation of a body politics” (Arendt 1951: 181).
World trade requires a global politics. Arendt cites Cecil Rhodes:
“wake up to the fact that you cannot live unless you have the trade of the world,”
“that your trade is the world, and your life is the world, and not England,” and there-
fore they “must deal with these questions of expansion and retention of the world.”
(Arendt 1951: 178)
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Here again we must be cautious. Imperialism’s lack of foundation in the body politics of the
nation-state did not create an apolitical space, nor did its disregard for the democratic principles
of self-determination and the consent of the governed make it something other than political,
although certainly, it was no longer the democratic politics of the nation-state. Still further,
when Arendt writes, “The concept of unlimited expansion allowing for the unlimited accumu-
lation of capital . . . cannot be the foundation of new political bodies which need a stabilizing
force” (Arendt 1951; 137–8), she is not arguing that imperialism is apolitical; on the contrary,
imperialism’s political aim is to move beyond the confines of the nation-state. Its aim is a “poli-
tics without a body,” if by the latter is meant a limited body politic comprised of a common
tradition, language, and a body of stabilizing laws. Instead, imperialism’s explicit political aim is
the inherent instability of the political. As Arendt points out, the laws of capitalism defy the tra-
ditional notion of law as boundary and limit; they introduce limitless and boundlessness into the
laws themselves. The question then is whether a politics of unlimited expansion and boundless-
ness of the law ultimately destroys the political. Arendt’s discussion of radical evil that emerges
from this politics suggests that the answer is in the affirmative.
Arendt claims that Thomas Hobbes offers a political philosophy for the newly emergent
bourgeois class and its expansive global politics. As she puts it, “[Hobbes] is the only great phi-
losopher to whom the bourgeoisie can rightly and exclusively lay claim” (Arendt 1951: 139).
Hobbes’s description of the human being with no free will, no capacity for thought, but only
“reckoning with consequences” and absolved of all responsibility, is for her a description of this
newly emancipated class, for whom everything is based on power. As Arendt points out, for
Hobbes everything – whether in the form of knowledge or wealth – is reduced to power for
the sake of power: “Therefore, if man is actually driven by nothing but his individual interests,
desire for power must be the fundamental passion of man” (Arendt 1951: 139). The dignity of
this person is his price, determined by his function and what he will be paid for by the use of his
power; he has no intrinsic worth or dignity and it is the “the esteem of others that determines
his price,” an esteem that is dependent on the law of supply and demand (Arendt 1951: 139).
If dignity is determined by one’s function and the price paid for it, then those without func-
tion are superfluous, without dignity, and are owed no respect. It is not arbitrary that Arendt
begins Origins with an account of how with the rise of capitalism the Jewish people lost their
function as the “European element” within the nation-state and, therefore, became increasingly
superfluous and increasingly susceptible to violence, especially when their loss of function was
concomitant with their increasing racialization.
Arendt argues that a political space animated by the principle of unlimited power and expan-
sion is inherently violent: “Power left to itself can achieve nothing but more power, and vio-
lence administered for power’s (and not for the law’s) sake turns into a destructive principle that
will not stop until there is nothing left to violate” (Arendt 1951: 137). Going further, she argues
that the imperial state, based on this Hobbesian principle,
acquires a monopoly in killing and provides in exchange a conditional guarantee

against being killed. Security is provided by the law, which is a direct emanation from
the power monopoly of the state. . . . And as this law flows directly from absolute
power, it represents absolute necessity in the eyes of the individual who lives under it.
(Arendt 1951: 139)
The military and the police become the “functionaries of violence,” whose violence con-
tinually increases with an expanding sovereignty. Still further, the state now becomes the locus
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of “monopolized power” that demands absolute obedience. Arendt states that “[t]he blind con-
formism of bourgeois society” flows from this obedience to absolute power (Arendt 1951: 141).
Linking “blind conformism” to the citizen’s required obedience to the absolute power of the
state, Arendt is already anticipating her later thinking of the thoughtless obedience that marks
Eichmann’s banality of evil. At the same time, absolute obedience to sovereignty, whose power
takes the form of force, resolves the stability issue of an ever-expanding political space.
In an important discussion of Hobbes in The Human Condition, Arendt elaborates on his
attempt to stabilize an ever-expansive and destabilizing process of power and accumulation.
Here she focuses on Hobbes’s separation of reason from the unpredictability of human affairs:
The political philosophy of the modern age, whose greatest representative is still
Hobbes, founders on the perplexity that modern rationalism is unreal and modern
realism is irrational – which is only another way of saying that reality and human rea-
son have parted company.
(Arendt 1959: 300)
Rather than locating reality in a common world, Arendt points out that Hobbes locates it in
the interiority of the passions, which are “the same in every specimen of the species man-kind.
Here again we find the image of the watch, this time applied to the human body and then used
for the movements of the passions” (Arendt 1958: 299). The inherent disorderliness and unpre-
dictability of the passions is made orderly and stabilized through the fabrication of the great
machine, Leviathan, whose head (literally) is the absolute sovereign. The Hobbesian sovereign
rules through the universal laws of reason that are now nothing other than the raison d’etre
of the state. As Foucault points out, in a reading of the modern state very similar to Arendt’s,
sovereign reason is no longer understood as a system of laws to which the just or rational state
should adhere; instead, it is “the very being of the state and as such commands the law and sus-
pends the law as is necessary” (Foucault 1976: 262). The antinomy between law and violence is
dissolved. The sovereign machine can use both in the service of its paramount concern with the
unceasing expansion of power and wealth. Hobbes’s stabilization of individual passions in the
absolute will and reason of the sovereign with its force of necessity sets the stage for totalitarian-
ism’s attempt through terror not just to stabilize but to eradicate altogether the human capacity
of unpredictability. If Hobbes stabilizes unpredictability in the absolute sovereign, totalitarian-
ism goes further, attempting to wipe unpredictability off the face of the Earth. At the same time,
reason’s separation from the reality of human affairs is a key element at work in Eichmann’s
remoteness from reality that marks his thoughtless banality.
As noted earlier, Arendt argues that the law of expropriation, “the original sin of simple
robbery (Marx) must be repeated again and again” (Arendt 1969: 211). Important is Arendt’s
implicit claim that expropriation is more fundamental than exploitation in the unleashing of
imperialist capital; it is the original sin or evil upon which other evils or sins follow. (Again,
this is a political evil, unleashed upon the world by a new political-economic structure; it is not
theological nor is it located in the depths of an individual soul.) In other words, exploitation
is founded on the law of expropriation and its production of superfluousness. This production
takes the form of surplus profit and surplus labor. As Marx points out, “The working popula-
tion therefore produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it is itself
made relatively superfluous and it does this to an extent which is always increasing” (Marx
1977: 783). In view of the violence that is to come, Marx aptly names this surplus population
“the disposable industrial reserve army” (Marx 1977: 783, emphasis added). As Marx notes, this
surplus population, both hopeless and stagnant, is “set free” to find another function. In Arendt’s
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analysis the new function is to become a functionary of violence in service to the capitalist
forces that produced them. Rather than Marx’s emancipatory figure of the proletariat, this
dark underbelly of capitalism was a superfluous stratum who bore a grudge against society that
had no use for them and who had a great penchant for violence. Contrary to Marx, Arendt
argues that the economically superfluous “could not be identified with the growing industrial
working class” but instead “[were] the product of bourgeois society, directly produced by
it and therefore never quite separable from it” (Arendt 1951: 189). Indeed, Arendt argues
that this group did not want to leave bourgeois society, but instead “had been spat out by
it . . . simply victims without use or function. Their only choice had been a negative one, a
decision against the workers’ movements” (Arendt 1951: 189). For Arendt, this new alliance
between superfluous labor and superfluous wealth was so contrary to Marx’s theory of class
struggle that he completely overlooked it and thereby also overlooked “the actual dangers of
the imperialist attempt—to divide mankind into master races and slave races, into higher and
lower breeds, into colored peoples and white men” (Arendt 1951: 152).
Armed with the doctrine of race, imperialism sent this superfluous population abroad where
it carried out atrocities that in Arendt’s view provided the model that totalitarianism would
emulate and surpass. Arriving in noncapitalist countries, the colonizing alliance between capi-
tal and its superfluous stratum expropriated not only land and natural resources but also the
political and legal status of colonized subjects; indeed, it expropriated their very dignity as
human beings. Again, this violent process of expropriation is the condition for the violent
exploitation that follows.2
As just noted, the violent process of expropriation is driven by the ideology of racism, which
Arendt claims has its roots in the race-thinking of the eighteenth century but which became a
political and economic ideological weapon with the rise of imperialism and its colonization of
the world. Noting the “inner contradiction” between on the one hand the nation-state princi-
ples of limited territory, equality, and the consent of the governed, and on the other imperial-
ism’s principle of unlimited expansion that recognizes neither borders, equality, nor consent,
Arendt asks, “Why did nationalism develop such a clear tendency toward imperialism?” (Arendt
1951: 152). She answers that the national body was “deeply split into classes, and the cohesion of
the nation was jeopardized” (Arendt 1951: 152). Imperialism offered a solution insofar as unlim-
ited expansion was something around which the nation could unite, especially as the unity was
based not on class struggle, but the race factor. She points out that the nation-state’s emphasis
on the homogeneity of the national will “favored the oppression of foreign people’s abroad.”
Still further, Arendt argues that race-thinking was the “ever-present shadow” that haunted the
nation-state from its inception:
For the truth is that race-thinking entered the scene of active politics the moment the
European peoples had prepared, and to a certain extent realized, the new body poli-
tic of the nation. . . . Race-thinking, rather than class-thinking, was the ever-present
shadow accompanying the development of the comity of European nations, until it
finally grew to be the powerful weapon for the destruction of those nations.
(Arendt 1951:161)
While race-thinking is the shadow that haunts the rise of the nation-state, Arendt argues that
such thinking might well have “disappeared in due time together with other irresponsible opin-
ions of the nineteenth century” (Arendt 1951: 183) if it had not been for the new era of impe-
rialism, which, she argues, “would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible
‘explanation’ and excuse for its deeds” (Arendt 1951: 184). In other words, the sin of robbery
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required the additional sin of racism to keep it going and to legitimate its “destructive forces”
(Arendt 1951: 184). Again, it is important to note that the “excuse” was ready to hand with the
emergence of the modern nation-state and its notion of a homogeneous people that excluded
all those who were foreign to the bounded national body.
As noted at the outset, the conditions for radical evil include both economic and political
superfluousness. Arendt argues that the Minority Treaties after World War I produced politi-
cal superfluousness, whereby hundreds of thousands of stateless refugees were made politically
superfluousness, outside of any legal or political protection. The Minority Treaties, Arendt
argues, “said in plain language what until then had been only implied in the working system
of nation-states, namely, that only nationals could be citizens, only people of the same national
origin could enjoy the full protection of legal institutions” (Arendt 1951: 275). This last exposed
the illusion of the universality of human rights. As Arendt puts it, “the arrival of the stateless
people brought an end to this illusion” (Arendt 1951: 276). Only those who belonged to the
unified, homogenous will of the nation had citizenship and therefore human rights. Lacking any
protection under the auspices of human rights, Arendt traces the genealogy of the production
of political superfluity – the complete loss of political status – through the loss of the right to
asylum to the impossibility of repatriation or naturalization because neither the country of origin
nor the country swamped with refugees wanted them and, finally, to the “sovereign insistence
on the right to expulsion,” making statelessness an illegal act whose enforcement was turned
over to the police” (Arendt 1951: 283). The refugees and stateless suffered a political expropria-
tion as violent as the economic expropriation of the peasantry. As Arendt puts it:
The calamity of the rightless is . . . that they no longer belong to any community
whatsoever. Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law
exists for them; not that they are oppressed, but that no one wants even to oppress
them. Only in the last stage of a rather lengthy process is their right to live threatened;
only if they remain perfectly “superfluous” if nobody can be found to “claim” them,
may their lives be in danger.
(Arendt 1951: 295–6)
Arendt’s words are chilling in light of the latest (2016) UN report on the number of forcefully
displaced and politically superfluous stateless and refugees: 65.5 million, an unprecedented num-
ber that continues to increase.
As stated at the outset, for Arendt the unprecedented production of economic and political
superfluousness provided the key elements that crystallized in totalitarianism’s production of the
“perfect superfluousness” at work in the radical evil of the death camps. Speaking of the concentra-
tion camps and the production of “living corpses” for the “mass manufacture of corpses,” she writes:
[T]he silent consent to such unprecedented conditions are the products of those events
which in a period of political disintegration suddenly and unexpectedly made hun-
dreds of thousands of human beings homeless, stateless, outlawed and unwanted, while
millions of human beings were made economically superfluous and socially burden-
some by unemployment.
(Arendt 1951: 447)
Arendt’s genealogy chronicles three deaths that together produce “living corpses” and the
radical evil of perfect superfluousness: the death of the juridical person, the death of the moral
person, and, finally, the death of human uniqueness and individuality.
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The death of the juridical person occurs “by putting certain categories of people outside the
protection of the law and forcing at the same time, through the instrument of denationaliza-
tion, the nontotalitarian world into recognition of lawlessness” (Arendt 1951: 447). The last
is essential for the death of the juridical person: the nontotalitarian world’s recognition of the
sovereign right to suspend the law, including the suspension of citizenship, makes it complicit
in the lawlessness that necessarily follows. At the same time, the death of the juridical person is
produced by placing “the concentration camp outside the normal system, and by selecting its
inmates outside the normal judicial procedure in which a definite crime entails a predictable
penalty” (Arendt 1951: 447). Again, the destruction of a person’s rights and legal persona is the
prerequisite for the production of perfect superfluity.
The death of the moral person follows. Arendt understands this death as the “corruption of
human solidarity” without which no protest against injustice is possible: “Here the night has
fallen on the future. . . . To demonstrate when death can no longer be postponed is an attempt
to give death a meaning, to act beyond one’s own death” (Arendt 1951: 451–2). The corrup-
tion of human solidarity makes sacrifices meaningless and death anonymous. With this death,
two human conditions are destroyed: plurality, in which solidarity is rooted, and mortality, in
which one’s death is one’s own. Speaking of the latter, Arendt writes: “In a sense they took
away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he
belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never really existed”
(Arendt 1951: 452).
The production of perfect superfluousness is completed with the eradication of the
uniqueness of the individuality. Here the production takes the form of terror combined with
practices targeted to render unique embodied life superfluous: the shorn head, the prison
uniform, the replacing of the individual’s name with a number. The killing of uniqueness is
the killing of spontaneity, the power to begin something new: “Those who aspire to total
domination must liquidate all spontaneity, such as the mere existence of individuality will
always engender” (Arendt 1951: 456). Added to imperialism’s unlimited desire for power
is the totalitarian desire for total domination, from “all is permitted” to “all is possible.”
As Arendt argues,
Such power can be secured if literally all men, without a single exception, are reliably
dominated in every aspect of their life. In the realm of foreign affairs new neutral terri-
tories must constantly be subjugated, while at home ever-new human groups must be
mastered in expanding concentration camps or, when circumstances require liquidated
to make room for others.
(Arendt 1951: 456)
With the destruction of spontaneity, human beings are reduced to a set of mechanical
reactions and with this perfect superfluousness is achieved: “Totalitarianism strives not toward
despotic rule over men, but toward a system in which men are superfluous” (Arendt 1951: 457).
Reducing human beings to nothing other than a set of mechanical reactions – terrorized
marionettes – perfect superfluousness is the systematic attempt to eradicate altogether the condi-
tions of human existence: natality and mortality, plurality and uniqueness.
Arendt’s genealogy of the systematic production of superfluousness indicates that she did not
change her mind on the nature of radical evil, which in her reply to Scholem she renames as
“extreme.” Not once in Origins of Totalitarianism does Arendt attribute radical evil to demonic
motives or some monstrous depth to the human soul.3 The totalitarian “hell on earth” is pro-
duced through a political production of superfluousness that has its roots not in the nature of the
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soul but instead in the “monstrous process” of expropriation that becomes increasingly extreme
as it moves from imperialism’s production of economic and political superfluousness to the
perfect superfluousness of the death camps. This process renders extreme evil banal in Arendt’s
sense of moving along the surface without depth. Turning now to her discussion of Eichmann,
I submit that Arendt’s account of the banality of evil remains inseparably connected to political
and economic superfluousness that ends in extreme evil’s production of perfect superfluousness.
Eichmann and the thoughtless banality of evil

Although Arendt is unwavering in her claim that extreme evil’s production of perfect super-
fluousness does not have it roots in the monstrous depths of the human soul, but instead in
systemic political and economic conditions, she does not deny that it is also a moral problem
inseparable from individual agency. We need to recall that for Arendt the moral, unlike the
political, is marked by the self’s concern with its voice of conscience: Thoreau commits civil
disobedience not out of a concern for the world but from a concern for his own conscience.
He could not live with himself had he paid the poll tax. So, too, Eichmann claims that “he
would have had a bad conscience if he had not done what he been ordered to do—to ship
millions of men, women, and children to their death with great zeal and the most meticulous
care” (Arendt 1963: 25). If there was a moment of temptation, it was when he was tempted
not to murder. While some recent scholarship views this claim as disingenuous, a justification
after the fact, Arendt takes him at his word, focusing on the transformation of Eichmann’s con-
science such that his claim became true the longer he participated in the Nazi regime. Indeed,
Arendt argues that the transformation of Eichmann’s voice of conscience provides us with
the central moral problem of totalitarian evil, and it is the focus of her analysis of his banal
thoughtlessness.4 Her trial report grapples with two questions that emerge from Eichmann’s
conscience: (1) How was it possible for Eichmann to overcome his temptation of the good,
and 2) how long does it take for “a person to overcome his or her moral repugnance to
crime?” (Arendt 1963: 25).
Contrary to the claims of some of her readers such as David Cesarani and Bettina Stangneth,5
Arendt does not argue that Eichmann was without motives in carrying out his duties as a Nazi
functionary. On the contrary, she points out that Eichmann did have one motive and it was
economic. Having been fired in 1932 from his job with the Vacuum Oil Company, a “déclassé
son of a solid middle-class family,” he joined the Nazi Party because “he could start from scratch
and make a career” (Arendt 1963: 33). In her 1945 essay “Organized Guilt and Universal
Responsibility,” Arendt elaborates on the economic motivation that led ordinary citizens such
as Eichmann to become part of the Nazi machine. Asking of “the real motives which caused
people to act as cogs in the mass-murder machine” (Arendt 1994: 128, my emphasis), she points
out that Himmler is the representative of these people, “the organizing spirit of the murder,”
who was neither sadistic nor a fanatic but rather “a ‘bourgeois’ with all the outer aspect of
respectability, all the habits of a good paterfamilias,” who understood that most people are “first
and foremost jobholders, and good family men.” She then describes the central motive of such
a good family-man: “It became clear that for the sake of his pension, his life insurance, the
security of his wife and children, such a man was ready to sacrifice his beliefs, his honor, and his
human dignity” (ibid.) Arendt, therefore, is not surprised when a number of psychiatrists found
Eichmann’s “whole psychological outlook, his attitude toward his wife and children, father and
mother, sisters, friends, was ‘not only normal, but most desirable’” (Arendt 1963: 26).
Arendt’s description of Himmler as “neither sadistic nor a fanatic” but instead a “good
bourgeois” raises the question of whether Eichmann was motivated by the ideology of racism.
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Certainly, Arendt has many critics who argue that she is able to describe Eichmann’s evil as
thoughtless banality only because she overlooks his virulent anti-Semitism that made him more
than simply a thoughtless functionary whose singular motive was careerism. Arendt’s analysis
of Eichmann’s conscience, however, does not deny that he was ever free of the ideology of
racism. Recall Arendt’s claim that racism is the haunting shadow of the nation-state manifested
in the logic of inclusion and exclusion that animated the notion of a homogenous body politic.
Certainly, she would not deny that Eichmann’s untiring efforts to relocate Jews to Madagascar
were animated by this logic. She denies, however, that a virulent racism propelled him into the
Nazi machine. David Cesarani, a critic of Arendt’s banality thesis, admits that Eichmann did not
join the Nazi Party already a rabid racist:
Eichmann’s account of his entry into the Nazi party, the SS and the SD exclude anti-
Jewish feeling and this is probably true, but his disavowal of hostilities to the Jews once
he had been in the SD for a few years rings hollow.
(Cesarani 2014: 360–61)
Cesarani’s claim lends support to Arendt’s argument in her analysis of imperialism in Origins of
Totalitarianism that the principle of bureaucracy and the principle of racism were not initially
connected in imperialism’s unlimited expansion, although certainly they traveled side by side:
Although in the end racism and bureaucracy proved to be interrelated in many ways,
they were discovered and developed independently. No one who in one way or the
other was implicated in their perfection ever came to realize the full range of poten-
tialities of power accumulation and destruction that this combination alone provided.
(Arendt 1951: 186)
She points out that Lord Cormer was an imperialist bureaucrat in India “who no more have
dreamed of combining administration with massacre, than the race fanatics of South Africa
thought of organizing massacres for the purpose of establishing a circumscribed, rational politi-
cal community” (ibid.). Immediately following, in parentheses, Arendt adds, “as the Nazis did
in the extermination camps” (ibid.). Within parentheses, in a subordinate clause, Arendt claims
that the originality of the Nazi regime was to recognize the “full range of potentialities of
power accumulation and destruction” unleashed by the combination of these two principles.
In other words, the Nazis merged the imperialist principles of racism and bureaucracy to carry
out “administrative massacres.” It is surprising that Arendt did not explicitly return to this insight
when reporting on Eichmann’s thoughtless banality as it would have allowed her to better
articulate how a thoughtless bureaucrat initially without strong ideological views could embrace
an increasingly virulent anti-Semitism the longer he participated in the Nazi machine such that
notion of a “desk murderer” is not a contradiction in terms.
Significantly, Arendt’s report on Eichmann’s banality of evil begins with a consideration of
neither bureaucracy nor race, but instead with a consideration of his economic superfluousness.
In fact, I submit that her description of Eichmann’s thoughtless banality must be understood
as an account of the other side of the production of perfect superfluousness, focusing not on
extreme evil’s production of “living corpses” but instead on the economically superfluous who
found remedy by becoming thoughtless functionaries of that production. Still further, while
Arendt is often criticized for her use of the term “banality” to describe totalitarianism’s evil,
betraying thereby a lack of regard for the victims of this evil, this criticism overlooks the fact that
her analysis of Eichmann continues her reflections on the extreme evil that produced the victims
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of the death camps, showing the inseparability of the political production of superfluousness of
both the victim and the thoughtless banality of the perpetrator such as Eichmann.
Here I want to return briefly to Arendt’s discussion of the “monstrous process” of extreme
evil’s production of superfluousness. At the outset of her report, Arendt notes that Eichmann
felt he was “a leaf in the whirlwind of time [which] had blown him into History, as he under-
stood it, namely, into a Movement that always kept moving” (Arendt 1963: 33). Along with
economic motive, this sense of being part of a process was decisive for Eichmann’s joining the
Nazi Party. For Arendt, Eichmann was one of those “modern men,” for whom:
it was at least as decisive that [he] began to consider himself part and parcel of the two
superhuman, all-encompassing processes of nature and history, both of which seemed
doomed to an infinite progress without ever reaching any inherent telos or approach-
ing any preordained idea.
(Arendt 1957: 307)
Placed within the infinite flow, singular acts and events have no inherent meaning and have
become superfluous. As Arendt puts it:
the perplexity is that the particular incident, the observable fact, or single occurrence
of nature, or the reported deed and event of history, have ceased to make sense with-
out a universal process in which they are supposedly embedded; yet the moment man
approaches this process in order to escape the haphazard character of the particular, in
order to find meaning . . . his effort is rebutted by the answer from all sides: Any order,
any necessity, any meaning you wish to impose will do.
(Arendt 1968: 88–9)
Not only did Eichmann understand the Nazi movement in terms of a universal process of
history that renders singular acts and events superfluous; he saw himself as part of this process,
thereby making superfluous his capacities for acting and judging, both of which require an
engagement with particular deeds and events.
In a short review of J-T Delos’s La Nation, written in 1946, Arendt anticipates the problem
of Eichmann’s conscience caught up in the stream of history. Reflecting on the conquering of
the modern state by the nation, a conquest in which the state “became the supreme individual
before which all individuals had to bow,” Arendt points out that this conquest also brought
about the “individualization of the moral universal within a collective, the concretization of the
Idea, “first thought by Hegel as Spirit, but subsequently devolved into the spirit of the people
[or] the soul of the race” (Arendt 1994:209). Arendt goes on to claim:
The main aspect of this conception is that the Idea, no longer recognized as an inde-
pendent entity, finds its realization in the movement of history as such. Since then,
all modern political theories which lead to totalitarianism present an immersion of an
absolute principle into reality in the form of a historical movement; and it is this abso-
luteness, which they pretend to embody, which gives them their “right” of priority
over the individual conscience.
(Arendt 1994: 209, my emphasis)
Following Delos, Arendt points out that not only does the structure of totalitarianism absorb
each individual into the collective, it also “surrenders him to becoming” (Arendt 1994: 210).
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Surrendered to the stream of becoming, the “particular reality of the individual person appears,
indeed, as a quantité négligeable, submerged in the stream of public life which, since organized as
a movement, is the universal itself” (Arendt 1994: 210).
Caught up in a movement that renders individual agency and judgment superfluous,
Eichmann’s conscience becomes elated, caught up in the “winged words” of Heinrich Himmler,
“who was the most gifted at solving problems of conscience” (Arendt 1963: 105). Elated,
Eichmann’s voice of conscience was not silenced but rather transformed by being carried away,
caught up in the voice of another; his voice had literally been “voiced over” with the voice of
Himmler. Identified with the voice of Himmler, Eichmann’s elated voice of conscience is now
transformed, losing its repugnance to commit evil:
And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells
everybody, “Thou shalt not kill,” even though man’s natural desires and the inclina-
tions may at times be murderous, so the law of Hitler’s land demands that the voice
of conscience tell everybody: “Thou shalt kill,” although the organizers of the mas-
sacres knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of
most people.
(Arendt 1963: 150)6
In Eichmann’s case, the transformation of his conscience and the overcoming of his repugnance
to committing evil was accomplished by turning basic instincts such as pity whereby we recoil
at the suffering of others back upon the self. As Arendt points out,
The trick used by Himmler consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in
directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: “What horrible things I did
to people,” the murderers would be able to say, “What horrible things I had to watch
in the pursuance of my duties.”
(Arendt 1963: 106)
Himmler’s trick, Arendt argues, was accomplished through slogans and stock phrases, the
effect of which was to distance his followers, including Eichmann, from any engagement with
reality. I want to linger over this last point, because it is not often noticed by Arendt’s readers
that Eichmann’s use of clichés emerges not only in submerging his conscience into the mov-
ing stream of history, but at the same time emerges in his getting caught up in the cliched
language of the Nazi Party, which strictly enforced a set of “language rules” such that Jewish
victims were not slated for “extermination” but instead, “resettled” and “subject to special
treatment” (Arendt 1963: 85).
As Arendt points out, Nazi functionaries such as Eichmann were not “bearers of orders”
but “bearers of secrecy,” thereby eliminating any sense of individual agency in favor of
simply protecting a secret hidden in the recesses of the heart. The effect of these language
rules was not to keep people, including Eichmann, “ignorant of what they were doing,
but to prevent them from equating it with their old, ‘normal’ knowledge of murder and
lies.” At this point, Arendt answers her second question: protected against the reality of
his actions through his immersion in the movement of history whose cliched voice is that
of the Party, it took approximately four weeks for Eichmann’s conscience to overcome its
moral repugnance to commit atrocities.7 After four weeks, he could carry out his duties in
the murderous production of the perfect superfluousness of the death camps without being
tempted to do otherwise.
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Here I want to emphasize Arendt’s claim that Eichmann’s reversal of conscience was possible
through his increasing remoteness from reality. This remoteness from reality is Arendt’s definition of
the thoughtlessness that marks the banality of evil. I cite Arendt at length:
Eichmann was not Iago. . . . Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for
his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. . . . He merely, to put the mat-
ter colloquially, never realized what he was doing. . . . It was sheer thoughtlessness . . .
that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of the period. . . . That
such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than
all the evil instincts taken together . . . that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in
Jerusalem . . . the strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil.
(Arendt 1963: 287–8)
As we have seen, the first step of Eichmann’s thoughtlessness was seeking remedy for his politi-
cal and social superfluousness by entering the movement of history that renders superfluous
singular events and deeds and which absolved him all individual agency and judgment. His
individual voice of conscience became a quantité négligeable. The cliched language of the party of
that movement furthered the remoteness. Eichmann’s voice of conscience – a voice that usually
provokes one to stop and think – became morally thoughtless: “he never realized what he was
doing.” This moral thoughtlessness is Arendt’s definition of the “the banality of evil.”
Eichmann’s thoughtlessness, however, is not the entirety of the evil Arendt is pointing to
when she claims “the strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil.” If Eichmann’s
thoughtlessness - his banality of evil - was all that Arendt meant by evil, she would have written,
“the strange evil of thoughtlessness.” Instead, she notes an interdependency of thoughtlessness
and evil. In my view, Arendt is noting the interdependency of banal thoughtlessness and the
radical evil at work in the systematic production of perfect superfluousness. Eichmann’s moral
thoughtlessness is the condition of his being a diligent and zealous functionary in the produc-
tion of the death camps. At the same time, his own superfluousness made him thoughtless. In
other words, Arendt never wavers in her claim that extreme evil is the systematic production of
perfect superfluousness. Her account of the banality of evil is an account of the production of
the moral thoughtlessness that is concomitant with this production. They are interdependent.
Again, Arendt suggests that economic and political superfluousness is the condition of
Eichmann’s banal thoughtlessness. Recall Arendt’s claim that radical evil “has appeared in con-
nection with a system in which all men have become superfluous in some way” (OT 475).
Immediately following this claim, she notes that a peculiar kind of loneliness is at work in this
superfluousness and is key to understanding its potentiality for evil:
Loneliness, the common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian government, for
ideology and logicality, the preparation of its executioners and victims, is closely con-
nected with uprootedness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern
masses. To be uprooted means to have no place in the world recognized and guaran-
teed by others, to be superfluous means not to belong to the world at all.
(Arendt 1951: 475)
As we have seen, at the outset of her account of the banality of evil Arendt notes that Eichmann
was a “leaf in the wind,” a “declassed son” without a job or career and lacking a sense of sig-
nificance or meaning to his existence. Joining the Nazi Party gave him a career, social standing,
and a sense of historical significance. In sum, it provided a remedy to his economic and political
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superfluousness, which in turn produced the moral thoughtlessness necessary to become a func-
tionary in radical evil’s production of perfect superfluousness. Thus, Arendt gives us a double
account of evil: the banality of evil (moral thoughtlessness) is concomitant with radical evil’s
extreme production of the perfect superfluousness of the death camps. She notes that evil – at
once banal and radical – has appeared in a world where human beings have become “equally
superfluous.” This returns us to the beginning of Arendt’s genealogy of superfluousness. Prior
to both banal and radical evil is the monstrous process of expropriation that produces economic
and political superfluousness. This process is ongoing, which is why Arendt claims that evil will
continue to be the problem of our present age.
Notes
1 The quote is from Hannah Arendt’s “A Letter to Gershom Scholem” (2007: 470–71). Richard J. Bernstein
(1996) has a very good discussion of the two aspects of evil in Arendt’s thought – superfluousness and
banality – but agrees with most of Arendt’s readers that she changes her mind and moves from extreme
evil’s production of superfluousness to evil’s banal thoughtlessness. He spends no time showing how
Eichmann’s thoughtlessness emerges from the production of superfluousness.
2 Nancy Fraser’s recent work emphasizes that expropriation is condition for exploitation. While Fraser
acknowledged Arendt’s grasp of imperialism’s deformation of the nation-state in Arendt’s Origins of
Totalitarianism, especially the “under-appreciated middle section on imperialism,” Fraser overlooks
Arendt’s claim of the primacy of expropriation in her analysis of imperialism and, moreover, her claim
that imperialism is driven by the engine of racism such that expropriation is from the outset racialized.
See: Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi, Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory, 2018. Cambridge: Polity,
p. 39, note 39.
3 In fact, Arendt clearly distances herself from Kant’s notion of radical evil that attributes a hidden source of
radical evil in the depths of the human will. As she points out, “It is inherent in our entire philosophical
tradition that we cannot conceive of a ‘radical evil,’ and this is true for Christian theology, which con-
ceded even to the Devil himself a celestial origin, as well as for Kant, the only philosopher who, in the
word he coined for it, at least must have suspected the existence of this evil even though he immediately
rationalized it in the concept of a ‘perverted ill will’ that could be explained by comprehensible motives”
(see Origins, p. 459). Immediately following this discussion of Kant, Arendt points out that the extreme
evil of the death “breaks down all standards we know” with “only one thing that seems to be discernible:
we may say that radical evil has emerged in connection with a system in which all men have become
equally superfluous” (ibid.)
4 Arendt’s essay “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy” supports my argument that Arendt’s understand-
ing of evil insists on both its political and moral dimensions. In this essay, she points to both the extreme
evil of the death camps and the “true moral issue” of those “who only ‘coordinated’ themselves . . . ordi-
nary people, who, as long as moral standards were socially accepted, never dreamt of doubting what they
had been taught to believe” (in Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, p. 54). Arendt explicitly names
Eichmann as someone who poses this moral issue.
5 See David Cesarani, Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a “Desk Murderer,” and
Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer. Christopher
Browning, Ordinary Men, and Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, also offer important
counterarguments to Arendt’s claim that Eichmann was a thoughtless bureaucrat without strong
ideological convictions.
6 For a longer account of Himmler’s role in the reversal of conscience, see my article “Holes of Oblivion:
The Banality of Evil” in Hypatia, vol. 18, no. 1 (Winter 2003), pp. 80–103. In this earlier essay, fol-
lowing Kristeva’s and Kateb’s accounts of Arendt’s understanding of evil, I argued for a much more
psychoanalytic account of extreme evil’s banality, arguing that it is rooted in the ontological condition
of human finitude with its inherent abandonment and loneliness, whose remedy, I argued, is a renewed
concept of political friendship. The 2003 essay neglected entirely Arendt’s analysis throughout Origins of
Totalitarianism of imperialism, racism, and the political-economic production of superfluousness that had as
its final step the production of the perfect superfluousness of the death camps. See George Kateb, Hannah
Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil, and Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt.
7 See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, pages 93ff.
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Peg Birmingham
References
Arendt, H. (1951) Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Arendt, H. (1992/1963) Eichmann in Jerusalem, New York: Penguin.
Arendt, H. (1968) Between Past and Future, New York: Penguin.
Arendt, H. (1969) Crises of the Republic, New York: Harcourt Brace.
Arendt, H. (1994) Essays in Understanding, edited by Jerome Kohn, New York: Harcourt Brace.
Arendt, H. (2003) Responsibility and Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn, New York: Schocken.
Arendt, H. (2007) The Jewish Writings, edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron Feldman, New York: Schocken.
Bernstein, R. (1996) Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Browning, C. (1992) Ordinary Men, Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, New York:
Harper.
Cesarani, D. (2014) Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a “Desk Murderer,” London:
Da Capo.
Goldhagen, D. (1997) Hitler’s Willing Executioner’s, Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, New York: Vintage.
Kateb, G. (1984) Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil, Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld.
Kristeva, J. (2001) Hannah Arendt, New York: Columbia University.
Marx, K. (1977/1867) Capital, Volume One, translated by Ben Fowkes, New York: Vintage.
Stangneth, B. (2015) Eichmann Before Jerusalem, The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer, New York: Vintage.
162
12
AFTER THE FALL
Camus on evil
Matthew Sharpe
Asked by Émile Simon about the foundations of his thinking in 1948, Albert Camus gave this
answer: “The insurmountable obstacle appears to me to be the problem of evil. There is the
death of innocents which signifies the arbitrariness of the divine, but there is also the murder
of infants which embodies [traduit] human arbitrariness” (Camus 1948: 476). As the existence
of this Routledge Handbook attests, in the period following September 11, 2001, we might be a
good deal less surprised by Camus’s response than his Marxissant contemporaries were, in their
preoccupation with the economic, structural preconditions of political life. We live in an age in
which the old questions of theodicy have rebecome contemporary: What is evil? How is it pos-
sible? Is it necessary? What does its existence say about the human condition? Is evil’s continuing
career the best argument in the armory of the atheists? Or does its existence challenge forth the
most profound grounds for faith?
For Camus as for some Christian theology, as we shall see, evil is first of all manifest in
seemingly useless human suffering, even or especially when caused by natural or “divine,” not
human causes. It secondly involves moral evil, freely chosen by agents, albeit capable of being
institutionalized in the vast machineries of enslavement and killing of the twentieth century.
This chapter will examine Camus’s thoughts on natural and moral evil in three registers. The
first is the ontological register, in which the reality of senseless suffering becomes for Camus
the cause of both his ceaseless engagement with, and irreconcilable distance from Augustinian
theology (although not other aspects of Christianity). The second is the political register, in
which Camus’s The Rebel (1956a) gives a philosophical account of how the twentieth-century
totalitarian regimes came to rationalize political murder on a hitherto unprecedented scale.
Third, we turn to what can be called the psychological or spiritual register. In Camus’s The Fall
and “The Renegade,” as we will see, Camus dramatized and explored the questions of how
individual humans can be seduced into perpetrating and rationalizing deceit and violence.
Natural or divine evil: Camus, Ivan Karamazov,

Saint Augustine, and Doctor Rieux
The abiding popular image of Camus depicts him as an “absurdist.” This Camus is obsessed
with the seeming senselessness of human life in a world now conceived as without a salvific,
providential deity. His preoccupation with the “absurd” leads to meditations on suicide, then
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on murder and terror in the age of the totalitarian regimes of the far right, led by the Nazis, and
Stalinism on the far left.
This image of Camus is deeply contestable, not least concerning the putative “senseless-
ness” of human existence. In fact, The Myth of Sisyphus (1978 [1942]) already presents us with
an affirmative philosophy. The young Camus “rebels” against false or dubitable consolations
offered him against the indubitable realities of death and finitude (Camus 1978: 53–60). He
proposes a philosophical form of life that would lucidly confront this “black side of the sun”
he so loved, as a boy raised on Mediterranean streets and beaches (Camus 1968: 357; Sharpe
2014). This conception of “rebellion” becomes the basis for his mature work of political phi-
losophy, The Rebel/L’Homme révolté of 1951 (1956a). The book, as is well known, provides
a genealogical account of the modern totalitarian désastres. But the genealogy begins with
early modern forms of “metaphysical rebellion” against the absolute monarchies and their
theological foundations (Camus 1956a: 23–104). The philosophical challenges to Christian
political theology posed by early modern “free thinkers” (Camus 1956a: 36) paved the way
for the forms of political or “historical rebellion” that began with the Jacobins’ regicide
and ensuing Terror and culminated in the genocides of Hitler and Stalin (Camus 1956a:
105–252). Throughout the genealogy, Camus’s concern remains single-mindedly on the
question of the right to kill that the twentieth century had seen so horrifically reinstated by
the totalitarian regimes:
Our purpose is to find out whether innocence, the moment it becomes involved in
action, can avoid committing murder. We can act only in terms of our own time,
among the people who surround us. We shall know nothing until we know whether
we have the right to kill our fellow men, or the right to let them be killed. In that
every action today leads to murder, direct or indirect, we cannot act until we know
whether or why we have the right to kill.
(Camus 1956a: 4)
The metaphysical rebels with which Camus’s genealogy commences are figures like the
Voltaire of Candide and de Sade in the eighteenth century. However criminal de Sade’s
response, Camus reads his thought as animated by the same problem of evil that shook
Voltaire (Camus 1956a: 37), and much of intellectual Europe after the devastation of pious
Lisbon by the earthquake in 1755 (Neiman 2004). If God is omnibenevolent as well as all-
powerful, as the Christian tradition supposes, how can there be such acts of natural evil, in
which Christians perished alongside Muslims, Catholics alongside Protestants, and children
alongside the most inveterate sinners? For Camus, the secular age is an age born out of indig-
nant rebellion against the idea that such natural calamities could be part of the providential
plans of a god of love. It is not the age of anomic or atheistic egoism, although it opens up
those possibilities. It is born of a concern for justice, questioning the legitimacy of theological
sanctions for murder and unjustified suffering.
This animating concern in The Rebel is what makes the section on Dostoevsky’s Ivan
Karamazov, “The Rejection of Salvation,” so important (Camus 1956a: 55–62; see 101–2).
Highlighting its significance, Camus places it in between dedicated sections on the“Absolute
Negation” and “Absolute Affirmation” that we will see Camus thinks defines modern forms
of political evil. Having witnessed the senseless death of an innocent child, Ivan in The
Brothers Karamazov agonizes over how to reconcile such a senseless death with God’s plan.
His compassion leads him first to an assertion with which Camus largely concurs: that a
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God who could prescript such senseless suffering into his providence is not worthy of
unquestioning faith:
Ivan does not say that there is no [providential, theological] truth. He says that if
truth does exist, it can only be unacceptable. Why? Because it is unjust. The struggle
between truth and justice is begun here.
(Camus 1956a: 56)
This is the same attitude, of course, of Doctor Rieux faced with the agonizing death of Monsieur
Othon’s child in The Plague, which he hurls in the face of the Jesuit Father Paneloux, who is at
his side: “that one at least was innocent, and you know it as well as I do!” (Camus 1971: 177).
This Father Paneloux is nevertheless a profoundly important figure both in The Plague, and
for understanding Camus’s wider stance against theodicy. The justification of God’s justice to
man rests on the claim that the evils people suffer are punishment for our innate sinfulness, as
inheritors of Adamic guilt; or that evil is necessary, so the good may shine; or that God’s plan,
however apparently unjust, is beyond human comprehension (Camus 2007: 119–23). Camus’s
lesser-known, but highly important, 1936 thesis on Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism had
already wrestled with the Gnostics’ and early Church’s attempts to come to terms in these ways
with natural and human evil (Camus 2007: 47–60). Like Pierre Bayle or Hans Blumenberg,
Camus is struck by the simple coherence of the Gnostic solution to the “problem of evil”:
to suppose that the salvific God is not all-powerful, and that this veil of tears is evidently
the product of a malign deity or deities (Camus 2007: 67–75). To “ward off Gnosticism,”
in Blumenberg’s phrase (1997: 132–41), Christianity after Augustine is compelled to freight
human beings with the vast cosmic weight of having introduced evil into Creation. It thereby
looks to explain seemingly unjustifiable suffering on the basis of each generation’s inheritance of
Adam and Eve’s sinfulness, as rightful punishments for innate human pride. As Father Paneloux
in The Plague tells the Oranais people, soon after the plague strikes their quarantined town:
The first time this scourge appears in history, it was wielded to strike down the
enemies of God. Pharaoh set himself up against the divine will, and the plague
beat him to his knees. Thus from the dawn of recorded history the scourge of God
has humbled the proud of heart and laid low those who hardened themselves against
Him. Ponder this well, my friends, and fall on your knees.
(Camus 1971: 78)
At the limit reached by Saint Augustine, this position commits us to supposing that, despite all works
and appearances, nemo bonus (no one is good). Even unbaptized children are not innocent (Camus
2007: 123). Should they be killed by illness, wickedness, or disaster, they cannot be accepted into
Heaven. Throughout his life, Camus agonized over this last Augustinian idea. As he protested against
the image of his work as “pessimistic” in 1946, in a speech delivered at a Dominican monastery:
what right has a Christian or a Marxist to accuse me of pessimism? It is not I who

invented the “misery of the creature”, nor the terrifying formulas of divine maledic-
tion. It is not I who exclaimed “nemo bonus” (Mark 10:18), nor I who preached the
damnation of unbaptised children. It is not I who said that man was incapable of saving
himself and that from the depths of his misery his only hope was in the grace of God.
(Camus 1974: 72–3)1
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Camus’s distance from Christianity centered upon his resulting, controversial claim that it is a
religion of injustice. He profoundly admired many Christians, and Christianity itself when it is
embodied in acts of self-sacrificing love. The Fall gives us a highly sympathetic depiction of “my
friend,” Jesus: albeit as a man, not God, and albeit in the duplicitous mouth of Jean-Baptiste
Clamence, whom we shall encounter in due course (Camus 1956b: 115). Paneloux in The
Plague himself dies a “doubtful” death, having undergone his own transformation after witness-
ing the death of the innocent child (Camus 1971: 187–91; Merton 1995). In his latter sermon
to the Oranians, delivered after this event, Paneloux uses the first-person plural “we” to describe
the fate of the townspeople. There is no certain answer to the why? question, he now qualifies
his earlier stridency. Instead, he falls back upon Augustine’s conception of Predestination:
“My brethren,” Father Paneloux said at last, announcing that he was coming to an
end, “the love of God is a difficult love. It assumes a total abandonment of oneself
and contempt for one’s person. But it alone can wipe away the suffering and death of
children, it alone makes them necessary because it is impossible to understand such
things. . . . This is the hard lesson that I wanted to share with you. This is the faith—
cruel in the eyes of man, decisive in the eyes of God—which we must try to reach. We
must try to make ourselves equal to this awful image. On this peak, everything will be
confounded and made equal, and the truth will break forth from apparent injustice.”
(Camus 1971: 186)
As Camus had already argued in his 1936 Diplômes thesis, what is at issue then is exactly a mat-
ter of faith, requiring a sacrificio intellectus unable to be justified in the modern age: “Augustine’s
final word on this subject . . . is an admission of ignorance. Divine arbitrariness remains intact”
(Camus 2007: 123; see 121).
Moral or political evil: secularizing the divine right to kill

So the modern age begins for Camus with a legitimate human rebellion against divine arbitrari-
ness and its political utility, in the hands of kings and clergy, as the justification for forms of
this-worldly injustices. Camus would have had little truck with contemporary reanimations of
political theology in the wake of the seemingly final fall of Marxism in Europe. Profoundly anti-
theodical, Camus cannot accept any rational justification, theological or secular, for the killing
of innocents, or in general for the premeditated killing without trials (and even with trials) of
human beings (Camus 1974: 173–234; 1956a: 279–93).
But how then does Camus think that the legitimate early modern rebellion against divine
arbitrariness and the “divine right of kings” – to wage war, imprison, enslave, and kill in God’s
name – morph into the disastrous twentieth-century experiments in similarly arbitrary, limitless
power? It is this troubling enigma that shapes the largest part of The Rebel:
Progress, from the time of Sade up to the present day, has consisted in gradually
enlarging the stronghold where, according to his own rules, man without God brutally
wields power. In defiance of the divinity, the frontiers of this stronghold have been
gradually extended, to the point of making the entire universe into a fortress erected
against the fallen and exiled deity. Man, at the culmination of his rebellion, incarcer-
ated himself; from Sade’s lurid castle to the concentration camps, man’s greatest liberty
consisted only in building the prison of his crimes.
(Camus 1956a: 102–3)
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After the fall
Camus’s answer, in his own terms, is profoundly Greek, as opposed to Christian (Camus
2007: 40–41). Camus accepts Socrates’ idea that, however horrendous their actions may be,
human beings commit evil not out of the compulsion of a broken human nature but through
forms of self-misrecognition and by misunderstanding their true, larger Good (Plato, Protagoras
357c–358c). Here, for instance, is Rieux speaking in The Plague, but he is speaking for Camus:
“The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may
do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are
more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. They are more or less igno-
rant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of
an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right
to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true
love without the utmost clear-sightedness.”
(Camus 1971: 110.)
The first key idea capturing the kinds of “ignorance” Camus thinks explains human evil here is that
of a “leap” (un saut), which Camus had introduced in Myth of Sisyphus (1978: 6, 33–41). In this early
work, it was used to describe the forms of passionate, absolute affirmation that there just must be an
absolute meaning to life or else, in an equally absolute negation, there can be no meaning (Camus
1978: 33–48). Both these forms of reasoning, which Camus calls forms of “philosophical suicide,”
“leap” out of the uncanny middle ground of the “absurd.” This lies neither in man nor in the world.
It emerges in the confrontation between the inalienable human demand for unity, justice, and
meaning, and the undeniable registers of our condition that resist, undermine, or do violence to this
“desire for unity” (like death, the limits of our understanding, and then senseless suffering) (Camus
1978: 17–21). The philosophical suicide “leaps” to one or other, symmetrical form of metaphysical
closure out of a “nostalgia.” He wishes to escape from the ambiguities and uncertainties that beset a
life lived lucidly, excluding nothing of our experience: “[r]eason and the irrational lead to the same
preaching. In truth the way matters but little, the will to arrive suffices” (Camus 1971: 47–8).
In The Rebel, the same critical Camusian idea of a “leap” returns.2 But, this time, what is
at stake is the question of the possible legitimacy of murder or capital punishment, as against
suicide. Ivan Karamazov thus leaps, definitively, at the moment when his indignation against
divine injustice carries his “such a God [who allows innocents’ deaths] does not deserve to
exist” into the unsustainable, atheist affirmation: “there is no God, thus everything is permitted”
(Camus 1971: 102). This form of “leap,” wherein the victims find their justification not simply
for resisting divine evil, but for passing from victims to executioners, is the heart of Camus’s
critique of the modern totalitarian mindset (Camus 2006).
Indeed, it is possible to argue that (skirting an idealistic reductivism3) there is one form to
all of Camus’s political criticisms of Sade-ism, romanticism, Nietzscheanism, Jacobinism, fas-
cism and Nazism, Leninism and Stalinism. Each begins from the “Karamazovian” outrage that,
as things stand, it seems as though natural evil and human injustice are necessary to the natural
order. Each ends, in response, not by opposing political murder on principle (Camus’s position
(1971: 279–93; 2006)) but by assigning to human beings, the party, leader, or master race the
same right to divine arbitrariness modern revolt had begun by opposing. In each case, however,
as in Ivan Karamazov’s, there is a “leap” of erroneous reasoning which the philosopher can
discern: a paralogism wherein inestablishable, secularized theological, or metaphysical positions
are introduced to give form to the rebellion’s founding indignation, and to vindicate assuming
ourselves the excessive rights to kill, deceive, or enslave that we had decried in an unjust God
or our this-worldly oppressors. For example, here is how the revolutionary leap takes place in
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Matthew Sharpe
the different ideological positions of, first, the romantics, second, fascism, and, third, Leninism.
If senseless suffering and injustice seem to be inevitable, part of the natural or divine order:
Romantics, surrealists:
•• then . . . we, like Milton’s Satan, are the victim of injustice;

•• thus we must [leap] make our lives (in dandyism) and our art a standing protest against His
Order. . .
•• thus [a second leap] crime is justifiable, the criminal a martyr, excess the portal of higher
revelations . . . (Camus 1971: 47–54).
Fascism:
•• then . . . there is no higher Meaning to this world;

•• the suffering of the weak must be an ineradicable part of the world order;
•• thus [leap], the strong (those capable of seeing this without pity) should do whatever they
need to (murder, exploitation, deceit) to rule (Camus 1956a: 177–87; 1974, 5–32).
Marxism-Leninism
•• then . . . any values that do exist cannot come from God, or from any other Transcendent
source . . .
•• indeed, theological and Formal, Transcendent principles have been used to rationalise and
mystify real injustices . . .
•• thus [leap] human History alone, the long story of class struggle alone is true;
•• and thus [a second leap] the highest value must be to do whatever it takes (including mur-
der, vanguardism, propaganda) to expedite the end of Historical struggle and the advent of
a classless society (Camus 1956a: 133–48, 197–210, 226–32).
It is worth unpacking several of the philosophical suppositions at work in Camus’s idea that
political evil involves assuming the right to kill, on the basis of such flawed, paralogical leaps as
those just inventoried. The first implication is that a completely lucid form of reasoning, which
takes no licenses with facts and “excludes nothing” of our condition, can never sanction suicide
or murder (Camus 1968: 165, 169). This is actually a deeply optimistic position, in stark contrast
to the pessimism often charged against Camus. Camus’s philosophical optimism does not sup-
pose, in a utopian vein, that human beings could ever realistically end evil and suffering. It does
however suppose that there is something in our condition which orients us toward this impos-
sible end. In moments which anticipate Jürgen Habermas’s claims on behalf of an ideal speech
situation underlying all forms of mundane communication, but pointing beyond them toward
a horizon of consensual human solidarity, Camus can thus write that “parler, répare”: “to speak
[is] to heal” (1971: 8). Even the greatest crimes, on this view, are faulty attempts to commune
with others. They presuppose and bespeak a longing for a “kingdom” of human solidarity as an
ideal normative horizon. “In every word and in every act, even though it be criminal,” Camus
writes, “lies the promise of a value that we must seek out and bring to light” (1971: 248):4
Man wants to reign supreme through the revolution. But why reign supreme if noth-
ing has any meaning? Why wish for immortality if the aspect of life is so hideous? . . .
The destruction of man once more affirms man. Terror and concentration camps are
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the drastic means used by man to escape solitude. The thirst for unity must be assuaged,
even in the common grave. If men kill one another, it is because they reject mortality
and desire immortality for all men. Therefore, . . .they prove, at the same time, that
they cannot dispense with mankind; they satisfy a terrible hunger for fraternity.
(Camus 1971: 248)
These reflections open out onto the final register of Camus’s Socratic-philosophical explana-
tion of human evil, even the genocidal evils of the totalitarian regimes, as issuing from forms
of error or ignorance, albeit charged with forms of cynicism, anger, hatred, and fear. This is
Camus’s singular claim that moral or political evil always involves (or results from) forcibly or
violently excluding some salient dimension of human experience: whether it is our need for
friendship, love, or art; the beauty of the natural world; the inhumanity of the natural world;
our determination by social institutions; our love of the particular places and customs in which
we were raised; or the capacity of our reason, imagination, and sensibility to transcend tribal
boundaries. Instead, one particular datum or dimension of the human condition is artificially
hypostasized, or promoted as “the one thing needful,” to the exclusion of all others. Fascism for
instance takes our racial, spiritual, or national identities as the One Thing we must singularly
promote (Sharpe 2016), even if this means cruelty and violence toward the weak and all outsid-
ers. Marxism-Leninism takes our status as laboring animals and subjects of collective historical
processes as the One Thing we must single-mindedly promote, even if it means cruelty and
violence toward the bourgeois, dissidents, intellectuals, artists, etc.
Each position, including the most extreme, thus has at least a partial validity. Nothing human,
even the worst evils, is foreign for Camus. But Camus will add that each position also has its
“limits”: a key word in his mature thought. The evils that human beings mistakenly pursue as
forms of the Good are also thus forms of excess (démesure) (Camus 1956a: 21, 56–7, 97, 107,
157, 251, 301). Camus’s classical inspiration for this position came from the tragic dramatists,
more than the Greek and Roman philosophers. The ancient tragedies, Camus argued, were
already metaphysically complex dramas, like the modern age has become. Each staged not the
triumph of any one world view, as in morality plays; but the confrontation between the exces-
sive representatives of two or more such viewpoints:
in tragedy, each force is at one and the same time both good and bad . . . it wears
the double mask of good and evil. . . . Antigone is right, but Creon is not wrong.
Similarly, Prometheus is both just and unjust, and Zeus, who pitilessly oppresses him,
has right on his side . . . the perfect tragic formula would be “All can be justified, no
one is just.”
(Camus 1987: 301)
The end of these plays then sees the destruction of heroes who, although each partly justi-
fied, take their position too far, embracing forms of violent and finally self-destructive evil.
They each cross the Camusian limit, and so must put out their eyes. What the tragedies
thus point to, for Camus (alongside Cornelius Castoriadis 1997; see Sharpe 2002), is the
wisdom of pluralistic, democratic societies. For it is in such regimes alone that different
perspectives can each find their expression, balanced by the checks of others’ views (Camus
1987: 301–4; 1971: 26–8). At the same time, the tragedies dramatize the price for achieving
such a post-tragic democracy. This is that each must renounce his (or her) exclusive claim
to Truth and Right: a price that Camus knew to be immensely spiritually demanding, as
we shall examine now.
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The psychology of evil: The Fall, guilt, and the renegade

In the third volume of Camus’s Oeuvres Complètes there is a little-known piece entitled “Orgueil”
(“Pride”) (Camus 2008b). The text is dated by the editors between 1948 and 1956, on the
basis of its epigraph from Gandhi. It is a curious and intriguing morsel, recording a series of
reflections by God the Father concerning human beings, His creation. God, perhaps unsurpris-
ingly, presents us with a very Augustinian discourse concerning the lamentable but seemingly
inextinguishable human desire to rival His absolute power. It is this pride that provokes every
divine rebuff and causes every human disaster. “It is always the same thing,” according to God
(Camus 2008b: 1171): from Adam and Eve, through the tower of Babel, Prometheus, and “that
poor young Icarus” to the Manhattan Project (Camus 2008b: 1171–3).5 There is moreover an
additional sting in the tail to these ill-conceived bids for apotheosis, God warns us at the close.
To the extent that human beings exalt our pride, demystify all mysteries, and usurp God’s all-
powerful place, human life will lose its distinct dimensions:
as the body has need of bread so the soul has need of something incomprehensible,
so that you may have something still to seek out . . . if one day men vanquish me and
know all things, said God, . . . one will see a striking thing: God and man dying the
same death.
(Camus 2008b: 1173)
It is the Augustinian register that emerges in some of Camus’s 1950s texts that has prompted
frequent speculation about Camus’s imminent conversion. As we have seen, Camus’s response
to the problem of evil up to at least 1951 and The Rebel was Socratic or tragic: evil involves
forms of error, ignorance, excess, blindness, and partiality. We err despite our better selves, and
through lack of mesure (moderation, temperance, sophrosynȇ) (Camus 1971: 294–301). People
always “mean well,” even when their decisions license the physical killing of other human
beings. In “Orgueil” as in The Fall of 1956, by contrast, Camus seems to recur to the Christian
idea that there is an immovable pride in the human spirit. This presumption means we cannot
tolerate our limited, intermediary place in the order of things, between angels and beasts. If evil,
for the Greek poets, involved the hybris of acting as if we were more and other than we are,
then the human condition on this later Camusian model would be irredeemably hybristic, if not
radically evil in the Kantian sense (Kant 1999; and Chapter 8 in this volume).
So, does Camus have a change of heart in the 1950s, turning upon the problem of evil at
the heart of his oeuvre? Despite some appearances, I want to suggest that the answer is “no.”
Certainly, Camus’s texts and his points of emphasis change, reflecting the difficult circumstances
he found himself in the 1950s. Like his character Jean-Baptiste Clamence in The Fall, whose life
as a carefree bon viveur and shining advocate for “widows and orphans” (Camus 1956b: 17) is
interrupted when he comes upon a young woman committing suicide one night on the Seine;
so Camus after 1951 fell suddenly from grace as an intellectual of the Rive Gauche due to his
criticisms of the then-in-vogue Stalinism. He also came to struggle, both with renewed, serious
illness (the tuberculosis he had suffered since his youth) and guilt about his marital infidelities.
After 1954 and the outbreak of the Algerian war, Camus was widely positioned by the Parisian
left as on the wrong side of history, as a moderate pied noir who advocated for a political, not
military end to French colonialism.6 As his Carnets from this period attest, Camus now wrestled
with a profound sense of being deeply unworthy of his reputation as a man of conscience: “Each
time someone tells me that they admire the man in me, I have the impression of having lied all
my life” (Camus 2008: 67).
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But Camus’s resulting focus on guilt in The Fall and the story “The Renegade” in Exile
and the Kingdom (1962 [1957]) also answer to a different kind of question about evil than the
analyses in L’Homme Révolté and earlier texts. Camus’s focus now moves from the analysis of
philosophy and ideology to the diagnosis of motivation: the question of why it is that individuals
can be drawn to embrace totalizing ideologies and pursue mastery at the expense of solidarity,
even to the point of willingly enslaving and harming other people. Totalitarian regimes, Camus
had already argued in The Rebel, work by cultivating a sense of universal guilt or culpability in
subjects. They withdraw the protections of calculable, rational laws, so one never knows when
one has become “objectively guilty” in the eyes of the Leader or Party (Camus 1971: 233–45).
They install regimes of secret police to surveil the populace, monitor all communications, and
encourage neighbors and colleagues to “report” upon one another. They reserve the right
to retrospectively enact edicts against particular individuals and groups, and destroy lives and
families without compunction. Stalinism enacts a “universe of trial,” Camus argues, at the same
time as all right of attorney or appeal is destroyed. Totalitarian governance is a “state of siege”
become permanent, wherein every subject is potentially an enemy and actually like a rights-less
refugee in their own country (Camus 1971: 233–45).
Nevertheless, what we get in the two famous later Camusian monologues that address the
question of evil, The Fall and “The Renegade,” are depictions of the psycho-logic of guilt from
the inside. Camus now sets out to explore how human beings can be motivated to appease their
own sense of guilt by putting others to the sword, and to seek, in domination or servitude,
perverted substitutes for true communion:
Those who reject the agony of living and dying wish to dominate. “Solitude is power,”
says Sade. Power, today, because for thousands of solitary people it signifies the suffer-
ing of others, bears witness to the need for others. Terror is the homage the malignant
recluse finally pays to the brotherhood of man.
(Camus 1971: 248)
In fact, the same Camusian framework of the “leap” that we explored in Part 2 demonstrably
applies in this new, psychological territory too. We saw above that the question to which the
totalizing ideologies examined in The Rebel each respond is the question of how human beings
should respond to a natural order in which evil seems to be inescapably necessary. By contrast,
the questions posed in The Fall and “The Renegade,” less abstract, are: How should an individual
respond when, at some point, they realize that they have fallen short of the ideals they had cherished for
themselves? What can we do when, one fine day or night, we come to see that the bright self-image we had
promoted in the eyes of others, and in our own eyes, is untrue to the more shaded original? In brief: “if I
am guilty/hypocritical/‘fallen,’ then what?”
Take the nameless “garrulous slave” whose inner monologue Camus makes us privy to in
“The Renegade.” His moment of decision comes after his hopeless failure to convert the inhab-
itants of the city of salt, Taghâsa, to the god of love, in whose name he had dreamed of their
conquest (Camus 1962: 36–42). For Jean-Baptiste Clamence in The Fall, as we averred above,
the fall comes when this celebrated honnête homme fails to assist a drowning suicide one night on
the Seine (Camus 1956b: 69–70). He realizes now that his pretence to being the noble defender
of the weak and humble was just that: a pretence. Later, after he successfully represses the
memory of this traumatic event, the repressed returns in the form of uncanny, derisive laughter
he hears walking home one night some time later, beside the same river (Camus 1956b: 39, 96).
Again echoing Camus’s earlier modes of the analysis of evil, both the renegade and Clamence,
faced with these challenges, make their own leaps. “If I am guilty and worthy of scorn,” they
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Matthew Sharpe
reason falsely, “then we all must be guilty and worthy only of scorn.” This illogical but all-too-human
leap, the reader can see, passes illegitimately from “I” to “we.” It does not do so by raising others
charitably upwards, in the light of a chastened sense of one’s imperfections, however. Instead, it
seeks to bring them all down to our own level.
“I didn’t want their [particular others’] esteem because it wasn’t general,” Clamence tells us
about his state of mind after his fall (Camus 1956b 93). His sole aim was to silence the laughter
of his own conscience. Only a general, unqualified exoneration could perform this work. But
Clamence does not turn to organized religion. Nor does he ask anyone’s forgiveness. He adopts,
all by himself, the mantle of a new founder: assuming the uncanny mantle of a “judge penitent.”
“After prolonged research on myself,” Clamence announces, “I brought out the fundamental
duplicity of the human being” (Camus 1956b: 84). If everyone is guilty, his reasoning goes, then
my own particular failings pale into insignificance. A kind of ersatz solidarity is even opened up:
“I have no more friends; I have nothing but accomplices. To make up for this, their number
has increased; they are the whole human race” (Camus 1956b: 73). In fact, the universe of the
judge penitent is the “universe of the trial” that for Camus describes the totalitarian nightmare.
“When we are all guilty, there will be democracy” (Camus 1956b: 136), Clamence tells us in
a poetic flight: “the others get theirs too, and at the same time as we—that’s what counts. All
together at last, but on our knees and with our heads bowed” (Camus 1956b: 136).
The same (il)logic of dark absolution is differently explored in “The Renegade” in Exile and
the Kingdom. As Camus confided to his mentor Jean Grenier, “The Renegade” is the story of an
“intellectual turned communist . . . who ends up adoring the religion of evil” (Camus, at Orme
2007: 262, n. 4). The call of conscience which sounds at those moments in our lives when we
confront our human weaknesses is for Camus a call to acknowledge the complexity of our con-
dition and the limits to our intemperate egoism. We confront at such times the great difficulty
of pursuing a truly virtuous life, which involves “a long-distance race, quite solitary and very
exhausting” (Camus 1956b: 132–3). This difficulty is avoided if we instead accept the tempting
but profoundly cynical notion that, since I or we evidently are not virtuous, virtue itself must
be the sham. All at once, in this way, a monological simplicity is reinstated – and it is deeply
significant that The Fall and “The Renegade” are Camus’s only two monologues:
I had been misled, solely the reign of malice was devoid of defects, I had been misled,
truth is square, heavy, thick, it does not admit distinctions, good is an idle dream,
an intention constantly postponed and pursued with exhausting effort, a limit never
reached, its reign is impossible. Only evil can reach its limits and reign absolutely, it
must be served to establish its visible kingdom, then we shall see, but what does “then”
mean, only evil is present, down with Europe, reason, honour, and the cross.
(Camus 1956b: 54)
In this world of universal culpability, pity, doubt, and dialogue are all to be suppressed.
Superiority falls to those strong or (as they will say) “clear-sighted” enough to affirm this uni-
versal state of things without the “clemency” that Camus’s antihero’s surname in The Fall
ironically evokes. A “judge penitent” condemns himself publicly first (“I am guilty”), in order
to provoke others to recognize their comparable shame (“we are all guilty”), the better to ascend
the mountain and reassume his lost, prelapsarian right to judge everyone without compunction
(“but since I affirm this Truth, I have the right to rule over all you others who are still lost in illusory dreams
of goodness”). In such a dispensation, cynicism replaces wisdom; grim decision responsibility;
blind obedience or “compliance” the virtues; amoral resolution courage. Clamence and “the
renegade” are two instances of the new kind of European philosopher whose advent Camus
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After the fall
announced in 1948’s “Helen’s Exile” who philosophizes not with a hammer but (given the
chance) with shock troops:
For instance, you must have noticed that our old Europe at last philosophizes in the
right way. We no longer say, as in simple times: “This is the way I think. What are your
objections?” We have become lucid. For the dialogue we have substituted the commu-
niqué: “This is the truth,” we say. “You can discuss it as much as you want; we aren’t
interested. But in a few years there’ll be the police who will show you we are right.”
(Camus 1956b: 45; 1987b: 151)
Concluding remarks
In this chapter, we have examined three registers of Albert Camus’s continuing engagement with
the problem, or problems, of evil. From his early work, Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism,
we saw, Camus is in dialogue with Augustinian theology. He shares with the early Christians
the acute sense that the problem of evil is the problem which should stand at the center of our
thought. Yet, like the early modern metaphysical rebels, he disputes the theological resolutions
of this problem. Unlike his Clamence or his “renegade,” Camus cannot accept the assignation
of universal culpability to all human beings, including children and unbaptized infants, whether
in order to save the supposition of an omnibenevolent deity or to salve our own senses of
guilt. In short, like Voltaire, Camus rejects the responses of theodicy as either inadequate, cal-
lous, or simply disingenuous. He sees the modern totalitarian regimes’ claims to absolute truth
and power as hideous secularized theocracies. In these, the leaders and their minions claim the
same sovereign rights over life and death assumed by absolute monarchies, backed by churches,
against whom early modern thought had legitimately rebelled.
In what became his last works, by contrast, Camus undertakes penetrating analyses of the
psychological or spiritual dimensions underlying people’s continuing attraction to such forms of
absolute rule. Living well for Camus involves accepting one’s finitude and even, where appro-
priate, owning up to one’s ethical failings and moral guilt. By contrast, evil of the worst kinds
can be rationalized when individuals instead “leap” to the comforting but cynical assessment
that everyone is equally guilty (so I am no more to blame than anyone else) or else, as in forms of
fascism, to the idea that the very ideas of virtue and goodness are cons, engendered by the weak
to reign in the strong (what matter if I am not good, since the very idea is an illusion anyway?).
Albert Camus died in a car crash on January 4, 1960, at age 46. It is impossible to know how his
thought would have developed had Camus lived a natural span of life. The First Man, the novel he
was working on at the time of his death, reflects Camus’s expressed desire in his last years to begin
exploring, positively, and painting portraits of lives lived well, in solidarity with others, in and not
despite human fallibility. This chapter has examined how the problem of evil, in its theological
and moral, political, and psychological dimensions, underlie nearly all of his singular body of work.
Notes
1 In a note in the weeks preceding this 1946 speech, Camus reflected more strongly:
“The only great Christian mind to look at the problem of evil in the face was Saint Augustine. His
conclusion was the terrifying ‘nemo bonus’. Since then, Christianity has spent its time giving the problem
temporary solutions. The result is there for everyone to see. It took time, but men are today poisoned by
an intoxication that dates back two thousand years.They have had enough of evil, or they are resigned to
it, which amounts to pretty much the same thing. But at least they can no longer put up with deception
(le mensonge) on that subject” (Camus 1966: 92).
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2 The following analysis reproduces in condensed form the analysis in Sharpe 2015: 125–34.
3 See Sharpe 2015: 125–6. Jeanson made this arguably justified charge against Camus in his unbalanced,
polemical attack on Camus in Les Temps Modernes: that Camus “limits himself to considering revolutions
from the point of view of a metaphysician” (Jeanson 2004: 87).
4 Compare: “‘Obey’, said Frederick the Great to his subjects, but when he died his words were: ‘I am tired
of ruling slaves,’” in Camus 1971: 251.
5 A technical device that impresses God, for the record, no more than “some obscure coin” from Greece
or Mexico (Camus 2008b: 1173).
6 In what follows, I again draw on the more extended analysis in Sharpe 2015: 318–46.
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PART II
Recent secular explorations of evil

13
DELIVER US FROM EVIL
The case for skepticism1
Phillip Cole
Introduction: the myth of evil

In a review of Matthew Kramer’s book The Ethics of Capital Punishment: A Philosophical
Investigation of Evil and its Consequences (Kramer 2011), Carol J. Steiker contrasts Kramer’s
response to learning of the horrors of the Holocaust as a child with her own. As an eight-year-
old, Kramer started to develop what ended up as a “purgative” rationale for the death penalty as
a moral duty in the face of extreme acts. It seemed obscene to Kramer that the rest of humanity
should have to devote resources to keeping leading Nazi perpetrators alive indefinitely. Steiker’s
own response as a “standard American Jewish teenage girl” was to wonder “how many Germans
(and others) could have come to see an entire people (my people) as not really people at all – as
something less than human” (Steiker 2015: 367). She would later explain her work as a public
defender in law:
I viewed the representation of (allegedly) heinous criminals as an extreme civil rights

work – the championing of the rights and dignity of exactly those people that right-
thinking folks are inclined to view as “not really people” at all. I argued that by zeal-
ously representing those whom we are most inclined to hate, I was keeping the world
safe for whoever else might at some point fall into that category – Jews, blacks, gays,
etc. I hoped that by contextualizing my clients’ offenses and giving voice to their
stories – especially when they were in fact guilty as charged – I was working against
our collective tendency to “dehumanize” others, by combating this propensity in its
most compelling form.
(Steiker 2015: 367–8)
For her, the challenge of the Holocaust was “to resist the human tendency towards the dehu-
manization of others, even (maybe especially) wrongdoers” (Steiker 2015: 368).
These contrasting responses – the first focusing on an account of the agents who carried out
these extreme actions and what should be done to them, the second focusing on understanding the
conditions that can give rise to dreadful persecution on the scale of the Holocaust, especially
the “collective tendency to ‘dehumanize’ others” – can be seen in the range of philosophical
responses to human “evil.” My own response is the same as Steiker’s, and it is this collective
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Phillip Cole
tendency and its power that I describe in my book, The Myth of Evil (Cole 2006), which, in
the United States, was given the subtitle Demonizing the Enemy. However, when I set out to
research and write that book I had a very different intention – but three interesting things hap-
pened during my encounter with the concept of evil. The first was about how I understood
evil and agency; the second about my relationship with two great moral philosophers, Kant and
Nietzsche; and the third to do with philosophy itself as a discipline.
When I decided to write a book on evil, I was convinced that philosophy, in its dominant
form, was importantly mistaken about a key issue to do with agency. The view taken by the
great moral theorists Hobbes, Hume, and Kant was that a human agent could not will “pure”
evil – that is, to bring about human suffering for its own sake. Where an agent willed human
suffering, it was for the sake of some other goal, such as power, pleasure, out of fear – this is
“impure” evil. But pure evil lay outside the realms of the human. I decided this was a radical
mistake – in the face of a human history filled with obscene atrocities at all levels, it seemed
futile to deny that human beings could will pure evil. So I set about collecting evidence for my
argument, looking at some of the worst cases of human cruelty – child murderers, torturers, ter-
rorists, serial killers, including the perpetrators of the Holocaust. But then came my first surprise.
Despite researching deeply into these events, I could make no sense of the idea of pure evil. Not
only that; even the idea of impure evil ceased to make sense – in fact, the concept of evil itself
began to dissolve into incoherence. By the time I wrote the book, I had arrived at a conclusion
completely opposite to the hypothesis I began with – a form of “evil skepticism.”
This is not skepticism that the concept of evil exists – it clearly does. And while in philoso-
phy there are subtle and sophisticated theories of evil, my concern was that these conceptions
have very little purchase on political and public discourse. The fact is that the concept of evil
that dominates popular culture and politics is what I term the “monstrous” conception. This
conception holds that some humans can freely and rationally choose to make others suffer
purely for its own sake, but these people have crossed a boundary beyond the human – they are
monsters in human shape, different from you and me and the rest of humanity. This concep-
tion is a powerful source of inspiration in fiction, where monsters with extraordinary powers,
whether from folklore or outer space, are filled with malevolence toward us and want to destroy
us for no reason other than this is what they want to do. But this conception has often crossed
from the world of fiction into people’s understandings of reality. The popular media are quick
to identify murderers, rapists, and others as monsters, and political leaders have also deployed
the monstrous conception. To portray an other as an evil enemy is to close off any possibility of
communication and negotiation, indeed of any need to understand anything about them. The
only possible form of defense is their complete destruction.
The second surprise was about my relationship with Kant and Nietzsche. As an undergradu-
ate student I encountered Kant’s categorical imperative in the form: “Act in such a way that you
treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a
means to an end, but always at the same time as an end,” and this was a transformative moment
in my philosophical and political life. This principle has underpinned my political thinking and
action ever since. However, as I dug deeper into Kant’s encounter with the concept of evil, I
saw my favorite moral philosopher become entangled in ever more complex knots with very
little result (Cole 2006: 58–66).2 I realized that it was Nietzsche who pointed the way forward,
because he asked the right question – not “how do we explain evil in the context of moral
philosophy?” but “why do people want to use the concept of evil in the way they do?” (Cole
2006: 66–76). This brought about the third surprise, that philosophy may not be best placed to
answer this question. And so, despite devoting my life to philosophical teaching and writing,
very early in this book I stopped doing philosophy. I traveled through politics, psychology,
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Deliver us from evil
psychoanalysis, literary and film theory, cultural theory, all of which told me much more in
answer to Nietzsche’s question than philosophy. Even then I ended up in a surprising place,
concluding that evil is not a philosophical concept, or a psychological one, or even a theological
one – it has its home in mythology.
Drawing heavily on the work of Neil Forsyth (Forsyth 1987 and 2003), I argued that the
figure of the evil person in the contemporary discourse of evil is mythological. Just as Satan is a
meaningful figure only in the context of the Christian mythological world history and makes no
sense outside it, the evil figures that stalk our contemporary world have a similar role. When we
describe someone as evil, we are not saying anything about their character or their motivations –
we are instead making them a figure in a story in which they play a specific and prescribed role.
And in making them such a figure we do away with any need to understand their history, their
motives, or their psychology. Narrative characters have no such features, or rather they simply
have the history, motives, and psychology ascribed to them by the narrative plot, those required
to drive the story forward. If we were to look beyond the myth of evil, we may discover people
very different to those we have constructed.
The philosophy of evil

I was rejecting any philosophical theory of evil persons, a theory that claimed to be able
to identify the properties that make a person evil, and/or claimed to be able to offer an
explanation for their evil agency. In their paper “Speak No Evil,” Eve Garrard and David
McNaughton respond to this rejection by describing it as a kind of “error theory” (Garrard
and McNaughton 2012). What they mean is that, if there is no such thing as evil agency,
then there can be no evil acts, and so the kind of moral horror we experience in response to
the terrible things people do must be some kind of error on our part. This, they argue, is
implausible. What a philosophical theory can do is enable us to understand this phenomeno-
logical experience of moral horror. A philosophical concept of evil action:
categorises together those acts to which we respond with moral horror; the pressing
task of a theory of evil is to provide an account of what features it is of such actions
that justify our horror, and explain why they do so.
(Garrard and McNaughton 2012: 17)
In their account, part of the role of a philosophical theory of evil action is to make sense
of our experience of moral horror. That is, of course, to make normative sense of it, not psy-
chological sense. The theory can tell us when that response is appropriate or inappropriate by
telling us when we are confronted with an act that is properly evil. We can make mistakes –
we can experience moral horror when we shouldn’t, or fail to experience it when we should.
For Garrard and McNaughton the theory of evil fills in the details of the experience – without
it, or at least without the concept, there would be no experience of moral horror. “What the
phenomenology delivers is not that acts are evil because we find them horrifying; rather it’s
that we find them horrifying because they are evil” (Garrard and McNaughton 2012: 15–16).
There are two possible claims being made here – first, that we will not experience moral hor-
ror without a concept of evil action, or a second, that we cannot make normative sense of
our experience of moral horror without a philosophical theory of evil agency (allowing that a
concept of evil action need not be a full-blown philosophical theory of agency). Whichever
of these claims is being made, I would argue that we do not need a concept of evil action in
order to experience moral horror, and we do not need a philosophical theory of evil agency
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in order to make normative sense of that experience. (See Chapter 15 for a discussion on the
emotion of moral horror).
There are different levels of experience to which the concept of evil has been historically
applied. The first is the fundamental experience of extreme suffering in the world, in particular
the suffering of innocents (traditionally this has specifically been human suffering); the second
is the cause of that suffering, which can be either natural activities like disease or earthquake,
or social, the results of human activity; the third is to human actions or inactions that cause
suffering; and the fourth is to the human beings and their reasons, motivations, or dispositions
that are taken to explain why those people carry out such actions. It is at the fourth level that
philosophical theories of evil agency are supposed to do their work, focusing on the character-
istics or dispositions or reasons that lead evil persons to carry out evil actions. And it is at this
level that evil functions as an explanatory concept, such that our philosophical theory offers an
explanation of why evil persons carry out evil actions. An explanatory concept of evil makes
no sense at the first two levels without a theological or mythological framework, and, while
philosophical theories of evil action apply at the third level, such theories can only tell us what
properties make an action evil, not why it happened, and so again there is no explanatory role
for the concept of evil at this level.
There are two points of crucial importance here. The first is that any idea of evil at the third
or fourth levels is parasitic upon the first two levels, and in the end all are parasitic on the first –
the unjustified suffering of innocents is the core idea of evil. The second is that there is more
than enough scope for the experience of moral horror at these first two levels without the need
for any concept of evil action or any philosophical theory of evil agency. Not only that; there
is expansive space here for illumination and explanation. These first two levels include the fact
that human beings have done dreadful things to humans and other animals and caused terrible
suffering. The important task is to understand the conditions under which such terrible events
occur – a situational rather than a dispositional approach. These are conditions that Garrard and
McNaughton say can play a part in explaining human action alongside the concept of evil,
such as social, psychological, historical, and neurological conditions (Garrard and McNaughton
2012: 10), to which I would add political, economic and cultural conditions. This is to widen
the second level beyond a simple binary between the natural and the human as causes of suffer-
ing, and to take in the social, political, economic, historical, cultural, neurological, and psycho-
logical complexities of the human condition. Certainly the other frames I explore in The Myth of
Evil of psychology, psychoanalysis, and politics can contribute to our understanding at this level,
as can economics, criminology, and other disciplines. And I do strongly believe that philosophy
can contribute to our understanding here also. In that sense, my skepticism about philosophy
is limited to those accounts that claim to provide theories of evil action and evil agency, and
which claim to be explanatory.
But it is this kind of theory that Garrard and McNaughton believe is needed to make sense of
moral horror. They use an example from the conflict in the Congo: “a combatant who disem-
bowelled and dismembered his adversary, and forced the dead man’s wife to gather up the dis-
membered body parts into a heap, on top of which he then raped her” (Garrard and McNaughton
2012: 14). We experience deep moral horror here, and if Garrard and McNaughton are right
we need a philosophical theory of evil agency to make sense of the normative content of that
horror, to make it moral horror. Their example comes from a report by Adam Hochschild, “The
Rape of the Congo.” Toward the end of that report, Hochschild asks how people could do such
terrible things to others, and provides an account, talking of brutalized and exploited soldiers as
well as the complex and longstanding chaos in the Congo. He says:
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looking at people I meet, even an entire encampment of gold miners who are almost
all ex-combatants, do I see those who look capable of killing hospital patients in their
beds, gang-raping a woman like Rebecca Kamate, jabbing a young man’s eye with a
bayonet? I do not.
He asks:
What turns such people into rapists, sadists, killers? Greed, fear, demagogic leaders and
their claim that such violence is necessary for self-defense, seeing everyone around
you doing the same thing—and the fact that the rest of the world pays tragically little
attention to one of the great humanitarian catastrophes of our time.
(Hochschild 2009)
He does not use the word “evil” at any point in his article, and, although this does not prove
anything concerning the arguments here, it seems significant to me that this is a report from
a journalist in the field, who has born witness to the events and to the people involved,
and experienced moral horror at first hand. Yet it does not seem to occur to him to use the
word “evil” or the idea of evil people to make sense of it. Rather, he takes Carol J. Steiker’s
turn in emphasizing the processes that have led these soldiers to see their victims as less than
human. The crucial point is that moral horror is entirely appropriate and comprehensible at
this situational level of analysis.
In an earlier paper Garrard makes one of the most important and detailed attempts to arrive
at a theory of evil agency (Garrard 2002). There she argues that the evil agent suffers a severe
cognitive defect such that they are blind to reasons that count against the action they wish to
perform. An “account of evil . . . which identifies the evil act as one in which the agent is
impervious to reasons of the most conclusive kind against his act, is therefore apt for figuring in
an explanation of the act in question” (Garrard 2002: 332). Saying the act is evil will “amount
to saying that the agent acted as he did because he was blind to the reason-giving force of (for
example) the suffering of his victims – he just couldn’t see that as a reason for him to desist”
(Garrard 2002: 332). This explains why he performed this act – “because he couldn’t see that
there were overwhelming reasons against it” (Garrard 2002: 332).
Because the proposed account of evil locates it in the agent’s motivational state (that
is, in the reasons he saw and failed to see), attributing evil to an action will always
partially explain why the agent performed the act, since it will always reveal some-
thing about what the agent saw as reasons for acting, and about what reasons he failed
to discern altogether.
(Garrard 2002: 332–3)
However, this account suffers the defects of any philosophical theory of evil agency, in that
any such theory will be derivative and parasitic. It will be derivative because the sense of evil
as the presence of overwhelming and undeserved suffering delivers all the content of the con-
cept, and it is parasitic as the concept of evil gets its explanatory force by becoming attached to
something else that does all the explanatory work. With Garrard’s account we might want to
say: “This person is evil because they have a cognitive structure which leads them to perform
evil actions.” But the concept of “evil” in this sentence plays no explanatory role. The cognitive
structure has been identified as evil because of the actions and their consequences that flow from
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it, but describing that cognitive structure, or rather the person who has it, as evil does not give
the concept any explanatory role to play at all. It is entirely parasitic.
In their later paper Garrard and McNaughton point out that other moral concepts do play an
explanatory role and that the concept of evil:
takes its place among the other moral concepts, both those which are features of
actions and also those which are features of character. And these moral concepts all
figure quite naturally in our explanations of human actions and reactions; indeed, we
will be unable to adequately understand how our fellow humans are behaving without
some reference to virtues such as courage, generosity, and honesty, or vices such as
selfishness, cruelty, and hypocrisy.
(Garrard and McNaughton 2012: 8)
But this is a significant shift in the understanding of the concept and its explanatory power.
Luke Russell distinguishes between two kinds of philosophical theory of evil agency – the first
is where “evil actions are marked out by a distinctive psychological feature that is comparatively
unfamiliar and complex” (Russell 2014: 36); and the second is a form of “folk psychology”
where evil actions are explained by an everyday psychological state we are familiar with such
as malice or pleasure. The appeal Garrard and McNaughton make to concepts like courage,
cruelty, and hypocrisy is an appeal to that latter kind of “folk psychology,” but the concept of
evil Garrard develops in her earlier paper does not belong to this list – folk psychology concepts
are relatively shallow and people who use them are making no claims about the deeper psycho-
logical structure of the agent described; Garrard’s concept of evil as a specific cognitive defect
has psychological depth. And so the appeal to “shallow” concepts of folk psychology cannot
persuade us that Garrard’s “deep” concept of evil makes philosophical sense.
The philosophy of dispositions

Russell has his own “shallow” theory of evil agency, as opposed to Garrard’s “deep” theory.
This is a dispositional approach where evil persons are those who are strongly and highly
fixedly disposed to perform evil actions under conditions of autonomy: “an evil person is
someone who is markedly likely to do evil when he is allowed to do what he wants to do, and
whom we cannot easily change into a good person by using everyday techniques such as moral
reasoning” (Russell 2014: 5). Evil personhood understood in this sense can act as a limited
explanation of evil action: that a person has a strong and highly fixed disposition to perform
evil actions is part of an explanation of why that person performed such an action in specific
circumstances. If we are looking to philosophy to help, alongside other disciplines such as
psychology and economics, in the project of understanding why human beings cause terrible
suffering to their fellow humans and other creatures, Russell’s approach represents one of the
paths I described at the start of this chapter. This is a view that Garrard shares, in pointing to
the existence of a distinct type of human being as separate from the rest of humanity. This is
not a complete explanation, but evil persons, as identified by the theory of evil agency, are
going to be a very important part of the story.
This brings me to a second strand of my concerns about philosophies of evil and another
ground for my skepticism. The first was to do with the coherence of such theories and their
claim to provide an explanatory theory of evil agency. The second concern is ethical: even if
we can overcome the coherence objection, we should still be very cautious about philosophies
of evil agency, precisely because of their tendency to pick out a separate type of human being,
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marked out by specific characteristics, as evil persons. I have pointed to the power of the dis-
course of monstrous evil in popular culture and politics, and in The Myth of Evil I argue that this
discourse is much more powerful and pervasive than philosophy, and, if given the opportunity,
it will feed off philosophy for its own ends. If philosophy claims that it can identify evil persons
as distinct and different, it may find itself co-opted in political and social projects it finds deeply
dangerous and disturbing, with little or no power to resist that co-option. In this chapter, I want
to argue that some of the seeds of the monstrous conception are present within these philo-
sophical theories of evil persons, and that if they are applied consistently, these philosophical
theories can themselves lead to some deeply morally questionable practices.
We can see those seeds in Russell’s theory, in his conclusion that “there really are some evil
persons, who are not only strongly disposed to perform the worst kind of wrong actions, but are
beyond redemption, for practical purposes, and should be treated as write offs” (Russell 2014:
196). Todd Calder identifies two aspects of Russell’s conception of evil personhood that get him
to this conclusion – the fixity component and the autonomy component. The fixity component
is designed to overcome the objection that, if we take Russell’s definition of evil actions, a great
many people would count as evil persons when in fact such persons are comparatively rare. The
fixity component tells us that the evil person not only carries out evil actions; they also have
a fixed disposition to do so in the right conditions. The majority of people who perform evil
actions do not have this fixed disposition, and therefore do not count as evil persons. This is to
rule out the possibility of rehabilitation of evil persons, or at least make it very unlikely. They
will not change their ways. Russell says:
an evil person is someone who is strongly and highly-fixedly disposed to perform evil
actions when in autonomy-favouring conditions, and hence . . . for practical purposes,
an evil person is a moral right-off, whom we cannot expect to listen to our moral argu-
ments or to be a suitable candidate for other attempts at moral reform. If this is what
it means to demonize a person, then in judging that our enemy is an evil person, we
are demonizing the enemy.
(Russell 2014: 225)
Russell refers here to the second component of his theory, the autonomy requirement, that
people who perform evil actions in conditions where their autonomy is compromised in some
way do not count as evil persons – evil persons are disposed to perform evil actions in situations
where their autonomy is not compromised in anyway. This, again, meets the intuitive require-
ment that evil persons are comparatively rare.
But it also makes them distinct from the rest of the humanity. Calder comments that the
fixity component is meant to capture the “folk” intuition that evil persons are beyond reform
and redemption, but asks whether these intuitions should be captured in a philosophical theory
of evil personhood – just because they are strong “folk” beliefs, we do not have to include
them in our theory, and perhaps, morally, we ought not to. Calder suggests that they reflect a
psychological desire or need to see ourselves as essentially good persons, quite distinct from evil
persons such that we are incapable of participating in bringing about great suffering for others.
Evil persons are utterly unlike us; they are inhuman monsters (Calder 2015: 353). This makes
our dealings with such people simple: there is no need to negotiate or engage with them in any
way, or be concerned about their rehabilitation – we should “destroy them or isolate them from
civilized society” (Calder 2015: 353). This is a philosophy of monsters, hardly a stone’s throw
from the monstrous conception that motivates popular and political conceptions of evil people,
with all its dangers. Calder comments:
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while it may be true that many people have the intuition that evil persons are moral
write-offs, beyond reform and redemption, these intuitions may be based more on
desires to have and promote positive images of ourselves than on clear reflection about
the concept of evil personhood and human psychology.
(Calder 2012: 354)
Calder is also critical of the autonomy component of Russell’s account. As explained earlier,
the component is there to allow us to limit the number of evil persons and not implicate the vast
majority of people in evil personhood. Russell argues that the majority of people who took part
in Stanley Milgram’s experiment, for example, were not evil despite performing evil actions.
Russell expands this to what he describes as “Milgram scenarios,” in which people are being
pressured and deceived, or “volatile and threatening political situations” (Russell 2014: 170).
Calder asks how we are meant to know when a Milgram scenario holds. “Is any circumstance
where we are influenced by surprising situational factors a Milgram scenario? If so, we may be
in Milgram scenarios all of the time” (Calder 2012: 355). And if we extend this to include vola-
tile, threatening or coercive political situations, Russell’s evil person becomes very rare indeed.
Calder’s view is that there is something wrong – conceptually and perhaps ethically – with try-
ing to identify evil persons as a distinct kind. While most of us are not evil persons under ordi-
nary circumstances, “most, if not all, of us have the potential to be evil persons” (Calder 2012:
357). Rather than combat evil by seeking to isolate or destroy evil persons, the more urgent task
is “to avoid creating social environments that are conducive to the emergence of evil persons”
(Calder 2012: 357), recognizing that there is very little to prevent ourselves from being an evil
person in those environments.
Beyond the philosophy of monsters

Calder here refers to the option of the destruction of evil persons, and of course Russell does not
suggest this. In fact, few philosophers of evil agency have anything to say about what should be
done once we have used philosophical theory to identify evil persons. An exception is Matthew
Kramer, in his book The Ethics of Capital Punishment (Kramer 2011). Developing what he calls
his purgative theory of punishment, Kramer argues that:
among the countless crimes committed in any jurisdiction, some are so iniquitous that
the continued existence of the thugs responsible for them is a blot on the moral order
of the community in which those thugs are kept alive. Sparing such criminals from
execution is wrong, for their lives are of negative value. So long as they survive (past
the time necessary for fair legal proceedings against them), they sully any community
with which they are associated.
(Kramer 2011: 186)
A community is tainted – “its moral integrity is lessened” – by the continuation of the lives
of those who commit such crimes. “To avert or remove that taint, a community must devote
some of its resources to terminating the life of such an offender” (Kramer 2011: 187). Such a
theory of punishment, says Kramer, must be underpinned by an account of the nature of evil
(Kramer 2011: 187).
The evil that underpins the purgative response has to be extreme or “extravagant.” The
purgative rationale “extends only to instances of evil conduct that are so heinous as to render
abominable the continued existence of their perpetrators” (Kramer 2011: 224). He uses two
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fictional case studies, of Richard and Joseph. Richard, a Satan worshiper, rapes, tortures, and
mutilates people before murdering them, his victims ranging from infants to elderly women
(Kramer 2011: 227). His crimes include cannibalism, eating people’s body parts sometimes
while they are still alive to witness it. Joseph does not murder, but kidnaps girls aged between
seven and 14, amputates their hands and legs below the knees without anesthesia, and proceeds
to rape and torture them (Kramer 2011: 227–8). The community has a moral duty to execute
such people. This need arises from the normative relationship between the community and the
rest of humanity. To keep such people alive is to use resources to support “a life that constitutes
a gross rebuff to human kind” (Kramer 2011: 237).
For this to work, Carol J. Steiker argues that Kramer needs to provide a distinction between
extravagantly evil acts and “ordinarily” evil acts that is clear enough for us to be able to know
when the purgative response is appropriate. She is skeptical – evil acts can be on a continuum
from the less to the more extreme, but there is no clear boundary point that can carry the
immense moral weight Kramer needs to place somewhere. Kramer is confident such a boundary
must exist but Steiker is not convinced he provides us with the material to find it, and even if it
does exist she is skeptical about our ability to identify who has crossed it. She says: “the essential
nature of people is more obdurately opaque than Kramer is willing to admit – especially the
nature of evil doers, who by definition are exceptional and thus presumably not very much like
us” (Steiker 2015: 370). We should also note that Kramer’s examples of Richard and Joseph
are fictional, and in fiction we can write in details of people’s state of mind that we could never
know in reality – Kramer’s accounts are filled with the mental states of their experiences, giving
us special access into the minds of these people which is not, in fact, available to us.
Behind Kramer’s account, argues Steiker, is a strong view of self-authorship, something like
Russell’s autonomy condition, only perhaps much stronger.
Kramer acknowledges that offenders’ genetic predispositions, impairments and envi-

ronments may create “constraints” and “pressures” in their lives (241), but he insists
that “evil offenders are reflective agents rather than automatons” and that they “form
[. . .] their profoundly evil characters within the limits of their genes and environ-
ments” and are thus “rightly held fully responsible for their heinous crimes against
humanity” (243). This view stands in sharp contrast with the work of many medical
and social scientists that locates the roots of violent anti-social behaviour in strong
genetic predisposition, social deprivation, and situational constraints, rather than in
autonomous character formation.
(Steiker 2015: 371)
In the end, says Steiker, “Kramer’s clarity on the issue of extravagant evil is founded on an
implausibly rigid view of human character formation and agency” (Steiker 2015: 372).
Earlier I suggested that, if we are to illuminate and understand the conditions that give rise
to great suffering that can be attributed to human activity, we need to look at the social, politi-
cal, economic, historical, cultural, neurological, and psychological complexities of the human
condition. Philosophy can make a contribution to this project, but needs to find a way of doing
so which works alongside this range of different approaches. If we return to Calder’s concern
about the scope of the Milgram scenario we can see this challenge clearly. Melissa Deary, in
discussing the Milgram experiments and those of Philip Zimbardo, argues that their evidence
challenges the dispositional thesis, by showing that any human agent, in the right conditions, is
capable of evil action. We need to understand “the situational nature of the social context and
the systematic nature of socio-political organization over the dispositional factors of individual
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psychology in the manifestation of evil” (Deary 2014: 182). Illumination and understanding
will come with an awareness of those social contexts and organizational structures. However, as
Deary herself comments, this does not cover those who meet Russell and Kramer’s autonomy
component, who commit atrociously awful deeds without those social contexts and organi-
zational structures, and it is perhaps in this space that philosophies of evil agency that seek to
identify evil persons as distinct from the rest of humanity gain their hold.
We come now to the final skeptical point – that the agents that Russell and Kramer, and oth-
ers, identify as evil persons distinct from the rest of humanity do not exist: they are, once more,
fictional or mythological. But surely, in the face of the history of human atrocities, this cannot
be right. Garrard and McNaughton have provided us with a real case study, the soldier in the
Congo who disembowels and dismembers his enemy and rapes his victim’s wife on the heap of
body parts he forced her to gather together. And surely Kramer has provided another – whatever
the flaws in his fictional description of Richard and Joseph, we know such people exist. These
are people who are fixedly disposed to commit such actions under conditions of autonomy, and
for whom there is no prospect of rehabilitation.
But let us consider both of these cases more closely. In the first, if anything meets the condi-
tions of the Milgram scenario or a volatile, threatening, or coercive political situation, surely
it is the conflict in the Congo. This is especially so when we consider that a large number of
combatants are child soldiers who have suffered from particularly extreme traumas. The World
Health Organization estimates that there are at least 250,000 child soldiers involved in conflicts
around the world, and, while rehabilitation of such children, some of whom have committed
atrocities, is possible, it is a lengthy and expensive process (World Health Organization 2009).
Alexandra Stein writes about a particular form of Milgram scenario, the cult, and about how
people, including child soldiers, become members of cults, and how they can also escape and
recover from them. She herself has been through that experience with others. “Something we all
understand – and wish we didn’t – is how an ordinary person can end up donning a suicide vest
and killing themselves along with their unknown victims” (Stein 2017: 2). Her most important
conclusion is that “people who find themselves in cults, extreme groups or even totalitarian
nations are ordinary people who did not choose that situation” (Stein 2017: 2). None of us is
immune. “Cult recruitment is primarily the result of situational vulnerabilities not personality vul-
nerabilities (what social psychologists call situational as opposed to dispositional factors)” (Stein
2017: 59). The point is that these situational vulnerabilities can happen to anybody in the form
of a normal life “blip” – some normal change in life situation such as leaving home for university,
relationship breakup, or death in the family. All the research shows that there is no personality
profile here (Stein 2017: 60). But these “banal” disruptions can have explosive endings:
Endings of outsiders, of enemies, of followers, of children. We see the genocides of

totalitarianism from Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot. Or the smaller tragedies such as Aum
Shinrikyo’s 1995 gassing of commuters in the Tokyo subway. Propaganda films show a
young Londoner turned ISIS/Daesh executioner beheading hostages in Syria. Perhaps
saddest of all are the children, from child soldiers to the children who die in cults -
sacrificed to the Leader’s will.
(Stein 2017: 3)
The search for a personality or disposition leads people to ask the wrong question: “What
is wrong with those people that they chose to join such a group?” (Stein 2017: 4) – again an
expression of the “folk psychology” belief that they must be a distinct type of person, not at
all like us. On the contrary, Stein says: “We know that, in fact, most of these followers were
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ordinary people, people who got caught up in situations beyond their control” (Stein 2017: 4).
This means that the right question is:
What was the situation that these people found themselves in when these things hap-
pened? What processes unfolded in that situation to cause such a tragic and seemingly
incomprehensible result? What is this dangerous environment to which we are not
well adapted? Why, in fact, are most of us vulnerable to these influencing processes,
given the right circumstances at the right time?
(Stein 2017: 4)
But, it might be replied, this is to focus on the wrong people. We need to identify the cult leader,
the one who dominates and directs these people. Here we will find a personality type, someone
with a dispositional framework unlike that of the rest of us. To an extent Stein would say this is right –
unlike their recruits, cult leaders have a psychopathology that can be identified and understood
(Stein 2017: 108–9). However, we will not find the evil person who meets Russell’s or Kramer’s
autonomy condition. Drawing on the work of Theodore Adorno on the authoritarian personality,
and on Edgar Schein’s findings that totalist leaders are anxious and insecure, Stein argues that such
leaders display a specific kind of disorganized attachment that leads to aggressive and dominant
behavior, a form of disorganization that in children is overrepresented in those with aggressive
and controlling-punitive behavior disorders (Stein 2017: 111). These children have a background
of maltreatment, especially controlling physical abuse. “This hostile or controlling-punitive form
results from violent, frightening, controlling backgrounds, or what have been termed ‘hostile self-
referential parenting.’ These children respond to this situation by themselves becoming hostile
and controlling towards others” (Stein 2017: 111). Although we do not know much about the
background of totalist leaders, in some cases we know that they fit this background. Stein discusses
some of these cases, such as David Koresh, leader of the Branch Davidians, and Adolf Hitler (Stein
2017: 112). What we see is a set of attributes that fit the model of the psychopath – shallow effect,
lack of empathy, guilt, or remorse, superficial charm, egocentricity, manipulativeness, deceitful-
ness, grandiosity, and callousness in interpersonal relations (Stein 2017: 112).
In the final chapter of her book Stein looks at possible solutions, and these are similar to those
suggested by Calder. Rather than seek to identify and isolate problematic personalities, we need
to look at social organization and community life, to the building of positive communities in an
age of fragmentation (Stein 2017: 209). We need a public realm that:
works in our fragmented society, one that does not yearn for an idealized past and
a closed vision of community, but looks forward to an open, welcoming, safe and
diverse, pluralist view of community life where children are valued, universal human
rights are valued and varied cultural expressions that respect these rights are valued.
(Stein 2017: 211)
Such communities would, says Stein, produce fewer potential totalist leaders and fewer
potential victims, and by strengthening positive connections between people, “provide
fewer situational factors for the development of totalism” (Stein 2017: 208).3
This returns me to the central theme of this chapter and the evil skepticism it expresses, that
philosophies of evil are in danger of asking the wrong questions, and so rendering philosophy
irrelevant when it comes to the key task we face when confronted by human atrocity. That key
task is to understand the conditions – political, social, economic, cultural, psychological – that
underpin such atrocities and make them possible, and through that understanding to enable
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societies to guard against them by ensuring that we learn the lessons of history. By directing our
focus to the evil agent, by attempting to define them and explain their actions in terms of a dis-
tinct type of person, separate from the rest of us, philosophical theories of evil have us searching
in the wrong place, asking the wrong questions, with a danger that we will find ourselves lost in
a world of folk psychology and folk beliefs about monsters that have their origin in mythology.
However, I am not denying that the concept of evil is rich in meaning and deeply significant
for our understanding of our history or culture, or that philosophy as a discipline can contribute
to that understanding in rewarding and enlightening ways. What I am suggesting is that what
we will come to understand in exploring the concept, is not why human beings have acted and
continue to act in ways that defy our moral comprehension, but rather our own conception of
humanity and its limit, and how that conception – and especially the idea of the limit – has been
strategically distorted, deployed, and exploited, and most importantly how it contributes toward
the dehumanization – the demonization – of others.
Notes
1 Thanks to Roshi Naidoo for her comments on this paper.
2 For a close and sympathetic reading of Kant’s treatment of evil, see Gavin Rae’s Evil in the Western
Philosophical Tradition, forthcoming in 2019 (Edinburgh University Press). Another very helpful account
is Burdman 2016. Also see Chapter 8 in this volume for an outline and discussion of Kant on evil.
3 It may be objected that this kind of situational approach means we cannot condemn any act we might
consider to be immoral. I address this criticism in Cole 2006: 169–173 and will not repeat those
arguments here.
References
Burdman, J. (2016) “Between Banality and Radicality: Arendt and Kant on Evil and Responsibility,”
European Journal of Political Theory, forthcoming (available Online First http://journals.sagepub.com/
doi/full/10.1177/1474885116640725, accessed March 22, 2018).
Calder, T. (2015) “Evil Persons,” Criminal Justice Ethics, 34/(3): 350–60.
Cole, P. (2006) The Myth of Evil, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Deary, M. (2014) Making Sense of Evil: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Forsyth, N. (2003) The Satanic Epic, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Forsyth, N. (1987) The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Garrard, E. (2002) “Evil as an Explanatory Concept,” Monist 85(2): 320–36.
Garrard, E. and McNaughton, D. (2012) Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XXXVI: 1–17.
Hochschild, A. (2009) “Rape of the Congo,” New York Review of Books, July 15, 2013: www.nybooks.
com/articles/archives/2009/aug/13/rape-of-the-congo/?pagination=false (accessed April 19, 2013).
Kramer, M.H. (2011) The Ethics of Capital Punishment: A Philosophical Investigation of Evil and its Consequences,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Russell, L. (2014) Evil: A Philosophical Investigation, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rae, G. (2019) Evil in the Western Philosophical Tradition, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Steiker, C.S. (2015) “Can/Should We Purge Evil Through Capital Punishment?” Criminal Law and
Philosophy 9: 367–78.
Stein, A. (2017) Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems, London and New
York: Routledge.
Tanney, J. (2009) “Reasons as Non-causal, Context-Placing Explanations,” in Constantine Sandis, ed,
New Essays on the Explanation of Behaviour, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
World Health Organization (2009) “Healing Child Soldiers,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization,
Volume 87, Number 5: 325–404: www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/87/5/09-020509/en/ (accessed
March 21, 2018).
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14
DOES THE TERM
“EVIL” HAVE ANY
EXPLANATORY POWER?
Eve Garrard
This chapter focuses on the issue of whether or not the term “evil” is an explanatory moral
concept. That is, it’s about whether the concept of evil can help to explain the actions to which
it is applied – the actions that count as evil actions.
The different senses of evil

First we should note that people use the term “evil” quite readily and unselfconsciously in
ordinary discourse, and they understand each other perfectly well when they do so. But we
must also note that they use the term “evil” in several different ways. Sometimes it is used
to mean everything adverse in human lives, embracing both moral evils such as wars and
massacres, and natural evils such as drought and plague. On other occasions we use it more
specifically to refer to the whole range of human immorality (as when we say “the evil that
men do lives after them”). In this second usage, any wrongdoing can count as evil – we can
talk about the evil of genocide, and also about the evil of malicious gossip (there is a slightly
elevated, quasi-biblical quality about this use of the term). Sometimes, however, we nar-
row its reference still further, and reserve it for particularly horrifying kinds of action that
we feel are to be contrasted with more ordinary kinds of wrongdoing, as when for example
we might say, “That action wasn’t just wrong, it was positively evil.” The implication here
is that there is a qualitative, and not merely quantitative, difference between evil acts and
other wrongful ones; evil acts are not just very bad or wrongful acts, but rather ones possess-
ing some especially horrific quality. It is evil in this third sense that I want to concentrate
on in this chapter. There are some actions, some events, that we feel the need to describe
in terms of their being evil in this more exclusive sense, in which we contrast their moral
status with that of everyday wrongful actions. The terrible massacres of both the last century
and this one, the hideous and endless ingenuity of their tortures, seem to require description
in terms of evil in this exclusive sense because other kinds of moral condemnation do not
capture their nightmarish horror. What I want to examine in this chapter is whether the
concept of evil, used in this restricted sense, has the power to explain anything about the
actions so described.
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Eve Garrard
Two explananda
Why in general do we think that concepts should have explanatory power? The main thought
seems to be that a concept that lacks explanatory power will be vacuous, will add nothing to the
discourse in which it is deployed. A classic example that is often appealed to here is the concept
of dormitivity, which is the power of certain substances to send people to sleep. To explain
why a substance sends people to sleep by saying that it has dormitive power appears to tell us
nothing at all about the substance; the appeal to dormitive power produces nothing but the
tautological claim that this substance sends people to sleep because it has the power of sending
people to sleep. But we want our claims about evil actions to do more than rehearse tautologies;
we want them to help us understand the actions better, and explanation is (among other things)
something that increases understanding.
So in attributing evil to an agent or action, what might we be looking to explain? (Both evil
actions and evil persons require explanation, but in this chapter I’ll be focusing principally on
evil actions, mainly because they seem prior in some way to evil agents – we won’t be able to
understand what it is to be an evil person unless we have some prior understanding of what it
is for an action to be evil.) We want to categorize certain kinds of wrongful action as special in
some way, as especially chilling or horrific. So our first question is whether there is some distinc-
tive feature that such actions possess, or are we just using the term evil as a simple intensifier, to
pick out cases of extreme wrongness (or badness), differing only in degree, and not in kind, from
other cases of wrongness? Second, there is the question of why such acts are performed. We
understand human action in terms of the reasons that the agents take there to be for acting: how
are we to account for some agents thinking they have reason to act in these peculiarly terrible
ways? Any answer to this question will need to reveal something about the state of mind of the
agent, about the favorable light in which he saw the act, but it does not follow that appeal to the
agent’s character (i.e., his settled dispositions to act) will necessarily be helpful. The high level
of popular participation in some of the most terrible massacres of the twentieth century strongly
suggests that we need an account of evil under which evil acts can be committed by agents who
do not necessarily have evil characters. Without such an account, we would have to accept that
large, perhaps very large, numbers of people are evil, and I am assuming (perhaps optimistically)
that this is implausible. What is needed is an account of the agent’s state of mind in committing
the act in question, and this need not entail anything about her settled dispositions.
If the attribution of evil to an action is to have explanatory power, it should at least contrib-
ute to the answers to the questions presented above.1 On the face of it, claiming that the acts
in question are evil does not by itself reveal why we group just those wrongful acts together
in one category, or why we respond with horror to them. Nor does it explain why the agents
committed them. This is not a problem specific to evil. Identifying an act as benevolent does not
by itself explain why we group together certain acts in this moral category and respond to them
with admiration, or why some agents commit such acts. But in the presence of an account of
what benevolence amounts to, such questions are at least partly answered: to characterize an act
as benevolent is to identify it as one in which the agent’s reason for acting was the promotion
of the welfare of others. This already tells us something about why the agent acted as he did.
Similarly, an adequate account of what evil is would show why certain acts are to be categorized
together under that heading; why we respond as we do to them; and (at least to some extent)
why the agents performed them. In the case of benevolence, we take this kind of explanatory
power for granted, so clear is our grasp of what benevolence amounts to. The nature of evil is
more obscure, but I shall argue that appropriate accounts of evil are available, and that once one
of them is in place the concept of evil can do explanatory work.
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Does the term “evil” have any explanatory power?
Objections to using the term “evil”

For those who have the appropriate theological commitments, the term “evil,” with its super-
natural or even Satanic connotations, is not distinctively problematic – it inherits such problems
as that general metaphysical context presents, but it finds its natural home there. But purely
secular thinkers also feel the need to use this term; they too want to mark off certain kinds of
actions as special, as qualitatively different from more ordinary kinds of wrongdoing. However,
it is not clear what it is we are claiming when we attribute evil to an action or agent in a purely
secular context, and the general obscurity surrounding the term makes some thinkers very
reluctant to appeal to the idea of evil as part of a serious treatment of horrifying moral phenom-
ena. So a further question I want to address is whether this reluctance is justified, or whether on
the contrary a legitimate place can be found for the idea of evil in our secular understanding of
the moral domain. Of course, if evil turns out to be capable of playing an explanatory role in a
secular account of human actions, then this will strengthen its legitimacy as an element in the
web of secular moral concepts.
One of the fullest philosophical presentations of skepticism about evil has been provided by
Phillip Cole in his The Myth of Evil.2 I can’t do full justice to his views here, but his central claim
is that (1) in the most widespread and popular conception of evil, evil actions are done freely and
rationally in order to cause the suffering of innocents for its own sake; (2) that judging people to
be evildoers is to judge them to be monsters outside the bounds of the human race; and (3) the
deployment of the concept of evil is morally suspect.
But none of these claims is plausible. Neither the philosophical nor the popular concep-
tion of evil (assuming there to be a single version of those conceptions in either category) has
it that in evil actions the suffering of innocents must be brought about purely for its own sake.
It’s widely believed that a range of possible (and mainly discreditable) motivations – such as
the desire for power, or the taking of sadistic pleasure, or the fulfillment of various ideologi-
cal commitments – exists for the commission of evil acts. Second, even if we do conceive of
evildoers as monsters, it doesn’t follow that they are outside the bounds of the human race, nor
does it follow that we judge them to be. It all depends on the view we have of human nature.
With a not implausibly pessimistic view of that nature, we will see evildoers as realizing the dark
possibilities within many or even most of us, waiting to be brought to fruition by the tempta-
tions provided by the circumstances around us. (See for example the work of Philip Zimbardo,
who offers a situational, rather than a dispositional, account of evil.) We do evil because of the
institutional pressures and constraints upon us.3 Cole’s emphasis on the explanatory power of
situation seems very congruent with this view, but it certainly doesn’t involve seeing evildo-
ers as utterly different from the rest of the human race. Third, once we reject these unwanted
and unwarranted implications, there is no reason to see the deployment of the concept of evil
as morally suspect. It is judgmental, undoubtedly, but so is the concept of wrongdoer, and the
concept of wrongful action, and indeed the whole array of moral concepts that we use to assess
the world around us and its inhabitants.
The debate about the usefulness, and indeed the legitimacy, of the concept of evil can also
be seen taking place entirely outside the confines of philosophy, and it is illuminating to see
the extent to which Cole’s concerns are mirrored in the debate. A notable example of the
reluctance to appeal to evil can be seen in the historian Inga Clendinnen’s collection of essays
Reading the Holocaust.4 Clendinnen does not seem to endorse the view of evil motivation that
Cole proposes, and this is not surprising, since she is dealing with a specific historical phenom-
enon about which quite a lot is known. It would be hard after the work of Hannah Arendt5
and others to assume that people whose acts are regarded as evil (by those who are prepared to
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Eve Garrard
deploy that concept) are motivated entirely by the desire to bring about the suffering of inno-
cents for its own sake – there were too many evildoers with diverse motivations for that to be
a plausible story.
But Clendinnen certainly shares the second and third of Cole’s concerns mentioned above.
One of her principal aims in the essays is to reach some understanding of the major perpetra-
tors of that event, and in pursuit of that aim she explicitly rules out reference to claims about
evil. She regards such reference as a barrier to the kind of understanding she seeks,6 and there
seem to be two main reasons for this. First, she regards the appeal to evil as nonexplanatory: it
is a “dismissive classification”7 that is “of no use whatsoever when it comes to teasing out why
people act as they do,”8 and hence of no use in explaining the enthusiastic killings and massacres
by the Nazis and their local helpers.9 Second, Clendinnen claims that references to evil take us
beyond the domain of the human to somewhere “sinister and metaphysical,”10 “beyond the
moral pale . . . and therefore beyond the possibility of human understanding,”11 inhabited by
inhuman automata or monsters12 rather than human beings whom we can hope, to some extent
at least, to understand.
Let me start with the charge of explanatory inadequacy. Here the thought seems to be, first,
that reference to evil should not appear as part of an attempt to understand the perpetrators
unless it can explain in some way what was done, and, second, that the idea of evil cannot meet
this constraint: it cannot explain the perpetrators’ actions. But neither of these claims is entirely
plausible. It is not immediately obvious that in our account of a great moral catastrophe such as
the Holocaust we should only appeal to those features that pull clear explanatory weight in our
understanding of human action. Reference to a particular kind of feature may be appropriate
even if it isn’t explanatory. The explanatory force of thin moral concepts such as right or wrong,
good or bad, is widely contested, but any attempt to understand the perpetrators of that catas-
trophe that did not make at least implicit reference to these properties of their actions would
be hopelessly inadequate. What would we make of an account of the Holocaust that wasn’t
obviously committed to the view that it involved the most terrible wrongdoing? And of course
Clendinnen is clearly so committed.
Furthermore, the thick moral concepts such as courage or kindness, cruelty or cowardice,
are clearly indispensable for the historical description of human action, let alone its explanation,
and as a matter of fact Clendinnen makes no attempt whatever to do without them – e.g., she
talks about the “bully-boy geniality” of the barracks culture of the Order Police barracks; of the
“toughness of spirit” of the Sonderkommandos, which she admires; of the “heroic act of compas-
sion” of the woman doctor in the Warsaw ghetto who killed the children in her care to save
them from a worse fate at Nazi hands. Indeed, she even uses (rather than mentions) the term
“evil” in her description of Eichmann.13 The concept of evil is one element in the whole nexus
of our moral concepts, and in general their appearance in our account of perpetrators’ actions is
unobjectionable and indeed unavoidable.
So appeal to the moral concepts seems to be legitimate even if they do not pull any very
noticeable weight with respect to the explanation of action. But as I have suggested at the start
of this chapter, we should not take for granted the claim that there is no explanatory work
being done here. Nicholas Sturgeon, for example, has argued extensively for the explanatory
power of moral concepts.14 And clearly Clendinnen herself regards such concepts as able to
do explanatory work: she regularly appeals to moral features of agents to explain their behav-
ior. She wants “to believe that [Primo Levi] survived because of his remarkable qualities:
the curiosity . . . and the humour and compassion,”15 and, though she recognizes that actu-
ally it was luck that was primarily at stake, she obviously regards such characteristics as the
kind of consideration that does have explanatory power. She says of Gitta Sereny that “she is
192
consistently honourable in her relationship with Franz Stangl [commandant of Treblinka], as

with all her interview subjects, because she is by nature honourable”;16 of Rudolph Hoess,
commandant of Auschwitz, she remarks that “the man that we see is energetic, vain, and
much too frank in damaging self-revelation to be classed as a hypocrite.”17 Clearly the moral
categories used in these quotations are regarded as doing explanatory work, as accounting for
some aspects of the perpetrators and their deeds. And of course there is nothing remarkable
about Clendinnen’s use of these categories; this is how historians, and the rest of us, standardly
make sense of our fellow human beings.
Qua moral concept, then, there can be no objection to the concept of evil on grounds of
explanatory inadequacy. The other moral concepts are sufficiently explanatory to figure in the
historical understanding of human action. If there is a problem with evil, it must be because of
the kind of concept it is, because of the place it occupies in the matrix of our moral understand-
ing of human behavior and character. And this takes us to Clendinnen’s second objection to
the concept of evil: she does indeed see it as an appeal to something transhuman or inhuman,
something alarmingly “metaphysical,” the attribution of which implies that the agents in ques-
tion are monsters unlike the rest of us, and inaccessible to human understanding.
Now if we retain the connection between evil and the Satanic, then this view of the
concept may be justified. But that is the theological conception of evil (at least, one fairly
crude version of it) and no secular thinker should expect to appeal to it. If there is room for
a secular account of evil at all, then it will not have these transhuman implications. Perhaps
it might be argued that without the sinister metaphysics, there wouldn’t be anything recog-
nizable as evil left. But the presence of so many secular references to it casts doubt on this
suggestion. People who have no belief of any kind in the Devil find a use for the concept of
evil. Of course, it is possible to hold something like an error theory of evil: the view that its
use does imply something Satanic or at least supernatural, but that what is implied is just false,
and hence no statements referring to evil can be true. In using the term, on this account, we
are suffering from something like an intellectual hangover from a religious past. This view
is possible, and in the absence of a secular account of evil it may even be plausible. But we
need to see first whether there is a satisfactory secular account of evil, and, if there is, an error
theory will lose its appeal.
We should, however, also note that we do not have to accept the polarities just as they are
set up by Clendinnen. She thinks that we should not regard the perpetrators as monsters, since
this will exclude them from the domain of human understanding. But when we hear or read of
the tortures that these men (and sometimes women) devised, we do think they are monsters –
what more would an individual have to do to be classifiable as a monster? They are the stuff
of nightmares. We could, however, regard the perpetrators as monsters without thinking that
this cuts them off in some radical way from the rest of the human race. To do this, we would
have to give up the picture of human nature as intrinsically good, or at least as morally neutral.
But this picture is not in any case a plausible one – the work of Browning18 and Goldhagen19
that Clendinnen cites so approvingly, and the depressing evidence of much of the rest of the
terrible twentieth century, not to mention the continuation of many of these horrors into the
twenty-first century, suggests fairly strongly that ordinary humans can all too readily become
monsters, and that understanding monsters is what we will have to do if we are not to give up
on the project of understanding ourselves. But the very idea of a monster that is also a human
being just like us, indeed one of us, is part of what would be treated in a secular theory of evil,
so here we see another reason to develop such a theory.
So Clendinnen’s rejection of appeals to the idea of evil is in some respects misplaced, since
(1) concepts that are not obviously explanatory may still play a useful role in our account of
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human behavior; (2) in any case it has not yet been shown that the concept of evil cannot play
an explanatory role;20 and (3) attributing evil to agents or their actions does not necessarily imply
that they are radically unlike the rest of the human race. Nonetheless, her reservations about
appealing to evil do have some legitimacy, in the absence of a secular theory. Without such a
theory, we cannot know if the secular concept of evil can do explanatory work; we cannot fend
off an error theory of evil, and we cannot fully capture how terrible are some aspects of human
nature – the nature of ordinary human beings.
A theory of evil
There are various forms that a secular theory of evil action can take.21 Some focus on the out-
comes of the evil act, and say little or nothing about the agent’s psychological state; others focus
more exclusively on the state of mind of the evildoer, and may involve investigations into the
psychology of evil and how the evildoer comes to have that distinctive psychology. Here I will
offer what might be called a hybrid view of the question “What is it for an act to be evil?”,
making appeal both to the reasons against carrying out the evil act and to the state of mind in
which such reasons get no purchase on the evildoer’s motivational state. With that on the table,
we can then begin to see if such an account could make less plausible an error theory of evil;
could present us with a way of seeing major perpetrators as both monstrous and human like us;
and could show how the concept of evil can do explanatory work.
What, then, is it for an action to be evil?22 The first thing to note is that the very tempting
view, that the evil action is the one that produces huge amounts of suffering, is not satisfactory.
The production of enormous suffering is neither necessary nor sufficient for an act to be evil.23
It is not sufficient because all wars produce huge amounts of suffering, and yet not all wars are
evil, in the restrictive sense that is the topic of this chapter. Many people regard World War II
as a morally justified war, and one thing we can be certain of is that evil actions are not morally
justified. But the Allies who declared and waged World War II produced enormous suffering,
so this can’t be sufficient for evil. Nor is it necessary: there is a kind of small-scale horror, like an
exquisitely detailed miniature, which produces suffering of too limited an amount to meet the
requirement in hand, and yet is still unproblematically evil.24
If we cannot characterize evil purely in terms of the terrible suffering it produces, where else
might we look to find its distinguishing features? It might be thought that the evil act should be
seen as the dark counterpart of the supererogatory act: that just as we have the supererogatory
act at one end of the spectrum of moral excellence, so we have the evil act at the other, negative,
end. But this thought, even if true, is unlikely to be very illuminating about the nature of evil,
since there is a very notable disanalogy between supererogatory acts and evil ones.
Supererogatory acts are morally praiseworthy, but not morally obligatory – they’re outside
the scope of duty, and in some sense above and beyond it. If we think of a hierarchical scale
of moral action, we think of some actions as morally permissible – morally speaking, it’s fine if
we do them, and fine if we don’t. Brushing your teeth after breakfast might be an example.
Other actions are morally obligatory: we’re obliged to do them, and we’ll be doing wrong if
we omit to carry them out. Such actions are our duty; sometimes they’re easy to do, such as
picking up our own litter; sometimes they’re very hard to do, as when it’s our duty to look
after a very demanding and tiresome patient, and do this with forbearance and perhaps even
with good cheer. In such cases we may well sympathize with the person who fails to do this
kind of duty, and admire him when he does manage to carry it out. But we can still see his
task as, in the appropriate circumstances, his duty, as morally obligatory. In contrast, there are
some highly admirable actions that morality does not require of us, perhaps because they’re
194
so very hard to do or go so profoundly against our usual reasons for action, for example our
usual reasons for preserving our own lives. These actions can be utterly admirable but still not
obligatory for us to do. These are the supererogatory acts, and they’re outside the domain of
moral requirement.
At the other end of the hierarchy, below the permissible actions, lie the wrongful ones. This
is the domain of the prohibited, the forbidden actions: all the actions here are ones that it’s our
duty not to do. But evil acts aren’t outside the scope of prohibition: they fall squarely within the
domain of the forbidden acts. They aren’t in any sense below and beneath the area of prohibi-
tion; on the contrary, they are in many cases the most prohibited ones of all – we are in the most
serious breach of our duty if we perform any one of them.25
So, however we are to understand the nature of supererogation, it seems unlikely to reveal
what we want to know about the nature of evil. There is no structural similarity between evil
and supererogation in terms of their relation to other moral categories.
Another possibility for developing an account of evil is to focus on features of the agent,
and in particular his motives for acting. Colin McGinn26 has adopted such a strategy in his
proposal that the evil act is one committed by an agent who derives pleasure, noninstru-
mentally, from the pain of others; where the agent’s motive is to cause suffering for no
reason other than that it provides pleasure to the agent.27 No doubt such acts often are evil
(just as acts that produce huge amounts of suffering are often, though not always, evil). But
this is not enough to ensure that the proposed analysis is satisfactory. First, it rules out from
being evil the acts of the desk murderers who, though perfectly ready to produce appall-
ing horrors, feel no particular pleasure at the misery they cause (although it doesn’t follow
that they feel any regret either). Eichmann is usually cited as an example of such an agent,
and, though it may not actually be true of Eichmann that he took no pleasure in the suffer-
ing he caused, nonetheless that possibility should not be ruled out by our account of evil
(nor should the account force us to the broadly unacceptable alternative of denying that
Eichmann’s acts were evil).
Second, not all cases of pleasure-taking in the pain of others are evil. It depends what other
morally relevant features of the action are present. The sadist who, knowing and regretting his
propensities, tries to harness them to some good end (perhaps by working in a field where dis-
tress at the pain of others would be a positive handicap) need not be acting evilly, though there
may still be some morally deplorable element in his actions.
What McGinn has done is identify a feature that will make an action evil if there are no other
redeeming features in it. But there are other motives that are prima facie evil in the same way:
the aim of dominating others (which need not involve taking pleasure in their pain, or indeed
hurting them at all) may also, if it appears without any other redeeming characteristics, be suf-
ficient to make an action evil.
Third, there are many cases of evil where the pain of others is sought instrumentally, regard-
less of whether pleasure is taken in it by the evildoer. Think of the torturer who works for hire,
torturing in order to extract information or concessions for his paymaster. He may take little
or no pleasure in the pain he inflicts, but he holds his victims in such indifference or contempt
that their suffering counts for nothing at all to him. What he does seems evil, but nothing in
McGinn’s analysis accounts for that. So overall it is hard to see a privileged role in our under-
standing of evil for the taking of pleasure, noninstrumentally, in the pain of others.
However, there are other ways in which the agent’s motives – i.e., the reasons that she takes
there to be for acting – can figure. The theory that I am going to propose suggests that the evil
act can be identified by reference to the reasons that the agent sees, and fails to see, for acting.
Here I am drawing on an account given by John McDowell of action at the other end of the
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moral spectrum: McDowell proposes that we can understand the virtuous agent, and distinguish
her from the merely continent agent, by reference to the phenomenon of silencing.28 The conti-
nent agent overcomes the temptations that she experiences, and does what it is right for her to
do. The virtuous agent, by comparison, silences rather than overcomes temptation: for her, the
tempting considerations, which would in other contexts be genuine reasons for action, lose their
reason-giving force in the presence of the reasons that there are to do the right thing. So, for
example, the continent agent sees that it is right for her to give a substantial amount of money
to a charity for helping the victims of some terrible natural disaster. She feels some temptation
to keep the money for herself, since there are things she would like to buy with it, but with a
certain amount of struggle she overcomes these temptations and donates the money. The virtu-
ous agent (whom we need not at all suppose is normally indifferent to money) is by contrast
unmoved by what she might purchase for herself were she to keep the money. She is so gripped
by her understanding of the needs of the victims, so fully aware of how terrible things are for
them, that the prospect of spending the money on herself has no motivational force. For the
virtuous agent, the considerations that make the donation right silence the reason-giving force
of the opportunity to spend some money on herself. There is nothing for her to overcome, and
hence there is no struggle.
We need here to distinguish between what we might call metaphysical silencing on the one
hand and psychological silencing on the other. The virtuous agent, grasping the reasons as they
really are, sees that, in the presence of the reasons that make the action right, other considera-
tions cease to be reasons at all – they are metaphysically silenced. But this can be contrasted with
a total failure to see that certain considerations are reasons at all, even when they are, and this
we might call psychological silencing. Both forms of silencing will appear in the theory of evil
that I am going to sketch out.
According to this theory, the evil action is one in which the agent is entirely impervious –
blind and deaf – to the presence of significant reasons against his acting. It is not just that he
allows less important considerations, such as his own power or pleasure, to outweigh these more
forceful considerations, e.g., the suffering and loss of life of others; rather, he is completely
insensitive to these features’ reason-giving force. For him, there is nothing to be outweighed;
he has (psychologically) silenced such considerations, and is unable to see that they are reasons
for acting or refraining from action.
However, the mere fact that the agent has silenced – is entirely impervious to – the reasons
that genuinely are present is not sufficient to make his act evil. There may be very good reasons
for visiting our elderly parents, say, but someone who just doesn’t see them, who just does not
care at all about his lonely old mother, cannot really count as acting evilly (in the sense required).
He may be cold and heartless, but that is insufficient for evil. More needs to be said about the
structure of the reasons that the evildoer has silenced.
As is suggested in McDowell’s account of the virtuous agent, some reasons are so power-
ful that they have the effect of metaphysically silencing considerations that in other contexts
would have reason-giving force. The possibility of saving a modest amount of money is a
perfectly good reason for buying one kind of fruit, say, rather than another. But if there is only
one way to protect my much-loved child from a disease that will lead to a terrible and linger-
ing death, then the fact that the protection will cost me the same modest amount of money
is no kind of reason at all for not purchasing it. The reason I have to protect my child is a
metaphysical silencer for modest sums of money – in its presence they lose their reason-giving
force. It’s not that saving a few pennies is a reason to refrain from purchasing the treatment
that is outweighed by the stronger reason to protect the life of the child; rather, in the context
of saving the child’s life, saving a few pennies is no reason at all against getting the treatment.
196
Consider also the woman who betrays her neighbor (whom she’s always disliked), and the
Jewish family the neighbor is sheltering, to the Gestapo. The unlikability of neighbors is often
a perfectly good reason for action, but in the presence of the terrible fate awaiting them at the
hands of the Gestapo their unlikability loses its reason-giving force. The threat of that fate is
a metaphysical silencer for considerations such as unlikability. What the evildoer does is (psy-
chologically) silence reasons that are themselves (metaphysical) silencers.
On this account, the evil act turns out to be one performed by an agent who is suffering from
a profound cognitive defect – an inability to grasp the presence of reasons of the first impor-
tance. It is not, of course, that the evildoer fails to see that the considerations that constitute
these reasons are present in the circumstances: the torturer knows very well that he is causing
appalling pain to his victim – that’s what he’s aiming at, after all. What he fails to grasp is that the
pain that the victim is suffering is an overwhelmingly strong reason for him to desist. He fails to
see its reason-giving force.
Using evil as an explanatory concept

I am not aiming to defend this account of evil here (I think there are some cogent objections
to it, in particular that at best it only provides sufficient grounds for an action being evil,
rather than the more elusive necessary requirements). What I want to do is discuss whether
an account of this kind could meet the requirements suggested above: can it fend off an error
theory of evil; can it accommodate the idea of something monstrous in human nature; can it
play an explanatory role?
First, this is a fairly formal theory of evil: it says nothing at all about what the reasons are
which are silenced by the evil agent, and hence it can accommodate a variety of different nor-
mative moral theories. (The cases considered above are just examples, and could if necessary
be replaced by others driven by different moral commitments.) Unless we have a general error
theory of morality, there seems no reason why appeals to evil, construed in this way, should
plausibly be seen as the result of systematic error.
Second, it seems to allow for a recurrent feature in the phenomenology of evil, namely our
sense that there is something monstrous about the evil agent. The picture here is one of severe
cognitive defect, resulting in the most terrible distortions of practical reason. The evil act is one
in which the agent can’t even see that there is a reason of the most important kind against his
action. What kind of a condition would you have to be in to fail to hear the shrieks of your
victims as any kind of a reason against torturing them? A very dreadful condition indeed, given
how central practical reason is to our conception of what it is to be a person. So perhaps here,
in the idea of a deformed and distorted capacity for practical reasoning, we find an explanation
of the sense that the people who perform these dreadful acts have something monstrous about
them. But there is nothing in this way of construing evil that suggests that these monsters are
totally cut off from the rest of us; on the contrary, it leaves entirely open the possibility that
such blindness could affect others of us, if we allow ourselves to get into the cognitive states
characteristic of evildoers.
Finally, can this account of evil play an explanatory role? For evil, as for any other considera-
tion, whether it is explanatory or not will depend on what question is being asked, and what
range of alternatives are being considered.29 If the question is: “Why did he commit an evil
act?” and the answer is: “Because he’s evil,” then indeed little has been explained. Here we are
far too close to that paradigmatic case of nonexplanatoriness, the appeal to opium’s dormitive
powers to account for its ability to send people to sleep.30 But a theory of evil should enable us
to avoid such vacuities by providing a way of filling out what is being attributed to an act when
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it is called evil. And the filled-out account can at least to some extent help to explain why the
evildoer performed the act in question. We understand human actions in terms of their explana-
tions, and we explain action by citing the reasons that agents take themselves to have for acting
as they do. The account of evil outlined above, which identifies the evil act as one in which the
agent is impervious to reasons of the most conclusive kind against his acting, is therefore apt for
figuring in an explanation of the act in question.
So if the question is: “Why did the agent perform this chilling, horrific act?” then identify-
ing the act as evil will, on this account of evil, amounts to saying that the agent acted as he did
because he was blind to the reason-giving force of (for example) the suffering of his victims –
he just couldn’t see that as a reason for him to desist. This has explanatory force: it shows (to
some extent) why he performed this act (as opposed to some other less dreadful one), because
he couldn’t see that there were overwhelming reasons against it; and it also explains (to some
extent) why this agent (rather than the ones who refrained) performed the act, since other agents
might have been able to see what this agent couldn’t see. Because the proposed account of evil
locates it in the agent’s motivational state (that is, in the reasons he saw and failed to see), attrib-
uting evil to an action will always partially explain why the agent performed the act, since it will
always reveal something about what the agent saw as reasons for acting, and about what reasons
he failed to discern altogether.
There is, of course, a great deal that will not be explained by appealing to this account of
evil. It will not, for example, explain why the agent is blind to these considerations. But that is
a different issue – how people come to be evil – and one to be investigated by psychology and
sociology and history rather than by philosophy. The explanatory power of the concept of evil
may be quite limited; it is not, however, entirely negligible.
It might, however, reasonably be claimed that if this concept is to be truly explanatory
then it should be able to do more than just account for one kind of contrast – e.g., the con-
trast between performing and not performing a particular kind of act – since otherwise the
concept may just label the phenomenon rather than explain it.31 This requirement may be
another version of one we have already met (what we might call the “dormitivity worry”),
but in any case the proposed account of evil can meet it. Clendinnen cites Rudolph Hoess,
the commandant of Auschwitz, as comparing assaults on himself in prison, in 1946, by a
Polish-Jewish guard, with the behavior of the guards at Auschwitz, claiming that the com-
parison showed that controlling guards is always difficult and hence he was not to be blamed
for the excesses of those who were under his command. As Clendinnen says, “The gross
incommensurability of the two situations seems, quite simply, to escape him.”32 Where Hoess
sees similarities, we in contrast see a huge disanalogy between the two situations, on account
of the incomparably greater magnitude of the suffering of the victims at Auschwitz and their
utter innocence compared to Hoess’s own blood-soaked guilt. On the proposed account of
evil, Hoess was impervious to the reason-giving force of that innocence and suffering – he
did not at Auschwitz see it as any kind of reason to desist. That same cognitive defect explains
his inability to see the moral difference between the situation of the guards at Auschwitz and
the situation of the Polish Jew guarding him.
At the start of this chapter, two phenomena were proposed as suitable for explanation by
appeal to the concept of evil. The first is our readiness to identify a subset of the class of wrong-
ful actions, members of which provoke in us a special response of horror. The second is the
readiness of some agents to commit these acts, against which there seem to be such overwhelm-
ingly powerful reasons. The theory of evil that has been sketched out here seems able to explain
(to some extent) both of these phenomena. We identify this subset of wrongful acts because its
198
members have something in common (namely, that they are all performed by agents who are
silencing reasons of the greatest importance against acting), and they provoke such horror in us
because of the terrible deformation of practical reason that this silencing constitutes. We can
explain (to some extent) why agents are prepared to commit these horrific acts, where there
are such weighty considerations against acting, by citing the (putative) fact that those agents are
impervious to the reason-giving force of these considerations. There is, of course, much more
that needs to be said before either of these phenomena is fully explained. But that fact doesn’t
discredit evil as an explanatory concept, since it will also be true of the concepts appealed to by
any other elements of the full explanation.
The account of evil that I’ve sketched out here is a fairly elaborate one, referring both to the
reasons for and against action in the circumstances, and also to the psychological (specifically,
cognitive) state of the evildoer. But such elaboration is not necessary for the attribution of evil
to an action to play an explanatory role. Consider a much more straightforward account of evil
such as McGinn’s, according to which an evil action is one where the agent derives pleasure,
noninstrumentally, from the suffering of others. This account of evil can also play an explana-
tory role. We standardly recognize that pleasure is one of the great motivating forces in human
lives; so if, on McGinn’s account of what evil is, we characterize an action as evil, we are help-
ing to answer the question of why the agent committed this particular action that caused such
suffering to others – it’s because he derived great pleasure from doing so. And we thereby also
help to answer the question of why this particular agent committed the evil act, rather than any
of his peers – it’s because he, unlike (let us hope) most of the rest of us, derives pleasure from
the suffering of others.
Another monistic account of the nature of evil might claim that the evil act is one that inten-
tionally produces very terrible outcomes (such as great suffering, or great harms), or is closely
connected with the production of very bad outcomes. Claudia Card and Luke Russell both
have (differing) sophisticated versions of this kind of account. But even a simple version can play
an explanatory role, though perhaps a fairly minimalist one: if this is what evil amounts to, that
helps to some extent to explain the special horror that these actions produce in us, since there is
always at least pro tanto reason, and usually all-things-considered reason, to avoid producing very
terrible outcomes. The deliberate rejection of reason is always troubling; when it’s done in the
pursuit of great harm to others it is horrifying. (If this is correct, then theories of evil that hold
that there is no qualitative distinction between evil actions and very wrongful ones, but only a
quantitative difference, are able to play an explanatory role. The quantitative difference can to
some extent account for the reaction of horror at evil actions rather than at merely wrongful
ones – quantitative differences are, after all, genuine differences.)
Finally, let us consider a pluralist theory of evil, such as that presented by Stephen de
Wijze.33 His account is a disjunctive one, according to which an action is evil if it fulfills any
one of three different conditions: either it involves the deliberate violation of persons with the
intention of dehumanizing them; or it gratuitously inflicts the “Great Harms” (for example
physical suffering, starvation, imprisonment, destruction of one’s family) on sentient beings that
have moral standing; or it seeks to annihilate the “moral landscape,” for example by warping
or inverting what counts as right and wrong. Can this disjunctive theory play an explanatory
role in our understanding of the actions in question? Consider the case of genocide, where we
wonder how and why the perpetrators can desire to, or even bring themselves to, kill huge
numbers of helpless men, women, and children who have until recently been their fellow
citizens or even their neighbors. (The readiness to do this was a most notable feature of the
Holocaust and of the Rwandan genocide.) By categorizing genocide as evil we will, on de
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Wijze’s account, be claiming that it involves dehumanizing of the victims, and/or inflicting
one or more of the “Great Harms” on them, and/or warping or inverting our normal moral
standards. (In many cases genocide will involve all three of these conditions, though meeting
all of them is not necessary for an act to be evil on de Wijze’s account.) Dehumanizing the
victims undermines the prohibitions that are normally in place against harming the innocent,
as of course does the inversion of our usual moral standards. So judging genocide to be evil
helps to explain how otherwise normal people, often in large numbers, can bring themselves
to commit such horrors. It only helps to explain this – much more is needed for anything like a
full explanation of genocide, including contributions from sociology, psychology, history, and
quite possibly ethology and biology. But that is what we should expect in attempting to fully
account for so complex and terrible a phenomenon as genocide. It is, of course, possible that no
fully adequate explanation is available. In particular the element of gratuitous excess, especially
with regard to torture, which is such a notable feature of genocide and other very large-scale
killings, may resist our best attempts at explanation. But that doesn’t mean that partial explana-
tions aren’t available, or that they aren’t of use to us.
We’ve looked at two fairly simple theories of evil, and two rather more complex ones, and
in all cases the account of evil can do some explanatory work. The aim of this chapter is not
primarily to justify the various theories of evil under consideration; it is only to argue that the
concept of evil has some explanatory power even under different accounts of what evil is. Of
course, differing accounts of evil may be better or worse at helping to explain the actions in
question, and if a particular account is better than others at this task then that would be a strike
in its favor.
Conclusion
Although we can conclude that in the context of a secular theory of evil the concept of evil can
do some explanatory work, that work is often quite limited. But this doesn’t mark out the con-
cept of evil from other of our moral concepts, whose explanatory power is also limited. Limits
on explanatory power aren’t sufficient to cast doubt on the legitimacy of a concept. Whether
any of the particular theories of evil I have sketched out can be defended is of course another
matter. But, if they can’t, then maybe there is an alternative that will do better. For we need
a satisfactory account of evil if we’re to capture the full range and depth of our capacities for
terrible wrongdoing.34
Notes
1 Of course there is no reason to suppose that appeal to the idea of evil will be able to provide full answers
to all these questions. But that is not a special feature of the concept of evil: the provision of a full expla-
nation of any action is likely to be a complicated matter drawing on a wide variety of considerations.
2 See Cole 2006 and see also his more recent treatment of the subject in Chapter 13 of this volume.
3 Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, Random House, 2007.
4 Clendinnen 1999. I focus here on Clendinnen’s work because she is so helpfully explicit about her
decision to refrain from appeals to evil, but I do not intend any criticism of the book on historical
grounds, having found much of it extremely interesting and plausible.
5 See Arendt 1963.
6 See Clendinnen 1999: 81 and 104.
7 Clendinnen 1999: 107.
9 See Clendinnen 1999: 131.
200

12 See Clendinnen 1999: 131–2.
14 See Sturgeon 1986 and 1988.
18 Browning 1992.
19 Goldhagen 1996.
20 But see Cole’s chapter (Chapter 13) in this volume for an attack on this view.
21 For a very helpful discussion of different types of theories of evil, see Formosa 2008.
22 In much of this section I will be drawing on my paper, Garrard 1998.
23 Objections might be raised here to the search for necessary and sufficient conditions for a phenomenon
such as evil, on the grounds that such a search implies an unwarranted essentialism, or alternatively
that for other phenomena such searches have not had a successful track record. I cannot address this
methodological issue adequately here, but would like to note that philosophical practice, in the face of
a proposed account of a phenomenon, usually includes consideration of whether there are unconten-
tious cases of the phenomenon that do not fit the account, and on the other hand whether there are
cases that do fit the account but are not examples of the phenomenon in question. It is hard to see how
this differs from considering whether the account provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the
phenomenon in question.
24 For a more detailed discussion of this issue, see de Wijze 2018, Morton 2004 and Garrard 2002.
25 For the sake of simplicity of presentation, I’m speaking here as if it is definitely types of action which
are prohibited or obligatory. I very much doubt that this is the case, but that argument belongs in a
different paper. However it’s worth noting that with some of the great evils, such as genocide, there are
no obvious exceptions to their normative status as evil.
26 See McGinn 1997: 62.
27 McGinn contrasts this kind of “pure” evil with instrumental evil, where the suffering of others is a
means toward some other goal. He regards such instrumental cases as immoral selfishness or egoism
rather than pure evil, so it seems clear that the phenomenon being analyzed is the distinctive kind of
evil that is the focus of this chapter.
28 See McDowell 1978.
29 See Garfinkel 1981, especially Chapter 1.
30 It is also worth noting that there are some contexts in which an appeal to dormitivity is in fact highly
explanatory, as when everyone in the room has taken one of the pills but only John has fallen asleep.
Why did he fall asleep? It’s because the pills that everyone else took were vitamin C, but the pill that
John took was opium, which has dormitive powers.
31 “To construct – or employ, or discover – a theoretical entity to account for just one isolated difference
is to restate the difference rather than to explain it.” See Mellor 1965: 212.
33 See de Wijze 2002.
34 This is a revised and extended version of a paper that appeared under the title of “Evil as an Explanatory
Concept” in The Monist in April 2002. I am grateful to Todd Calder, Chris Daly, Andre Gallois, Graham
Macdonald, Geoffrey Scarre, Leo Zaibert, David Garrard, Stephen de Wijze, and in particular David
McNaughton, for very helpful discussion of earlier versions of this chapter.
References
Arendt, H. 1963. Eichmann in Jerusalem. New York: Viking Press.
Browning, C. 1992. Ordinary Men. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.
Clendinnen, I. 1999. Reading the Holocaust. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Cole, P. 2006. The Myth of Evil. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.
de Wijze, S. 2018. “Small-Scale Evil.” Journal of Value Inquiry, 52(1): 25–35.
de Wijze, S. 2002. “Defining Evil: Insights from the Problem of ‘Dirty Hands.’” The Monist 85: 210–38.
Formosa, P. 2008. “A Conception of Evil.” The Journal of Value Enquiry, 42(2): 217–39.
Garfinkel, F. 1981. Forms of Explanation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
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Garrard, E. 2002. “Evil as an Explanatory Concept.” The Monist 85(2) : 320–36

Garrard, E. 1998. “The Nature of Evil.” Philosophical Explorations 1(1): 43–60.
Goldhagen, D. 1996. Hitler’s Willing Executioners. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
McDowell, J. 1978, “Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, Supplementary Volume, 52: 32–59.
McGinn, C. 1997. Ethics, Evil and Fiction. Oxford, Clarendon Press.
Mellor, D.H. 1965. “Connectivity, Chance, and Ignorance.” British Journal of the Philosophy of Science,
XVI(63): 209–225.
Morton, A. 2004. On Evil. New York: Routledge.
Sturgeon, N. 1988. “Moral Explanations” in G. Sayre-McCord (ed.) Essays on Moral Realism. Ithaca, NY,
and London: Cornell University Press.
Sturgeon, N. 1986. ”Harman on Moral Explanations of Natural Facts” in N. Gillespie (ed.) Spindel
Conference 1986: Moral Realism, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Supplement, XXIV: 115–41.
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15
DEFINING THE CONCEPT
OF EVIL
Insights from our pre-cognitive responses
Stephen de Wijze
Are our pre-cognitive reactions to evildoing and evil persons, those very widely experienced
emotional and intuitive responses, useful for understanding the concept of evil? Do such expe-
riences provide an insight into why a notion of evil is needed as part of our moral vocabulary
and, second, why it is qualitatively different from mere moral wrongdoing? To ask these ques-
tions another way, does the phenomenology of our moral experiences when facing evildoing
and/or evil persons and institutions provide valuable data for resolving two difficult problems
facing contemporary secular accounts of evil? I argue that our pre-cognitive reactions, such as
the experience of moral horror, are indeed important data for understanding a concept of evil,
which in turn gives this concept explanatory power and insight into why it is qualitatively dif-
ferent from the concept of ordinary wrongdoing.
The chapter has the following structure. I begin by setting out the distinction between
a general concept of evil and the many varied and substantial conceptions that arise from
it. While this distinction applies to both religious and secular accounts my focus will be on
concerns faced by recent secular conceptions of evil. I then briefly outline the three main
approaches within contemporary secular scholarship about evil: historical, scientific, and philo-
sophical. They tend to downplay or entirely dismiss the role of emotions and intuition in the
analysis of evil. I then argue that a complete understanding of our moral reality1 necessitates
a concept of evil that is significantly informed by our pre-cognitive responses. I contend that
our pre-cognitive visceral and intuitive reactions to certain actions and persons motivate our
understanding of a general and universal concept of evil, one that is not sufficiently recognized
and taken into account by the many and varied conceptions of evil. This phenomenology of evil
indicates that we intuitively use a separate normative category within moral theory to describe
and react to certain terrible events where the standard concept of moral wrongdoing proves
insufficient. I then set out and clarify our pre-cognitive responses to evil. These responses of
horror, a sense of defilement, and disgust provide valuable data for defining the essence of the
concept of evil. Following this, I briefly offer a plausible explanation for why human beings
respond in these pre-cognitive ways and challenge the rejoinder that such phenomenological
data are of no use for developing conceptions of evil. Finally, I argue that if our pre-cognitive
responses do indeed provide insights into a plausible concept of evil, then this resolves the two
concerns raised against secular conceptions of evil: the question of explanatory power and the
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Stephen de Wijze
“qualitative difference” thesis. A properly defined concept of evil indicates that some of our
experiences are not merely of cases of great moral wrongdoing (although it includes this too),
but of cases that are qualitatively different due to the subversion and distortion of the very
normative boundaries needed to live decent lives.
Distinguishing between a concept and conception of evil

In any systematic and analytical discussion of evil, it is crucially important to make a clear dis-
tinction between the general concept and its many different conceptions. The former captures what
is referred to in the general or universal claim that evil exists while the different conceptions
offer substantive reasons and arguments for a particular account of evil and of evil actions, per-
sons, or institutions. Put another way, the concept of evil remains unchanging in picking out
an important part of our moral reality even in the face of different and conflicting conceptions
of this term. The concept of evil, then, subtends and frames the discussions from which the
competing conceptions, both religious and secular, arise.2
What then does the concept of evil entail and how does it differ from the many and varied
conceptions? The term “evil” seeks to describe a set of dreadful actions, persons, social institu-
tions, and ideologies, when the standard moral terms of “bad” or “wrong” are insufficient to the
task. The concept of moral evil recognises a set of actions, vices, and institutional practices that go
beyond ordinary moral censure and disapproval.3 What distinguishes evil from moral wrongdo-
ing is that if left unchecked it could destroy or seriously undermine accepted and established
moral/social/political boundaries. The term evil recognises that there are practices and persons
who, if not confronted and stopped, make viable social and political coexistence impossible.
Evil does not constitute a merely greater quantity of wrongdoing but involves subversion and
distortion of the very normative boundaries themselves, boundaries that are fundamental to the
possibility of decent and tolerable lives.
This concern with subversion of boundaries triggers and motivates the plethora of religious
and secular conceptions, each with their own specific focus on the precise characteristics of
the nature of evil. These differing religious and secular conceptions arise from the particular
historical and philosophical assumptions about what human beings require to lead worthwhile
and meaningful lives. A conception of evil, then, refers to those specific instantiations or sets of
conditions that give content to the general concept. In secular accounts, this focus is on malevo-
lent motives and intentions, and/or the deleterious consequences of actions. In many religious
accounts, it is the rejection of, or rebellion against, God that identifies the nature of the excess
and subversion that undermines or perverts the socially accepted moral boundaries and God-
given purpose of life.
The case for secular accounts of evil

The recent wave of scholarship on evil4 focuses on secular explanations and eschews theologi-
cal or religious accounts, which evoke the existence of supernatural entities.5 The concern of
secular theorists is that to underpin any analysis of evil with a theological doctrine and/or arcane
set of metaphysical claims fatally undermines its credibility. Besides relying on dubious super-
natural beings, some religious accounts also face other difficult problems. For example, the main
monotheistic traditions stipulate that there is only one God and that this deity is omnibenevo-
lent. Given this, evil occurs because a particular dark supernatural force (e.g., Satan) cajoles, per-
suades, or possesses people to act evilly. Where there is no evil force, human beings can choose
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Defining the concept of evil
to be evil when they fail to obey God’s commands or deny his very existence. Yet the question
that needs to be answered is why such a good all powerful God would allow evil in the world.6
Given the concern that religious accounts of evil inevitably import more problems than
they solve, secular theorists seek a conception of evil that avoids any problematic metaphysical
or theological claims.7 The analysis explores motives, intentions, character, consequences of
actions, and the role of specific vices, such as cruelty and malice, in arriving at a considered
view of what constitutes evil. From a secular perspective, the term “evil” picks out the very
worst kind of acts, persons, and institutions from a normative perspective. The principal
claim is that there is a strong need for this distinctive term, which serves as a condemnatory
descriptor to complement our moral vocabulary and properly describe a specific and terrible
facet of our moral reality. This revival comes after some believe that contemporary liberal
societies have “lost the sense of evil.”8 With the decrease in religious influence, contempo-
rary societies defer to explanations of human behaviour, even its worst manifestations, in
terms of a combination of biological, psychological, political, and social influences. People
act from motives and intentions best explained by genetic and/or environmental factors.
With a proper analysis of the aberrant behaviour, we can properly understand such actions
and take the appropriate steps to prevent them occurring in the future. This view argues that
there is no conceptual space for a term such as “evil” to describe these actions or a person’s
settled dispositions (character). A notion of “evil” is at best an outdated and unhelpful term
that brings with it unacceptable baggage from the past. To use this term inevitably evokes
a discredited and dangerous religious metaphysics and demonizes and excludes certain indi-
viduals or groups (very often) for a particular and illegitimate political purpose. Furthermore,
this demonization serves to “justify” actions against a particular group or individuals; actions
that would ordinarily be prohibited as morally unacceptable.9 Consequently, the term “evil”
has no place in contemporary moral theory and ought to be nothing more than a legacy of a
religious and superstitious past.
Yet there is a considerable gulf “between the visibility of evil and the intellectual resources
available for coping with it.” What is more, the scientific (social and biological) explanations on
offer do not capture the qualitative difference of these appalling events. As Delbanco points out:
So the work of the devil is everywhere, but no one knows where to find him. We
live in the most brutal century in human history, but instead of stepping forward to
take credit, he has rendered himself invisible. Although the names he was once desig-
nated (in the Christian lexicon he was assigned the name Satan; Marxism substituted
phrases like “exploitative classes”, psychoanalysis preferred terms like “repression” and
“neurosis”) have been discredited to one degree or another, nothing has come to take
their place. . . . .Yet something that feels like this force still invades our experience,
and we still discover in ourselves the capacity to inflict it on others. Since this is true,
we have an inescapable problem: we feel something that our culture no longer gives
us the vocabulary to express.10
By rejecting the term “evil” as a part of our normative vocabulary we lose the “conceptual
means for thinking about the sorts of experiences that used to go under the name of evil” and
“we feel something that our culture no longer gives us the vocabulary to express.”11 If this is true,
there is an urgent need to define a concept of evil that is secular and provides the conceptual
tools that Delbanco argues has been lost to our contemporary moral vocabulary. The recent
philosophical offerings of substantive conceptions of evil seek to do just this.
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Different approaches to developing secular conceptions of evil

There have been roughly three different, often interconnected approaches to developing a
secular conception of evil. First, there is a search for common views on evil by examining what
acts and which persons have traditionally been labelled as such. Susan Neiman uses this histori-
cal approach and argues that evil defies identification as a constant unchanging essence through
its various appearances down the ages.12 Consequently, the task of searching for this elusive
core is bound to fail as there are radically different types of evils; such as the rape of a child, the
gloating humiliation of those who are weak and vulnerable, and the Nazi death camps. What is
more, even the often made distinction between natural and moral evils turns out to be merely a
historical one, differing considerably down the ages. Consequently, any attempt to reduce evil
actions or persons to a singular formula will be either one-sided or trivial. It would be better
to look for what Wittgenstein calls “family resemblances” where evils “cannot be compared,
but they should be distinguished.”13 Given that the different conceptions of evil defy a clear
and universally agreed-upon set of intrinsic properties, we ought to shift perspective and focus
primarily on what evil does to us. If, as Neiman suggests, evil shatters our trust in the world, it
is this effect rather than the purported causes that we ought to explore.
While this approach does capture some of our intuitions about evil, it does suffer from
important deficiencies. First, its focus might lead to our overlooking significant issues such as
the distinction between evil acts, persons, and institutions and how they relate to each other.
Second, the historical approach may not be able to give us the clarity we seek about contempo-
rary uses of the term evil that we routinely encounter from the writings of politicians, journal-
ists, and others. And, even if Neiman is right that such clarity might ultimately elude us, it is
too soon to make this a conclusive judgment. As we shall see, much still can be done to clarify
a secular conception of evil enabling clearer insights into its necessary and sufficient conditions.
This said, I do not want to dismiss the historical approach and the insights it offers. Rather, my
point is that there are other approaches that do reveal valuable and interesting insights.
The second method of developing a secular conception of evil is to turn to the findings of
the contemporary natural and social sciences. Baron-Cohen’s Zero Degrees of Empathy14 offers
an interesting example of this approach. He explores the social and biological determinants that
affect the brain and argues that when individuals lack or lose the ability to empathise they some-
times engage in behaviors, and reveal a character, that laypersons refer to as evil. For Baron-
Cohen, the descriptor “evil” lacks content as it offers no scientific explanation for the worst kind
of actions, such as torture or genocide. His hypothesis is that laypersons label acts as “evil” when
they are extremely harmful, immoral, and motivated by an absence of empathy for the victims.
Consequently, we need to replace the term “evil” with “empathy erosion”. This enables the
focus to turn to exploring “corrosive emotions” such as hate or resentment (to mention just
two), which enable an agent to perceive their victims to be nothing more than objects to be
used for their own gratification.15 While this may be a transient state, it might also develop into
one that is stable and longstanding and in which it is very difficult or impossible for agents to
recover their empathetic abilities. These stable traits are what laypersons typically identify as the
settled character of evil individuals. In short, Baron-Cohen seeks to redescribe the term “evil”
by using explanatory, transparent, and secular social and natural scientific language.16
However, this approach on closer inspection faces difficult problems. A scientifically based
explanatory concept, such as “empathy erosion,” does not adequately replace a well-understood
conception of evil in our moral discourse. If Baron-Cohen is arguing that we ought to gener-
ally dispense with moral terms to describe and evaluate behavior, then his claim that the term
“evil” can be better replaced with “lack of empathy” loses what is unique to moral discourse
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and our concern with it. The term “cruel,” for example, is an evaluative concept evoking
a strong normative judgment that one ought not to act from this motive. To replace “evil”
with an amoral description of “empathy deficit” is to lose the conceptual apparatus required
to evaluate and properly describe what Kramer rightfully refers to as the “shuddering sense of
horror,” which deserves particular and special normative responses reserved for the “grotesque
perversity of evil.”17
Furthermore, we know that it is possible to lack empathy and not act evilly or be an evil per-
son. It is also possible to act evilly while feeling a great deal of empathy for those who will suffer
from such deeds. This puts Baron-Cohen’s attempt to replace the normative conception of evil
on the horns of a dilemma. Either he must covertly rely on and import into his understanding of
“empathy deficit” normative concepts such as cruelty, which prefigure a moral understanding of
evil, or he can opt for a normatively neutral term such as “empathy deficit” and fail to properly
capture the full range of our moral reality. Neither option is what Baron-Cohen would want,
yet his spurning of normative concepts in the name of scientific objectivity leaves him in such a
predicament. However, despite these concerns, the scientific approach is important as it makes
us aware that any successful conception of evil must be appropriately informed by, and take into
consideration, the best contemporary secular and scientific explanations we have for social and
individual behaviors. A theory of evil that flies in the face of universally accepted biological facts,
for example, would be one we should be wary of adopting.
A third method, the most commonly followed by the recent flurry of secular conceptions
of evil, is to engage in “conceptual analyses” of our common intuitions, language, and every-
day experiences.18 Here the theorist begins with “folk”19 examples of evil acts or evil persons
and examines their plausibility through a careful and systematic analysis using a process of “reflec-
tive equilibrium.”20 Commonly held intuitions about evil are tested against actual and hypotheti-
cal cases with the aim of developing general principles. This approach then outlines the necessary
and sufficient conditions for a conception of evil enabling a proper identification of evil acts and
persons. A conceptual analysis discards some intuitions as unsustainable or mistaken, while using
others to bolster the arguments for a particular set of necessary and sufficient conditions.
It is important to note here that the above three approaches – historical, scientific and
philosophical – are not mutually exclusive or contradictory. They can and do support each
other and capture a great many core intuitions that underlie the search for a rigorous concep-
tion of evil. However, what is missing is that none of the three secular approaches pays suf-
ficient attention to the concept of evil itself and the fundamental (near) universal pre-cognitive
responses experienced when faced by this phenomenon. This phenomenological experience is
all too often dismissed as either having no useful analytic role or as being detrimental for seeking
clarity about evil. However, this view of the phenomenology of evil is problematic and a careful
analysis of our pre-cognitive responses to evil provides valuable data for why there is a need for
a concept of evil. Even if there is much disagreement over which of the many conceptions is
the correct one, the common concept of evil provides clear reasons why we need such a term
in our moral vocabulary and why evil is qualitatively different from cases of moral wrongdoing.
The phenomenology of evil

The focus on conceptual analysis over the last several decades has produced a rich and exten-
sive scholarship on the topic of secular evil.21 However, while using commonplace intuitions
about evil as the raw data for beginning a conceptual analysis, their source and importance have
been downplayed. Intuitions are righty treated with great suspicion and often seen as based on
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prejudice, ignorance, error, or primitive superstitions. One of the fundamental goals of devel-
oping a rigorous conception of evil using conceptual analysis combined with the best contem-
porary explanations, both biological and environmental, for human actions is to overcome the
errors and confusions that infused previous religious accounts. It would be counterproductive,
to say the least, to replace an unreliable religious metaphysics with an unreliable set of shallow
and impulsive intuitions.
Given the limits on space, I will not explore in detail the arguments for why our phenom-
enological experiences play a vital role in our grasp of some concepts (moral and nonmoral)
and not in others. There are clearly some concepts on which our phenomenological responses
have no purchase, such as logical or mathematical concepts. One need not have any specific
kind of response to the concept of {pi} or {sqroot} of a number to fully grasp their meaning
and importance. However, to fully understand concepts of the secondary qualities, such as
how something looks or the particular taste of a food, requires a felt experience of the object.
It is very difficult, if not impossible, to explain the beauty of a song to someone who is deaf,
or the taste of sugar to someone who has no ability to discriminate between sweet or sour.
One needs to use similes and they never accurately reveal what sound or taste feels like. It
seems that this is also true of evaluative concepts, where to correctly understand them we need
to take note of their distinctive phenomenology. Understanding what it is to be terrified, or
frightened, or ecstatic, or traumatized, requires that we have, at some point, had the appropri-
ate experiences. If no one ever felt frightened, then the concept of fear could not have become
part of our language for describing the world and our reactions to it. Consequently, as Garrard
and McNaughton point out:
there is a reciprocal relationship of elucidation in play between the phenomenology of

our experiences of something that has a particular property and our grasp of the fea-
tures of what we experience in virtue of which it has that property. By getting clearer
about the precise nature of our reaction(s) to what we take to be F, we can get clearer
about what it is that makes things F, and by getting clearer about what it is that makes
things F, we may get a better grip on why these acts warrant this reaction.22
Exploring our complex moral reality, of which the notion of evil is a part, requires that we
begin with our intuitions about this moral concept. Our intuitions are formed, in large part,
by our strongly negative reactions and responses to the actions and/or character traits of
certain persons. An example concerning moral reactions generally might be helpful here. If
we do not recognize that indignation is an appropriate reaction to injustice, or that a feel-
ing of shame is an appropriate response to our own wrongdoing, then we have not grasped
the concepts of injustice and wrongdoing. The moral reaction is in part this kind of feeling,
and consequently understanding the feeling is an essential part of the grasp of the concept
of the moral event.23
In the same way it is not clear how any discussion about evil could begin without reference to
the very negative experiences that we have experienced or heard about. This is not to assert that
our responses or reactions are always accurate (we can be mistaken and react incorrectly). Nor
is this to claim that our reactions to certain events never differ throughout history and between
different cultures. They clearly do, and considerably so. In earlier societies, for example, racism,
slavery, torture, misogyny, all actions that horrify and disgust us today, were not then commonly
considered immoral, let alone evil. Rather, the claim here is that any grasp of what the concept
of evil entails will require some consideration of our collective phenomenological reactions to
it even if there is a different content to what is taken to be evil in a particular place and time.
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This difference will depend on the particular religious, political, social, economic, and meta-
physical views that hold sway at that particular time and place.24 However, what will be common
is that some actions and some persons will be perceived as evil and here we find the widespread
reactions to this phenomenon that are of interest in understanding what this moral concept
entails. Put another way, the concept of evil charts a distinct phenomenological response which
then enables us to theorize about what specific features of the act or person make them appro-
priately labelled as evil. This judgment will be informed by a host of other assumptions and insights
we possess at the time and this accounts for the very wide range of competing conceptions of evil.
Pre-cognitive responses to evil

My central claim in this essay is that the phenomenology of evil elicits near-universal reac-
tions and highlights our instinctive and intuitive responses to evil that are informative in
themselves. These are pre-cognitive, often visceral, reactions that expose deeply held senti-
ments and insights into the phenomenon experienced. The reactions I have in mind are
revulsion/disgust, disbelief/incomprehension, and a strong sense of being morally polluted or
defiled when in the presence of evil. These pre-cognitive feelings give rise to moral horror,
which highlights a distinct part of our moral phenomenology. It offers valuable insights into
what a concept of evil entails and helps us to distinguish it from the concept of wrongdoing.
Moral horror, then, occurs when certain individuals, groups, institutions, or societies engage
in wrongful actions that are especially abhorrent and shocking. Our reactions to ordinary
moral wrongdoing standardly range over feelings of disapproval, dislike, disdain, and even
contempt.25 But evildoing, in contrast, evokes that special sense of moral horror which goes
well beyond the usual disapproving reactions to immorality. The response of moral horror
recognizes a difference in moral quality and gravity that justifiably entails feelings of defile-
ment, revulsion, and a type of incomprehension or shock concerning the very existence of
such actions or persons. Our moral horror reveals a unique and distinct part of our moral real-
ity for which a different normative concept is required. However, while the concept of evil is
needed to identify this aspect of our moral reality, we still need a fully worked out conception
of evil to recognize the particular properties and conditions for what makes a person or his
actions properly referred to as evil.26
It needs to be noted here that a reaction of moral horror is not always accurate and such a
response needs to be challenged and justified through a careful and arduous process of reason-
ing and logical analysis.27 It would be mistaken, for example, to think of all horrified responses
as moral horror. One might react with horror when finding a snake in one’s bag, but this has
nothing to do with moral evil. It is also possible that someone could incorrectly experience
moral horror owing to strong prejudices or false information. For example, an anti-Semite’s
pre-cognitive responses of disgust and defilement when in the presence of Jews are deeply prob-
lematic and inappropriate and once subject to analysis can be understood to be so. It is possible
that when the values of equality and respect for all are seen as morally foundational then those
persons with prejudices will change, and these new values, in time, might become intuitive and
part of their settled moral convictions.

If we accept that there is a near-universal and highly distinctive set of pre-cognitive responses
to evil, can we ascertain what provokes such reactions? Are these negative reactions appropri-
ate and warranted by the nature of what is experienced? What we seek is the clarification of a
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concept that will frame the search for the content of a substantial conception of evil. An analogy
here is helpful. Fairness, as a general normative concept, refers to laudable situations or interac-
tions between persons and institutions where everyone receives what is their due. This general
claim frames and makes possible a further discussion concerning the specific details and princi-
ples that ensure fairness within a particular context. Here we will find significant disagreements
about what persons are really due and which principles or rules are needed for bringing about this
desired state of affairs. However, what remains clear is the general character of fairness and that
the notion of fairness is a desirable state of affairs, even if we cannot find a consensus of what
this actually entails in principle or practice.
What then gives rise to the near universal concept of evil down the ages in most reli-
gious worldviews and even in our secular contemporary times? A plausible way of finding
an answer is by examining different contexts in which this concept is used, and then try to
build a plausible hypothesis of why the specific moral phenomenology is pertinent to the
event experienced as evil.28 The experience of evil, it seems, occurs when human beings face
a particularly dangerous and terrible set of circumstances that are a fundamental threat to
their well-being and where this may preclude their continued social coexistence with others.
All sentient creatures, and human beings are no exception, require that they are protected
from certain actions or events which would make any chance of a tolerable life impossible.
In short, all persons need to be protected from what Stuart Hampshire refers to as the “Great
Evils.” These are:
states of affairs which are to be avoided for reasons that are independent of any
reflective thought and of any specific conception of evil. Physical suffering, starva-
tion, imprisonment and the destruction of one’s home and family are felt as great evils
by anyone in virtue of being a living creature with all the needs that are common to
living creatures.29
Hampshire also rightly points out that “humanity is united in the recognition of the great evils
which render life scarcely bearable.”30 The concept of evil recognizes a reality where certain
actions or ideologies or events encourage the infliction of the Great Evils and this elicits the
pre-cognitive response of moral horror involving feelings of fear, defilement, disgust, and
incomprehension. The Great Evils arise, or are made likely to happen, when persons, institu-
tions, or societies seek to obliterate moral constraints, seek total domination over others, and/or
prevent the very possibility of tolerable coexistence. However, what is perceived as the cause
of evil depends on historical, religious, and cultural interpretations of reality. Traditional
Christians (and no doubt other religious traditions) see the source of evil in either dark malev-
olent forces or in a dangerous person who through his or her own volition holds a “perverse
will contrary to the divine order, which among other things defines the end for which he is
created.”31 In largely secular contemporary societies the focus on the source of evil turns to
physical and mental suffering and the malevolent motives and intentions of persons who can
inflict misery and pain on others.32
But what is common to both accounts is the recognition that there is a normative reality
that is best understood as evil and it is not adequately captured by reference to simple wrongdo-
ing. The ordinary violation of moral norms (lying, stealing, some forms of unjustified violence)
is quite different from the fundamental violation of morality that inflicting the Great Evils
involves. In undermining any specific way of life or conception of the good, this kind of viola-
tion seeks the destruction or perversion of the moral and social orders themselves. In this way,
evil involves actions that are qualitatively worse than ordinary immoral actions. They involve
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the perversion or elimination of moral and social boundaries in order to advance malign interests
or, perversely, for its own sake. The latter case is noted by Hume:
A creature, absolutely malicious and spiteful, were there any such in nature, must
be worse than indifferent to the images of vice and virtue. All his Sentiments must be
inverted, and directly opposite to those, which prevail in the human species. Whatever
contributes to the good of mankind, as it crosses the constant bent of his wishes and
desires, must produce uneasiness and disapprobation; and on the contrary, whatever
is the source of disorder and misery in society, must, for the same reason, be regarded
with pleasure and complacency. . . . Absolute, unprovoked, disinterested malice has
never perhaps, place in any human breast; or if it had, must there pervert all the sentiments
of morals, as well as the feelings of humanity.33
The experience of evil is very different from that of mere moral wrongdoing (even those cases
which are very severe) because we are horrified by the inversion of the agent’s sentiments which
are contrary to what usually prevails in the human species. Here our emotional intelligence
generates that sense of horror, disgust, and defilement.34 We justifiably respond in a strong and
negatively emotional manner to actions that undermine our well-being, and to persons who
hold malevolent intentions towards us and the people and institutions we hold dear. Recent
research on moral judgment suggests that it is not moral reasoning but rather moral intuitions
and emotions such as empathy and love (for positive morality) and shame, guilt, and remorse
(for negative morality) that best motivate moral action. Moral action, it seems, covaries with
moral emotions more than with moral reasoning.35 When experiencing what is perceived to be
evil, the strong pre-cognitive reactions serve to warn of severe danger and motivate us to act in
ways that will eliminate and protect us from such danger.36
Our pre-cognitive responses to evil also frame the Rules of Evil Salience (RES).37 Our intui-
tive and pre-cognitive responses provide an immediate “evil sensitivity” to these extreme dangers
and provoke a robust reaction to those morally worst actions and persons. The RES are learnt
as part of our socialization and moral education and provide a framework within which we can
instantly identify evil actions and persons. This evil sensitivity recognizes the potential in such
actions to destroy the very fabric of morality and the recognized boundaries of civilized coexist-
ence. The strong feelings of horror, disgust and defilement play a key role in shaping our moral
intuitions about evil and hence in how we respond to contain or eliminate this threat. There is
a deep wisdom in our pre-cognitive emotions and intuitions about evil that alert us to the RES
and which in turn coalesce into a general concept that identifies the qualitatively different features
of evildoing from ordinary moral violations. The concept of evil, then, captures that aspect of our
moral reality which can be summarized as a form of immoral excess that causes fundamental and
consequently irreparable and permanent harms. It rips or undermines the moral fabric of society,
elicits hatred and revenge, and prevents the possibility of decent worthwhile lives.38
Solving two problems for secular accounts of evil

Our robust phenomenological reactions to evil encompass a unique assemblage of emotional
responses. As argued above, when insights from these reactions are combined with a careful ana-
lytical reflection and equilibrated with our strong intuitions, they provide a plausible universal
concept of evil, one that captures a uniquely terrible part of our moral reality. In so doing the
concept of evil and the different conceptions that arise from it become an essential part of our
moral vocabulary.
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If this is indeed the case, it opens up the possibility of resolving two pressing concerns within
the recent secular debates on evil. The first concerns the charge made by evil skeptics that talk of
evil is redundant as it is an empty concept with no explanatory power. Everything normatively
important can be properly captured using the standard moral terms that avoid any mention of
evil. The second concern focuses on the claim by some evil revivalists that evil is merely quanti-
tatively different from ordinary wrongdoing. There is no elusive property that makes an action,
person, institution, or ideology evil. It is my contention that both concerns are easily resolved if
indeed our pre-cognitive responses provide an indispensable preliminary understanding of what
a concept of evil identifies about our moral reality.
Evil as explanatory term

Consider the claim that the concept of evil has no explanatory power. It is in part a claim that
there is no aspect of our moral reality that cannot be accurately described using the usual moral
descriptors of good/bad or moral/immoral. Adding the intensifier of “very bad,” for example,
properly describes those actions that we consider horrifying. Yet this seems implausible since
certain actions and persons evoke moral horror, which in turn warrants a special term to prop-
erly label them. There was, and still is today, a common phenomenology of evil with the pre-
cognitive response of moral horror that goes beyond mere moral disapproval or condemnation.
Evil exists (for both religious and secular accounts) when there is grotesque perversity or the
incomprehensible and often wanton destruction of lives and property. There is the obliteration
or inversion of fundamental moral norms or boundaries that protect against the great natural and
social evils of starvation, humiliation, torture, and death; those evils that would make any kind
of decent and tolerable life and coexistence with others impossible. There are certain actions
motivated by cruelty, viciousness, and heartlessness, and which (almost always) involve the egre-
gious causing of extreme pain and suffering, which go beyond normal moral censure. The term
“evil” has considerable explanatory power in that it describes this aspect of our normative reality
and enables us to understand our moral geography more clearly and precisely. The concept of
evil’s explanatory power also extends to providing the appropriate language with its framework
and boundaries within which we can develop the means to identify this phenomenon through
the application of substantive necessary and sufficient conditions. It enables us to clarify and,
where necessary, correct folk accounts of evil, which can be misleading about this difficult and
terrible part of our moral reality. The concept of evil provides a vocabulary for those terrible
inescapable experiences and allows us to talk intelligently and accurately about them.
The qualitative difference thesis

In his paper “Is Evil Action Qualitatively Distinct from Moral Wrongdoing” Russell argues
that there is no special property which evil acts possess to mark them out from cases of mere
wrongdoing.39 The difference between evil and wrongdoing lies in the quantity or amount of
harm caused. This view flies in the face of most secular accounts which claim that a distinguish-
ing mark of evil is its qualitative difference from mere wrongdoing. However, responding to
Russell has proved difficult since it is not clear just how to characterize this qualitative difference
when setting out the necessary and sufficient conditions for evil acts or persons.
Calder responds to Russell’s claims by setting out and defending what he calls the “moderate
version” of the qualitative difference thesis.40 This is the view that evil is qualitatively distinct
from mere moral wrongdoing when the conception of evil and the conception of wrongdoing
do not share all of their essential properties. This criterion, Calder argues, coheres better with
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our intuitions about concept distinctness. To make this clear, Calder uses the analogy of the
difference between the concepts of “chair” and “table.” Both share similar essential properties –
four legs, possess a flat surface – but the essential property of chairs is that they are primarily
used for sitting. Even though it is possible to sit on a table, this is not its essential purpose and
so is distinguishable from a chair. Tables and chairs share properties but to different degrees.
And so it is with immoral and evil acts and persons. There is no need to search for that elusive
evil property that is absent from ordinary moral wrongdoing. Evil and wrongdoing do not share
identical properties and the qualitative difference lies in discerning each action’s or each person’s
unique combination of properties – some of which our pre-cognitive responses will indicate are
best understood as evil.
Liberto and Harrington take a different tack in response to Russell.41 They argue for what
they refer to as the “quality of emphasis” account. According to this view, two concepts are
qualitatively distinct when one of them has a property that determines the degree to which
that concept is instantiated but does not determine the degree to which the second concept is
instantiated. Unlike Calder’s account, two concepts can be qualitatively distinct even if they
share identical properties. Liberto and Harrington point to the difference between the concepts
of altruism and heroism. Both kinds of actions are always performed for others and at some cost
or risk to those so acting. Hence they share the same two essential properties. However, they
are different concepts because heroism is determined by the cost or risk of the action for the agent,
while altruism focuses on the degree to which the action was done for the sake of others. The difference
between evil and wrongdoing, then, does not depend on an elusive unique property or even
different essential properties, but on which property is the primary determinant for that concept.
For example, evil actions, unlike wrongful ones, are identified by a particular mix of malicious
intentions and the life changing harms inflicted on victims.
Yet while both Calder and Liberto and Harrington offer interesting defenses of the qualita-
tive difference thesis, they seem to have missed a simpler and more elegant solution. As our
pre-cognitive responses to evil indicate, we intuitively understand its qualitative distinctiveness,
in its excess, intentions, and goals. Evil poses a special kind of danger that is absent from immoral
actions, in that it seeks to invert or annihilate moral and social constraints that stand as a bar-
rier against the Great Evils, and so which constitute the conditions or very fabric of morality
and tolerable life themselves. Herein resides the qualitative difference from wrongdoing. Very
bad or immoral actions, even murder and rape, do not necessarily seek to undermine the moral
order, whereas evil has the quality of depravity or degeneracy which is particularly dangerous
for long-term social and moral stability.
Final comments
The phenomenology of evil provides us with a plausible concept of evil that frames the many
different (religious and secular) conceptions of evil that have been developed to date. The recent
secular accounts of evil make a serious error by not examining and learning from our pre-
cognitive responses to evil since they provide the basis for resolving what seem to be intractable
problems. This applies to two recent disputes in particular. Contrary to the claims that the term
evil has no explanatory power, this concept reveals an important part of our moral reality. Our
pre-cognitive reactions recognize those situations where evil is present and this enables a clear
and useful concept that provides the framework within which different conceptions seek to set
out the conditions for evil actions, persons, institutions, and ideologies.
There are other possible benefits to exploring our moral phenomenology of evil. It may be
possible to unify a secular conception of evil actions with one concerned with identifying evil
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persons if we have a clearer understanding of this aspect of our moral reality. Furthermore,
attention to the moral emotions that are provoked by evil may provide a narrative and con-
text that would enrich secular analytical accounts. This in turn would also aid in properly
understanding differing historical, anthropological, sociological, and political accounts of evil.
But, perhaps most important of all, a careful attention to the phenomenology of evil within
a secular context will return to us the means to talk intelligently and meaningfully about
evil, without succumbing to a religious metaphysics or the dismissive claims of scientific and
ethical reductionism.42
Notes
1 By “moral reality” I mean the set of experiences that constitute our moral lives.These include our moral
emotions, the sense of our own goodness and integrity (or badness, deceit, and corruption), the special
normative demands of our social roles, and the pull of different moral imperatives – from personal
duties to universal consequentialist and deontological imperatives.
2 John Rawls famously uses this “concept”/“conception” distinction when discussing the notion of
justice. Rawls argues that the concept of justice refers to “a proper balance between competing claims,”
whereas a “conception of justice as a set of related principles for identifying the relevant considerations
that determine this balance” (Rawls 1973: 9). In short, there are a number of different competing
conceptions of justice corresponding to the same concept. They all seek to offer a set of principles that
assign political and social rights and duties that treat citizens in a manner they argue best captures the
proper balance of competing claims, which is the essence of the concept of justice.
3 It should be noted here that historically the concept of evil has often been used to simply refer to
immoral or bad actions and did not allude to a qualitative distinction. However, for the term to offer
something more than a synonym for the terms “bad” or “immoral,” it becomes an intensifier (very, very
bad) and/or refers to a disturbing negative qualitative difference.
4 See Calder 2015 and Garrard and de Wijze 2016 and for overviews of the extensive recent scholarship
on a secular accounts of evil.
5 For an overview of the rich history of demons, see Guiley 2009.
6 This is the well-known and much-discussed “theodicy problem” and poses one of the more intractable
problems faced by religious conceptions of evil given the belief in an benevolent all-powerful God.
Clearly, a secular account of evil does not face this problem. For an excellent overview of the “theodicy
problem,” see Tooley 2015. On the theodicy problem also see chapters in this volume on Augustine,
Aquinas, Leibniz, and Sade. Also see Chapter 27 for a comparative view of evil from nonmonotheistic
religions in this volume.
7 This view is challenged by Clark 2019, who argues that no good grounds have been given by secular
theorists for the rejection of religious connotations to the term “evil.” He argues that what secular
accounts demonstrate is that there are two or more distinct variants of a more general concept of evil –
one that is secular and one that is religious (31). I agree with Clark’s view here that the general concept
of evil underlies both religious and secular conceptions of evil. However, my concern in this paper is
with secular accounts and specifically with resolving two particular problems they face.
8 See Delbanco, 1995.
9 Philip Cole makes this point with his account of the events following the destruction of the World
Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001. Cole claims that President George W Bush
used this attack to identify an “axis of evil” and then launched two wars to overthrow the governments
of Afghanistan and Iraq. This discourse of evil was then used to “justify” these wars and led to two fatal
errors.The first is that describing the enemy as evil distorted the reality preventing a rational and proper
analysis of the events that took place. Second, by demonizing the enemy this erroneously implied that
they were monsters who were capable of destroying the USA and Western civilization. This sets the
baseline for a response that was inappropriate and counterproductive. So, for Cole, the deleterious
consequences of using the term “evil” inevitably led to costly, immoral, and foolhardy responses such as
torture, illegal wars, and the loss of a great many lives. See Cole 2006: 213–15.
10 Delbanco 1996: 9.
11 Delbanco 1995: 9 (my emphasis).
12 Neiman 2002.
214
13 Neiman 2002: 9.
14 Baron-Cohen 2011.
15 Baron-Cohen explicitly states: “My argument is that when you treat someone as an object, your empa-
thy has been turned off ” (Baron-Cohen 2011: 7).
16 This approach is used in examining other opaque terms. For example, some theorists working within
the philosophy of mind seek to see explain consciousness in scientific terms. Eliminative materialists,
for example, redescribe concepts such as “love,” “happiness,” and “hate” with descriptions of scientific
physical processes in the brain. See Ramsey 2016.
17 Kramer 2011: 220
18 Russell 2014: 24–30 offers an extended and careful account of what a conceptual analysis of evil would
involve. He refers to the identification of evil acts and persons as the extensional aspect of the analysis,
and the insights concerning its practicality or functionality he calls the inferential aspect. The exten-
sional aspect (the class of things to which the concept applies) is useful for exploring whether a secular
account clashes with widely accepted folk beliefs and intuitions. The inferential aspect aids in establish-
ing the content for a conception of evil that has a close fit with widely held intuitions about evil.
19 The term “folk” refers to the usage of terms by those who are not philosophically trained and/or have
no particular expertise in the matter. The term “evil” is used by politicians, judges, journalists, and the
public at large without any of them necessarily thinking about the necessary and sufficient conditions
for the proper use of this term.
20 For a detailed account of the method of reflective equilibrium see Daniels 2018.
21 Using this method, I have argued for a disjunctive and pluralist account of evil actions. See de Wijze
2002. For a taste of the large range of competing conceptions of evil actions and evil persons see Steiner
2002, Garrard 1998, Russell 2014, Formosa 2008, Haybron 2002, and Barry 2013.
22 Garrard and McNaughton 2018: 20–21.
23 I am indebted to Jeremy Barris for these illustrative examples.
24 I am emphatically not making a case for moral relativism here. Societies and groups that hold racist
views, for example, are acting immorally even if they do not think this the case. The concept of evil is
universal and transhistorical even though the different conceptions vary considerably across history and
between societies. Religious societies may perceive of evil as the violation of the sacred and as caused by
the Devil. More secular societies seek see evil as a result of environmental deprivation or genetic factors.
While present-day decent societies believe racism to be evil, earlier societies did not and this was due
to beliefs in falsehoods combined with political and economic self-interest.
25 Garrard and McNaughton 2019: 22.
26 Following Hooker, when evaluating a moral theory (and this includes a theory of evil) we look toward
four criteria. First, it must originate from plausible general beliefs about morality. Second, it must be
internally consistent. Third, it must cohere with or endorse our convictions about what is moral or
immoral. Fourth, it should enable us to offer principles that support our considered convictions and
justify them from an impartial point of view. Finally, it must be able to resolve (at least in the vast major-
ity of cases) issues concerning immoral acts or persons over which there is strong disagreement. See
Hooker 2000: 4.
27 For a view that rejects my claims see Wilson and Wilson 2003. They argue that focusing on moral hor-
ror is a form of moral self-indulgence and offers little of value to our moral lives. We ought to strive
to rid ourselves of such pre-cognitive reactions as they have no utilitarian value. My concern with this
argument is that it presupposes a utilitarian account of morality holds sway and I reject this reductionist
account of our moral lives.
28 It is of course possible that there is nothing in the world that properly warrants the pre-cognitive
responses such as moral horror with its feelings of defilement, shock, and disgust. If this were the case
then any theory of evil would be an error theory. However, those who make this claim would also need
to offer plausible explanations for why people almost universally respond to actions they perceive as evil
in a specific way even when it isn’t warranted. For more detail on the concept of evil as error theory
see Garrard and McNaughton 2019: 24–5.
29 Hampshire 1989: 106.
30 Hampshire 1989: 107.
31 Pocock 1985: 48.
32 While this is true of most secular accounts of evil, some argue that there is the phenomenon of “small-
scale evil” where evil actions occur yet there is no severe or significant harm caused to the victim. See
Garrard, 2002; Morton 2004 and de Wijze, 2017.
215
Stephen de Wijze
33 Hume 1975: 226–7 (my emphasis).

34 Here I am following Salovey and Mayer 1990: 186, who argue that emotions provoke an organizing
response as they focus our cognitive activities and subsequent actions. Emotional intelligence “involves
the ability to monitor one’s own and other’s feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and
use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions” (189).
35 For a detailed discussion of this research see Haidt 2001: 823–30.
36 Of course, our reactions can be deeply problematic in themselves. In Europe between the fifteenth and
eighteenth centuries the Catholic Church published the Malleus Maleficarum, which provided a “com-
pendium of possible evil and a directory of how, through torture, interrogation and trickery, evil was to
be eliminated.” See Macfarlane 1985: 59.
37 Here I am using and extending a notion developed by Herman that explores the idea of the rules of
moral salience (RMS). Herman argues that the RMS highlight the morally relevant features of actions
and also mandate that they face the extra burden of normative justification. For example, the use of
violence, deception, and abuse of others always requires more than prudential or instrumental justifica-
tions. Furthermore, the RMS ensure that there is a common understanding that some actions always
require a normative judgment which, if in conflict, will always trump instrumental reasons to so act. In
short, the RMS constitute the structure of moral sensitivity. See Herman 1993: Chapter 4.
38 If I am correct that evil is a part of our moral reality that is not adequately captured by our usual moral
parameters of ordinary life, this raises a number of other issues that need attention. Two worth men-
tioning are the issues of punishment and forgiveness. Does evil require us to rethink the notions of
punishment and forgiveness? What would be a proportionate punishment for evil persons? Can they be
forgiven for their actions? Does evil leave an indelible moral stain on those who so act and also their
victims? These issues are beyond the scope of this chapter. (See in this volume Chapters 20 and 21 on
punishment and forgiveness, respectively.)
39 Russell 2007.
40 See Calder 2013 and his chapter (Chapter 16) in this volume.
41 Liberto, H. and Harrington, F. 2016.
42 I am indebted to Eve Garrard, Jeremy Barris, Daniel de Wijze,Thomas Nys, and Hillel Steiner for writ-
ten comments and discussions on an earlier draft of this chapter.
References
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Barry, P.B. 2013. Evil and Moral Psychology. Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory (New York:
Taylor and Francis).
Calder, T. 2013. “Is Evil Just Very Wrong?” Philosophical Studies 163(1): 177–96.
Calder, T. 2015. “The Concept of Evil.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2015 Edition),
Edward N. Zalta (ed.) http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/entries/concept-evil.
Clark, S. 2019. “A Religious Conception of Evil”. In Moral Evil in Practical Ethics, Shlomit Harrosh and
Roger Crisp (eds.) (London and New York: Routledge).
Clendinnen, I. 1999. Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Cole, P. 2006. The Myth of Evil: Demonizing the Enemy (Westport, CT: Praeger).
Daniels, N. 2018. “Reflective Equilibrium.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 Edition),
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Harrosh and Roger Crisp (eds.) (London and New York: Routledge).
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16
EVIL AND WRONGDOING
Todd Calder
Introduction
What is the relationship between evil and wrongdoing? Is evil just very wrong? Or is there a
qualitative distinction between evil and wrongdoing? Many people (both theorists and laypeo-
ple) share the intuition that there is a qualitative distinction between evil and wrongdoing. We
feel differently about evil actions – horror and repulsion rather than mere disapproval – and we
think that this difference in feeling reflects qualitative differences in the objects of our feelings.
However, it isn’t always clear what we mean when we say that evil is qualitatively, as opposed
to quantitatively, distinct from ordinary wrongdoing. Nor is it clear that it matters whether the
distinction between evil and wrongdoing is qualitative or quantitative.
In this chapter I consider four interpretations of the qualitative difference thesis, i.e., the
thesis that the difference between evil and ordinary wrongdoing is qualitative rather than
quantitative.1 I argue that one of these interpretations, what I call the moderate version, is pref-
erable to the others, and that, on this interpretation, evil is qualitatively distinct from ordinary
wrongdoing. I begin with reasons to care about the qualitative difference thesis.
Why should we care?

Most theorists writing about evil believe we should care whether the difference between evil
and wrongdoing is qualitative or quantitative.2 However, few argue explicitly for this claim.
One reason to care is that if evil is only quantitatively distinct from ordinary wrongdoing then
we may be able to abandon the concept of evil and refer to the most morally despicable sorts of
actions as “very wrong” rather than “evil,” without impoverishing our moral discourse.3 This
prospect is particularly appealing since it isn’t always clear what people mean by “evil,” and
misapplications of the term can lead to overly harsh judgments or punishment.4 Thus, if evil is
just very wrong and not qualitatively distinct from ordinary wrongdoing, it seems we should
renounce the concept of evil and use the term “very wrong” instead.
A second reason to care about whether the difference between evil and ordinary wrongdoing
is qualitative or quantitative is that, if the difference between evil and wrongdoing is qualitative,
we should reject theories of evil that do not cohere with this fact.5 Several theorists have assumed
that the difference between evil and wrongdoing is qualitative and have used this assumption to
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Evil and wrongdoing
support their theories of evil and argue against rival views.6 However, as we will see in the section
on interpretations of the qualitative difference thesis, these arguments depend on particular
interpretations of the qualitative difference thesis, and these interpretations are controversial.
A third reason to care about whether the difference between evil and ordinary wrongdo-
ing is qualitative or quantitative is theoretical interest or the pursuit of truth. If some theorists
believe the difference between evil and wrongdoing is qualitative and others disagree, there is
some value in settling the dispute. Further, by settling the dispute we learn something about
the nature of evil and its relationship to wrongdoing, and this knowledge may help us avoid
conceptual confusion.
Preliminary remarks
What do we mean, in general, when we say that one thing is qualitatively, as opposed to quan-
titatively, distinct from another thing? Some examples might help. It seems clear that the differ-
ence between a three-pound bag of apples and a six-pound bag of apples is quantitative rather
than qualitative. It seems equally clear that the difference between a two-pound bag of apples
and a two-pound bag of oranges is qualitative rather than quantitative. However, note that the
quality of apples in a three-pound bag might differ significantly from the quality of apples in a
six-pound bag. For example, the apples in the three-pound bag might have more blemishes and
be tastier than the apples in the six-pound bag. Similarly, there might be quantitative differ-
ences between the two-pound bag of apples and the two-pound bag of oranges. For instance,
the individual oranges might be denser than the individual apples, and so the two-pound bag of
apples might contain more individual apples and have a greater volume than the two-pound bag
of oranges. Further, there are qualitative similarities between apples and oranges: they are both
round, rich in vitamin C, seeded, and useful for juggling. Thus, what at first appear to be clear
cases of purely quantitative or qualitative differences are less clear upon reflection. There will
often be qualitative and quantitative similarities and differences between two things. The ques-
tion of whether two things are qualitatively distinct is not whether there are any, or even many,
qualitative or quantitative similarities or differences between them. The question is whether one
of the things is just a greater or lesser form of the other. If it is, then the difference between them
is quantitative. If it isn’t, then the difference between them is qualitative.
It is also important to note that when we ask whether the difference between evil and
wrongdoing is qualitative or quantitative we are asking whether the difference between the
concept of evil and the concept of wrongdoing is qualitative or quantitative, and not whether the
difference between some particular evil action and some particular wrongful action is qualitative
or quantitative. While it may seem obvious that our question is about evil and wrongdoing in
general or in the abstract, and not about particular cases, it is easy to slip from thinking about
the concepts of evil and wrongdoing to thinking about particular cases, and vice versa. For this
reason it is worthwhile to consider the relationship between concepts and their instantiations.
A concept tells us what is essential for being a particular sort of thing, thereby pointing to all
particular, actual and possible, cases that fall under the concept. Each instantiation of a concept
has the essential properties contained within that concept. However, particular instantiations
also have inessential properties as well. For example, the sole property of the concept of triangle
is the property of having three angles. However, each particular triangle has various inessential
properties as well, such as sides of varying lengths and angles of varying degrees.7
The concept of evil action contains those properties that are essential for evil action, while
the concept of wrongdoing contains those properties that are essential for wrongdoing. Theories
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Todd Calder
of evil action attempt to say which properties are contained within the concept of evil action,
while theories of wrongdoing attempt to say which properties are contained within the concept
wrongdoing. Some of these theories will be discussed in the following sections. Each evil action
has the essential properties contained within the concept of evil action and each wrongful
action has the essential properties contained within the concept of wrongdoing. Besides the
essential properties of evil action, particular evil actions have various inessential properties, just as
particular wrongful actions have various inessential properties.
Now consider wrongful action (W). (W) has the essential properties of wrongful action. Let
us call them properties a–d. (W) also has inessential properties e–g which, if intensified, would
make (W) evil. Compare (W) with evil action (E). (E) also has properties a–g, however, (E)’s
properties e-g are intense enough for evil. We might call them properties e*–g* to highlight
that they are intensified versions of e–g. Now, if we ask whether the difference between (E)
and (W) is qualitative or quantitative the answer seems to be quantitative. However, it does
not follow from this that the difference between the concept of evil action and the concept of
wrongdoing is quantitative rather that qualitative.
For the difference between the concept of evil action and the concept of wrongdoing to be
quantitative, rather than qualitative, the concept of wrongdoing would need to have properties
that, if intensified, would make it indistinguishable from the concept of evil action. Just because
(W), which falls under the concept of wrongdoing, has properties which if intensified would
make it evil, it does not follow that the concept of wrongdoing itself has these properties.
Now that we are clearer about what it means for one thing to be qualitatively distinct from
another, and have considered more deeply the relationship between concepts and their instan-
tiations, we are in a better position to discuss and evaluate different interpretations of what it
would mean for evil to be qualitatively distinct from wrongdoing.
Four interpretations of the qualitative difference thesis

Luke Russell has distinguished three interpretations of the qualitative difference thesis, i.e.,
the thesis that the difference between evil and wrongdoing is qualitative rather than quantita-
tive: the cheap version, the strong version, and the weak version.8 Hallie Liberto and Fred
Harrington have introduced a fourth: the quality of emphasis version.9
The cheap version

On the cheap version, whatever we call “evil” has a quality – call it evilness – that nonevil
actions lack by virtue of being nonevil. The cheap version simply assumes that there is a qualita-
tive distinction between evil and wrongdoing without entertaining the possibility that “evil”
and “wrong” might pick out different quantities of the same qualities. Thus, the cheap version
simply begs the question against those who believe that the difference between evil and ordinary
wrongdoing is merely quantitative, offering no substantive account of the conditions required
for a qualitative difference between evil and ordinary wrongdoing.
The strong version

On the strong version of the qualitative difference thesis evil is qualitatively distinct from ordi-
nary wrongdoing only if an essential property of evil is not shared to any degree by any merely
wrongful (nonevil) action.10 Some proponents of the strong version believe that the distinguish-
ing property of evil is a supernatural property, such as being possessed by Satan or dark forces.
220
Evil and wrongdoing
Proponents of this view tend to believe that since evil is a supernatural concept it should be
confined to theological or fictional contexts.11 Other proponents of the strong version hope to
offer a secular theory of evil by arguing that some natural property is the distinguishing feature
of evil. For example, Hillel Steiner argues that the distinguishing feature of evil is pleasure
in wrongdoing.12 On Steiner’s theory, evil is qualitatively distinct from ordinary wrongdoing
because no merely wrongful action is pleasurable for the doer, while all evil actions are both
wrongful and pleasurable.
The strong version of the qualitative difference thesis is appealing to theorists for at least two
reasons. First, it offers a significant distinction between evil and wrongdoing.13 On the strong
version, the difference between evil and wrongdoing is very clearly not just a matter of degree.
Evil actions have some special distinctive quality that no merely wrongful action has. Second,
the strong version rules out several extant theories of evil and thus can be used to argue in favor
of particular theories of evil over competitor theories.14 That is, a proponent of the strong ver-
sion can say that if a theory does not pick out a quality that all evil actions share and no merely
wrongful action has, then it does not make a genuinely qualitative distinction between evil and
wrongdoing and should be rejected for that reason.
However, the strong version has a number of problems. First, it makes it difficult to develop
a plausible secular theory of evil. For it is hard to conceive of a natural property that all evil
actions share and no merely wrongful actions have to any degree. Consider Steiner’s attempt to
define evil as pleasurable wrongdoing. While it may be true that taking pleasure in wrongdoing
is an aggravating factor, it seems that we can think of cases that are evil but lack pleasure, and
cases that are pleasurable and wrong, but not evil. For instance, malicious torture is evil even
if the doer derives no pleasure. And taking pleasure in shoplifting is pleasurable and wrong but
too trivial for evil.15
Eve Garrard argues that the distinguishing property of evil actions is that they are performed
by agents who are completely unmoved by morally important reasons for acting, or not acting,
and instead act, or do not act, for reasons that do not count as reasons at all given the moral
importance of the reasons the agents disregard.16 For instance, on Garrard’s account it would
be evil to kill someone to get the attention of a love interest while being completely unmoved
by the fact that one’s victim will suffer a great harm. This would be evil on Garrard’s account
because the preservation of another person’s life is of such moral importance that, when it
conflicts with a relatively trivial consideration, such as the desire to get the attention of a love
interest, this second consideration loses all of its reason giving force. To then be moved to act by
this trivial consideration while being completely unmoved by the morally important imperative
to preserve someone else’s life is evil on Garrard’s account.
The main problem with Garrard’s account is that it sets the bar for evil action too high. For
instance, it seems that it would be evil to kill someone to get the attention of a love interest
and be only somewhat moved by the fact that our victim will suffer a great harm. However,
on Garrard’s account, caring even a little bit about the morally important consideration at issue
precludes us from evildoing. But that doesn’t sound correct.17 Thus, it seems that Garrard does
not offer a plausible theory of evil and has not discovered a natural property that all evil actions
share and no merely wrongful action has to any degree.18
I contend that the reason that Steiner, Garrard, and others have been unable to uncover a
natural property that all evil actions share and all merely wrongful actions lack is that no such
property exists. If correct, this result would be welcomed by those who think that evil is a super-
natural or fictional concept, since if evil cannot be distinguished from wrongdoing via a natural
property, then we have some reason to believe that only a supernatural quality (if it existed) would
distinguish evil from ordinary wrongdoing. Other theorists take our inability to discover a natural
221
Todd Calder
property that all evil actions share and all ordinary wrongs lack to show that evil is not qualitatively
distinct from ordinary wrongdoing.19 On this view, evil is just very wrong. However, another
way to respond to our inability to discover a natural property that all evil actions share and all ordi-
nary wrongs lack is to reject the strong version of the qualitative difference thesis. This approach
is particularly appealing since the strong version has additional serious problems.
The primary problem with the strong version of the qualitative difference thesis is that it is
based on an implausible criterion for determining whether two concepts are qualitatively dis-
tinct. According to this criterion, one concept is qualitatively distinct from another provided the
objects picked out by the first concept have a property that no member of the class of objects
picked out by the second concept has to any degree. In a previous paper I offer the following
counterexample:
It seems that there is a genuinely qualitative distinction between tables and chairs. But
what is the difference between these two concepts? Both tables and chairs can be made
from different sorts of materials, have four legs, have hard flat surfaces, be backless,
etc.20 I contend that the essential distinguishing property of a chair is that it is primar-
ily used for sitting on, while the essential distinguishing property of a table is that it is
primarily used to set things on. However, if I am correct, [a proponent of the strong
thesis] would say that there isn’t a qualitative distinction between tables and chairs.
Here’s why. Although a table is primarily used to set things on, it can also be used for
sitting. And while a chair is primarily used for sitting, we can also set things on chairs.
Thus, according to [the] criterion for distinguishing between concepts [assumed by the
strong version], there is no qualitative distinction between tables and chairs because
chairs do not possess some special quality, such as being used for sitting, that no table
ever has to any degree, and tables do not possess some special quality, such as being
used to set things on, that no chair ever has to any degree. But surely there is a genu-
inely qualitative distinction between tables and chairs.21
Thus, the strong version of the qualitative difference thesis is based on a criterion for determin-
ing whether two concepts are qualitatively distinct which we should reject.
Theorists who have endorsed the strong version of the qualitative difference thesis may have
been misled by the following sort of reasoning:
1 It seems that there is a qualitative distinction between evil and wrongdoing.

2 If we say that some particular, actual or possible, wrongful action would have been evil had
one of its properties (e.g., harm) been intensified, then the difference between this merely
wrongful action and some particular, actual or possible, evil action would be quantitative
rather than qualitative.
3 Thus, for evil to be qualitatively distinct from ordinary wrongdoing, evil actions must have
some property that no merely wrongful action has.
The problem with this reasoning is the move from (2) to (3). Step (2) makes a claim about the
relationship between two particular, actual or possible, actions. Step (3) makes a claim about
the relationship between the concepts of wrongdoing and evil. As I argue in the preliminary
remarks, just because the difference between a particular wrongful action and a particular evil
action is only quantitative, it does not follow that the difference between the concept of wrong-
doing and the concept of evil is only quantitative. Consider again the concepts of tables and chairs.
We could build two identical objects and call one a table and the other a chair. The difference
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Evil and wrongdoing
between the two would be that the first is primarily used for setting things on and the second is
primarily used for sitting. In this imagined case, the difference between the two objects is quan-
titative rather than qualitative: one is used more for setting things on, while the other is used
more for sitting. But that doesn’t mean that the difference between the concept of a table and the
concept of a chair is merely quantitative. A chair is not just a greater or lesser table, and vice versa.
Instead of using the criterion upon which the strong version of the qualitative difference the-
sis is based, I believe we should use the following criterion to determine whether two concepts
are qualitatively distinct: “one concept is qualitatively distinct from another provided that all of
the essential properties of the first concept are not all of the essential properties of the second
concept, but had to greater or lesser degrees.”22 According to this criterion, the concepts of
tables and chairs are qualitatively distinct, for, while some tables are used for sitting and some
chairs are used for setting things on, it is not essential to the concept of a table that it is used for
sitting, and it is not essential to the concept of a chair that it is used for setting things on.
Since the strong version of the qualitative difference thesis makes it difficult, if not impossi-
ble, to develop a plausible secular theory of evil that makes for a qualitative distinction between
evil and ordinary wrongdoing, and is based on an implausible criterion for determining whether
two concepts are qualitatively distinct, it should be rejected.
The moderate version

Let us now consider what Russell calls the weak version of the qualitative difference thesis (what
I prefer to call the moderate version).23 According to the moderate version, evil is qualitatively
distinct from ordinary wrongdoing provided the concept of evil and the concept of wrongdo-
ing do not share all of their essential properties. The moderate version avoids the problems of
the cheap and strong versions while retaining some of their appealing aspects. First, unlike the
cheap version, the moderate version does not simply beg the question against proponents of the
view that evil is only quantitatively distinct from ordinary wrongdoing. It does not simply posit
a property – evilness – that all things called “evil” have by virtue of being called “evil” and all
nonevil things lack by virtue of being called “nonevil.” It makes a substantive claim about what
things must be like for evil to be qualitatively distinct from ordinary wrongdoing. According
to the moderate version, if, on our best theories of evil and wrongdoing, evil and wrongdoing
share all of their essential properties to differing degrees, then evil is not qualitatively distinct
from ordinary wrongdoing.
Like the strong version, the moderate version gives theorists tools to reject theories of
evil that do not make a qualitative distinction between evil and wrongdoing. Consider, for
example, a theorist who holds a purely act-consequentialist theory of wrongdoing and a purely
act-consequentialist theory of evil.24 On a purely act-consequentialist theory of wrongdoing,
it is wrong to fail to maximize the overall good and the worse the consequences, or the
greater the harm, the greater the wrong. On a purely act-consequentialist theory of evil it is
evil to bring about very bad consequences or a lot of harm.25 It is easy to see that, on purely
act-consequentialist theories of wrongdoing and evil, wrongdoing and evil share all of their
essential properties: bad consequences or harm. It is just that evil actions have these proper-
ties to a greater degree. Thus, on the moderate version of the qualitative difference thesis,
a theorist who holds a purely act-consequentialist theory of wrongdoing and a purely act-
consequentialist theory of evil cannot account for the qualitative distinction between evil and
ordinary wrongdoing, and so, her theory of evil may be rejected for that reason.26
However, unlike the strong version, the moderate version does not make it virtually
impossible for theorists to devise plausible secular theories of evil that make a qualitative
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distinction between evil and ordinary wrongdoing. On the contrary, on the moderate ver-
sion, most, if not all, theories of evil that have been offered in the literature make a qualitative
distinction between evil and ordinary wrongdoing on this understanding of that distinction.27
For example, according to Claudia Card, evil actions are inexcusably wrongful actions that
foreseeably produce intolerable harms.28 Card explicitly separates the wrongfulness and harm
components of her theory by rejecting theories of wrongdoing that define wrongful actions as
those that produce more harm than good, i.e., consequentialist theories of wrongdoing. For
this reason, Card’s theory of evil makes a qualitative distinction between evil and wrongdo-
ing. For on her account intolerable harm is an essential component of evil, while harm is not
an essential component of wrongdoing on the nonconsequentialist theories of wrongdoing
she endorses.29 For example, on the Kantian conception of wrongdoing, telling a lie is wrong
even if it doesn’t lead to harm.30
Also, unlike the strong version, the moderate version is not based on an implausible cri-
terion for determining whether two concepts are qualitatively distinct. On the contrary, the
moderate version is based on the plausible criterion argued for above: one concept is qualita-
tively distinct from another provided all of the essential properties of the first concept are not
all of the essential properties of the second concept, but had to greater or lesser degrees. This
criterion coheres better with our intuitions about concept distinctness. For instance, on this
criterion, and not on the criterion assumed by the strong version, there is a qualitative distinction
between tables and chairs.
The quality of emphasis version

In a recent paper, Hallie Liberto and Fred Harrington reject the moderate version of the quali-
tative difference thesis and the criterion for determining when two concepts are qualitatively
distinct that I have argued for above.31 Instead, they argue for what they call the “quality of
emphasis” account. According to the quality of emphasis account, two concepts are qualita-
tively distinct provided one of the concepts has a property that determines the degree to which
that concept is instantiated that does not determine the degree to which the second concept is
instantiated.32 Significantly, on this account, two concepts can be qualitatively distinct even if
they share all of the same essential properties. For example, Liberto and Harrington suggest that
altruistic and heroic actions share the following essential properties:
1 performed for the sake of others [and]

2 performed at some cost or risk to the agent.33
What makes the concepts of altruism and heroism qualitatively distinct is that degrees of altruism
are determined by (1), the degree to which an action is performed for the sake of others, while
degrees of heroism are determined by (2), the degree to which an action is performed at some
cost or risk to the agent. For example, rescuing a child from an uncontrollable blaze is more
heroic than rescuing a child from a smoke-filled room, but not more altruistic. Similarly, for
someone with a moderate aversion to needles, donating blood every month is more altruistic
than donating blood once per year, but not more heroic.34
Liberto and Harrington believe that evil and wrongdoing may be qualitatively distinct in a
similar fashion. For example, Liberto and Harrington argue that Card’s theory of evil has the
resources to make for a qualitative distinction between evil and wrongdoing in this sense. As
noted above, on Card’s theory, evils are distinguished from other wrongs by being inexcus-
able and resulting in intolerable harm. Liberto and Harrington suggest that Card could say that
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Evil and wrongdoing
degrees of evil are determined by degrees of harm, while degrees of wrongdoing are not. If so,
on Card’s theory of evil, evil and wrongdoing are qualitatively distinct according to the quality
of emphasis version of the qualitative difference thesis.
It cannot be denied that Liberto and Harrington have zeroed in on a problem for the mod-
erate account: it is theoretically possible for two concepts to be qualitatively distinct by being
quality of emphasis distinct while sharing all of the same essential properties. For example,
Liberto and Harrington are correct that if altruism and heroism each had (1) and (2) as their only
essential properties they could still be qualitatively distinct by being quality of emphasis distinct
in the way they suggest. The moderate version provides sufficient, but not necessary, conditions
for two concepts to be qualitatively distinct. However, the same criticism can be made against
the quality of emphasis version of the qualitative difference thesis. For it seems that two concepts
can be qualitatively distinct, and yet, not quality of emphasis distinct. This happens when two
concepts do not share all of their essential properties, and thus are qualitatively distinct on the
moderate version of the qualitative difference thesis, but neither concept has a property that
determines the degree to which the concept is instantiated that the other concept does not have.
For instance, one might argue that what makes an action evil, as opposed to merely wrong, is
that it involves an organization doing, or making possible, wrongful harms.35 According to this
hypothetical theory of evil, evil actions are very harmful wrongs performed, or made possible,
by organizations.36 On this account of evil, and on plausible conceptions of wrongdoing, evil
and wrongdoing do not share all of their essential properties. For on this account of evil, evil
actions must be performed, or made possible, by organizations, while, on plausible conceptions
of wrongdoing, individuals can perform wrongful (nonevil) actions as individuals, and not only
as members of organizations.
Now, imagine further that on this theory of evil the degree to which actions are performed,
or made possible, by organizations does not affect the degree to which these actions are evil.
For instance, the theory might contend that wrongful actions performed, or made possible,
by large highly complex organizations are, for that reason, no more or less evil than wrongful
actions performed, or made possible, by smaller simpler organizations. Imagine further that, on
this account, degrees of harm affect both degrees of evil and degrees of wrongdoing. If so,
on this hypothetical theory of evil, evil and wrongdoing are qualitatively distinct according to
the moderate version of the qualitative difference thesis, but they are not qualitatively distinct
according to the quality of emphasis version of the qualitative difference thesis. For there is
no property that determines degrees of evil that does not also determine degrees of wrongdo-
ing, and vice versa. The upshot seems to be that the correct view is a disjunctive account: two
concepts are qualitatively distinct provided they do not share all of the same essential properties
(the moderate version) or they are quality of emphasis distinct (the quality of emphasis version).
However, there is a further problem with the quality of emphasis version of the qualitative
difference thesis that gives us reason to set aside the cumbersome disjunctive account in favor of
the moderate view. While Liberto and Harrington make a fine theoretical point about concept
distinctness, they fail to provide any compelling cases where, on plausible accounts, two quali-
tatively distinct concepts share all of their essential properties. Take, for example, their central
case: altruism and heroism. Clearly altruistic actions must be performed for the sake of others,
and heroic actions must be performed at some cost or risk to the agent. But is it essential to the
concept of altruism that an altruistic action must be performed at some cost or risk to the agent?
And is it essential to the concept of heroism that a heroic action must be performed for the sake
of others? It seems that negative answers to both of these questions are warranted. For we can be
altruistic by sending unwanted money to the needy from the comfort and safety of our homes,
without cost or risk. And we can heroically fight off disease or make a risky voyage without
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trying to benefit anyone else. If so, altruism and heroism do not share essential properties on
plausible accounts of altruism and heroism, and thus, they do not offer a plausible example of
two concepts that are qualitatively distinct but which share all of their essential properties.
The same goes for Liberto’s and Harrington’s attempts to show that, on plausible accounts of
evil and wrongdoing, evil and wrongdoing share all of their essential properties but are quality
of emphasis distinct. For example, Liberto and Harrington suggest that, on Card’s theory of evil,
evil and wrongdoing share all of their essential properties but are quality of emphasis distinct.
Recall that on Card’s account evil actions are reasonably foreseeable inexcusable wrongs that
result in intolerable harms. Liberto and Harrington suggest that Card might be happy to say
that on her account evil and wrongdoing share all of their essential properties.37 But, as I have
argued above, this is not what Card should say. For while on Card’s account harm is an essential
ingredient of evil it is not an essential ingredient of wrongdoing on the nonconsequentialist
theories of wrongdoing she endorses. Furthermore, Liberto and Harrington’s suggestion that
on Card’s account harm might be a quality of emphasis for evil, i.e., a quality that determines
degrees of evil but not degrees of wrongdoing, is implausible. For, while most would agree that
degrees of evil vary with degrees of harm, there is no reason to think that degrees of (nonevil)
wrongdoing do not also vary with degrees of harm. Why, for example, shouldn’t we think
that causing someone 30 units of pain isn’t ceteris paribus more wrongful than causing someone
ten units of pain? Thus, it seems that harm is not plausibly the quality of emphasis for evil.
Evil and wrongdoing are qualitatively distinct on Card’s conception of evil because harm is an
essential ingredient of evil and not an essential ingredient of wrongdoing, and not because evil
and wrongdoing are quality of emphasis distinct.38 The same goes for other plausible theories
of evil and wrongdoing. Any property that determines degrees of evil also determines degrees
of wrongfulness. Pleasure, harm, intention, malice, hostility, etc. may all determine degrees of
evil, but they also determine degrees of (nonevil) wrongdoing. If evil is qualitatively distinct
from ordinary wrongdoing it is because evil and wrongdoing do not share all of their essential
properties and not because they are quality of emphasis distinct.
Thus, while Liberto and Harrington have made an interesting metaphysical discovery about
the relationship between concepts, their version of the qualitative difference thesis is incomplete
and not applicable to the debate about whether evil and wrongdoing are qualitatively distinct.
Hence, we should stick with the moderate version of the qualitative difference thesis rather than
move to the more cumbersome disjunctive version.
Evil is qualitatively distinct from ordinary wrongdoing

In the previous section I argued for the moderate version of the qualitative difference thesis.
According to the moderate version, evil is qualitatively distinct from ordinary wrongdoing pro-
vided the essential properties of the concept of evil are not the same as the essential properties of
the concept of wrongdoing but had to greater or lesser degrees. So now the question becomes:
do the concepts of evil and wrongdoing share all of their essential properties to greater or lesser
degrees? To answer this question we need to know about the essential properties of evil and
wrongdoing. In what follows I argue that on two of the most plausible and popular theories of
wrongdoing, act-consequentialism and Kantian ethics, evil and wrongdoing do not share all of
their essential properties.
According to classical act-consequentialism, an action is right if it maximizes the overall good
and wrong if it does not.39 For instance, on this theory of right and wrong, it would be wrong
to murder John to steal his wallet since any happiness that would result from the murder would
pale in comparison with the unhappiness caused to John, his friends, family members, the
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Evil and wrongdoing
community, etc. However, some consequentialists reject classical act-consequentialism because

they believe that the rightness and wrongness of an action does not depend on whether the
action actually maximizes, or fails to maximize, overall goodness; it depends on whether it was
reasonable for the agent to expect that it would. For instance, imagine that Ashley buys groceries
for a destitute woman from a reputable grocery store so that she can eat, but that some of the
food she buys is tainted with E. coli, making the destitute women extremely sick. According to
classical act-consequentialism, by buying the food for the destitute women Ashely performs a
wrongful action since what she does brings about more harm than good. However, it seems too
harsh to call Ashley’s action wrong since, given the available evidence, it was reasonable for her
to expect that she would bring about more good than harm. Persuaded by these sorts of prob-
lem cases, some consequentialists have moved from classical act-consequentialism to expected
consequence act-consequentialism, according to which, an action is right if it is reasonable to
expect that it will best promote the good and wrong if it is not.40
Do evil and wrongdoing share all of their essential properties to differing degrees on classi-
cal or expected consequence act-consequentialist understandings of wrongdoing? According to
these theories of wrongdoing, the essential property of wrongful action is a failure to maximize
actual or expected overall goodness. The following case, which I call Malicious Hirer, gives us
reason to think that a failure to maximize actual or expected overall goodness is not an essential
property of evil.
A has the power to hire a candidate for a prestigious well-paying job: President of a
charity organization called Good Deeds. Two people have applied: B and C. B has
worked hard to acquire the education and experience for this specific job, and she is
[highly] qualified for the job. A is aware of B’s qualifications. A also knows that if B
doesn’t get the job she will be devastated and suffer a severe depression. A knows that C
is equally well-qualified for the job but that C will not suffer a depression if she doesn’t
get the job. However, the situation is such that if C gets the job the lives of a lot of peo-
ple will be greatly improved. C is a celebrity. If C gets the job, Good Deeds will receive
a lot of publicity which will result in more donations. Let us say that it is obvious that
hiring C rather than B will maximize the good and prevent some people from suffering
more than B would suffer from the depression. A hires C reasonably expecting that she
will bring about these good effects, but she does not really care about the overall good
or about preventing suffering. She cares only about getting pleasure from the suffering
of others. The reason A hires C rather than B is to take pleasure in the suffering this will
cause B and not to maximize the overall good or to prevent suffering. This makes her
act evil. But since it is also expected that her action will maximize the overall good her
act is right according to [classical and expected] act-consequentialism.41
If it is essential for wrongdoing to fail to maximize actual or expected overall goodness but not
for evil, then on the moderate version of the qualitative difference thesis evil and wrongdoing
are qualitatively distinct since they do not share all of their essential properties.
Let us now turn to Kantian ethics. According to Kant, an act is permissible provided it does
not violate the categorical imperative, and wrong if it does.42 Kant gives several formulations
of the categorical imperative. I will restrict my discussion to his formula of humanity because it
affords us the best opportunity to make sense of degrees of wrongdoing and to develop a theory
of evil as the very wrong.43
According to the formula of humanity we must “So act that [we] use, humanity, whether
in [our] own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, [and]
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never merely as a means.”44 For Kant there are two main ways to fail to treat humanity, i.e., our
rational choice-making capacity, as an end in itself, and thus, perform wrongful actions:
1 not allowing other people to choose for themselves how they or their property will be
used, and
2 failing to recognize the unconditional and incomparable value of humanity, especially by
neglecting, damaging, or destroying rational choice-making capacities.45
Deception and coercion are good examples of the first type of wrongdoing. For example, if I
convince you to drive me to the airport by promising to buy you an ice cream cone when, in
fact, I do not intend to buy you an ice cream cone, I treat you as a mere means and not as an
end in yourself. For by deceiving you I do not allow you to choose for yourself whether you
will drive me to the airport under the circumstances in which you drive me to the airport. You
think you are exchanging your services for ice cream when in fact you are doing it for free.
Similarly, if I force you to drive me to the airport at gunpoint then I do not allow you to choose
for yourself whether you will drive me to the airport. In Kant’s language, you do not “contain
within yourself the end of the very same action” and thus are treated as a mere mean and not
as an end in yourself.46
Assault causing brain damage, suicide, and murder are good examples of the second type of
wrongdoing. With assault causing brain damage we severely damage another person’s rational
choice-making capacity. With suicide we utterly destroy our own rational choice-making
capacity. And with murder we utterly destroy someone else’s rational choice-making capacity.
All three of these sorts of actions treat rational choice-making capacities as subordinate in value
to something else. Thus, by performing these sorts of actions we fail to treat humanity as having
unconditional and incomparable value, and so fail to treat it as an end in itself.
Now that we understand the Kantian conception of wrongdoing we are in a position to
consider whether evil and wrongdoing share all of their essential properties on this concep-
tion of wrongdoing. One reason to think that they do not is that on the Kantian conception
of wrongdoing, as outlined above, harm is not an essential component of wrongdoing. For
instance, for Kant, lying is always wrong, even when no harm results, since, no matter how
harmless (or even helpful) a lie is, when we lie we do not allow another person to choose for
herself how she, or her property, will be used, and thus we fail to treat the humanity in her
as an end in itself. However, harm is an essential component of evil action, for a good deal of
the moral gravity of evil comes from the fact that a victim suffers significant harm.47 If harm is
an essential component of evil but not an essential component of wrongdoing on the Kantian
conception of wrongdoing, then evil and wrongdoing (on the Kantian conception) do not share
all of their essential properties, and thus are qualitatively distinct on the moderate version of the
qualitative difference thesis.48
To this point I have argued that evil and wrongdoing do not share all of their essential prop-
erties by explaining two popular theories of wrongdoing and relying on some intuitive claims
about the nature of evil. To strengthen my case, I will now say more about the nature of evil
by sketching an account of evil that makes for a qualitative distinction between evil and wrong
doing on the theories of wrongdoing discussed above.
On my view, an agent performs an evil action if and only if:
1 she causes or allows someone else’s significant harm for an unworthy goal,
2 she believes that this is what she is doing (or is responsible for her ignorance), and
3 she is sufficiently closely related to the victim.49
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Evil and wrongdoing
A significant harm is one that is so severe that it stands-out in the life of a person normally
situated and has long-lasting negative psychological effects.50 Torture, rape, serious assault,
slavery, and murder are all significant harms in this respect. An unworthy goal is a goal that, if
accomplished, would not make up for the disvalue of the harm caused or allowed to achieve
it. Wealth, career advancement, entertainment, and pleasure are all examples of unworthy
goals for causing or allowing significant harm. A relationship can be close in terms of social
connections or in terms of proximity. For instance, it would be evil to allow a person to die
when she is lying directly in front of you. It would also be evil to allow a distant person to
die if she is a family member or a friend. It is not similarly evil to allow a distant stranger
to die, although it may be wrong.
On the theory of evil sketched above, evil is qualitatively distinct from wrongdoing on the
consequentialist conceptions of wrongdoing discussed above for at least two reasons. First, it is
essential for evil, on the account sketched above, that the perpetrator be in a sufficiently close
relationship with his victim, while there is no such requirement for wrongdoing on the conse-
quentialist conceptions of wrongdoing discussed above. Second, it is essential for wrongdoing
on these conceptions that wrongful actions either fail, or are expected to fail, to maximize
overall goodness while this is not true for evil on the account sketched above. Consider again
the case of Malicious Hirer. Malicious Hirer doesn’t do anything wrong on these conceptions
of wrongdoing because what she does maximizes the overall good and is expected to do so.
However, what Malicious Hirer does is evil on the account sketched above because she causes
her victim (B) significant harm for an unworthy goal (pleasure), knows that that is what she is
doing, and is in a sufficiently close social relationship (hirer to job candidate) with her victim.
Similarly, evil, on the theory sketched above, is qualitatively distinct from wrongdoing on
the Kantian conception of wrongdoing outlined above for at least two reasons. First, it is essen-
tial for evil on this account that a victim suffers significant harm, while harm is not an essential
feature of wrongdoing on the Kantian conception. Second, it is essential for evil, on the account
sketched above, that evildoers act for particular sorts of reasons: to cause significant harm for
unworthy goals. This sort of reason is not essential for wrongdoing on the Kantian conception
of wrongdoing. For, on the Kantian conception, it is sufficient for wrongdoing that we fail to
treat humanity as an end in itself, and this can be done for a worthy goal. For instance, on the
Kantian conception of wrongdoing, we fail to treat humanity as an end in itself if we kill one
person to save five others from a similar fate. In cases of this sort, it is unlikely that we allow
the person we kill to choose how she is used, and, even if we did, we do not treat the human-
ity in her as having absolute and unconditional worth.51 Yet, by killing one person to save five
others we act for a worthy goal in the sense explained above, and thus do not perform an evil
action. The difference between evil and wrongdoing in this respect isn’t just a matter of degree.
It isn’t that evil actions have extremely unworthy goals while merely wrongful actions, on the
Kantian conception, have somewhat unworthy goals. On the Kantian conception of wrongdo-
ing, whether or not an agent has a worthy goal is irrelevant to whether her action is wrong. In
other words, reasons of this sort (to any degree) are inessential to wrongdoing on the Kantian
conception. Yet reasons of this sort are essential to evil on the conception of evil sketched
above. Thus, if the account of evil sketched above is correct, there are at least two essential
properties of evil that are not essential properties of wrongdoing on the Kantian conception
of wrongdoing. Hence, evil and wrongdoing, on the Kantian conception of wrongdoing, are
qualitatively distinct according to the moderate version of the qualitative difference thesis.
I do not have the space here to discuss other extant, or possible, conceptions of wrongdoing.
However, I hope to have shown that we are unlikely to find a plausible theory of wrongdoing
that includes all, and only, the essential properties of evil.
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Conclusion
When we ask whether the difference between evil and ordinary wrongdoing is qualita-
tive or quantitative, we are not asking whether there are any, or even many, qualitative
or quantitative similarities or differences between evil and wrongdoing. We are asking
whether evil is just very wrong. This is a question about concepts and not about particular
individual actions.
We have considered four interpretations of the qualitative difference thesis. On the easy
version, a qualitative difference between evil and wrongdoing is assumed. Evil actions have “a
quality of evilness” that nonevil actions lack. But this just begs the question against theorists
who reject the qualitative difference thesis. On the strong version, evil is qualitatively distinct
from ordinary wrongdoing provided all evil actions have a quality that no merely wrongful
action has to any degree. This version sets the bar for a qualitative difference between evil
and wrongdoing too high. There just isn’t a natural property that all evil actions have that
no merely wrongful action has to any degree. Furthermore, the strong version is based on a
criterion for determining whether two concepts are qualitatively distinct that we should reject
since it doesn’t cohere with our intuitions about concept distinctness, such as the intuition that
there is a qualitative distinction between tables and chairs.
On the quality of emphasis version of the qualitative difference thesis, evil and wrongdoing
are qualitatively distinct provided an essential property of one of these concepts determines the
degree to which that concept is instantiated and does not determine the degree to which the
other concept is instantiated. This is one way that evil and wrongdoing might be qualitatively
distinct. However, evil and wrongdoing are not, in fact, qualitatively distinct in this respect.
Any characteristic that determines degrees of evil will also determine degrees of (nonevil)
wrongdoing and vice versa.
On the moderate version of the qualitative difference thesis, evil is qualitatively distinct
from ordinary wrongdoing provided evil and wrongdoing do not share all of their essential
properties. This is the version of the qualitative difference thesis we should accept. On this
version, evil and wrongdoing are qualitatively distinct since, on plausible theories of evil and
wrongdoing, evil and wrongdoing do not share all of their essential properties. This is a sig-
nificant conclusion because if evil was just very wrong we would have reason to abandon the
concept of evil and call putatively evil actions “very wrong” rather than “evil.” Furthermore,
it is intrinsically interesting to understand the relationship between evil and wrongdoing and
this knowledge may help us avoid conceptual confusion.52
Notes
1 See Russell 2014: 113–18. See also, Liberto and Harrington 2016: 1591–602.
2 Luke Russell is a notable exception. See Russell 2007: 676; Russell 2014: 112–21.
3 See Calder 2013: 178–9. In the philosophical literature on evil, theorists who believe we should aban-
don the concept of evil have been dubbed evil-skeptics. Theorists who believe the concept of evil is
useful and important are called evil-revivalists. See Russell 2006: 89–105.
4 Sometimes when people use the term “evil” they intend to imply that dark supernatural powers are
involved. For others, calling an action “evil” means the action was performed by an agent who is wholly
bad and/or cannot be changed. Others use the term “evil” to denote the most morally despicable sorts
of actions and persons, without implying that supernatural powers are involve or that perpetrators
have no good side or are especially resistant to change. Whether or not these implications are intended,
ascriptions of evil are very harsh moral condemnations, and thus mistaken ascriptions of evil can lead
to overly harsh judgments or punishment.
5 Russell 2014: 118.
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6 Steiner 2002: 183–93; Haybron 2002: 260–84; Garrard, 1998: 43–60 and Garrard 2002: 320–36.
7 It is important to note that all particular, actual and/or possible, instantiations of a concept might share
inessential properties as well as essential properties. For example, all triangles share the property of hav-
ing three sides, even though having three sides is not an essential property of the concept of triangle.
Having three sides is an essential property of the concept of trilateral.
8 Russell 2014:113–18.
9 Liberto and Harrington 2016: 1592. Liberto and Harrington believe that they have introduced a form
of concept distinctness that is distinct from qualitative and quantitative distinctness: quality of emphasis
distinctness. However, in this chapter, by qualitative distinctness I simply mean nonquantitative distinct-
ness. Since quality of emphasis distinctness is a form of nonquantitative distinctness, I categorize their
view as an account of qualitative distinctness.
10 Russell 2014: 116–18; See also, Russell 2007: 659–61; Steiner 2002: 184; Garrard 2002: 321.
11 See Cole 2006: 1–23, 122–47.
12 Steiner 2002: 189.
13 Russell 2014: 118; Haybron 2002: 262.
14 Russell 2014:116. See also Steiner 2002: 183–93; Haybron 2002: 260–84; Garrard 1998: 43–60 and
Garrard 2002: 320–36.
15 Russell 2007: 669–71. See also, Calder 2013: 179–80, 182 and de Wijze 2009: 221. Steiner seems to
acknowledge these problems with his view. See Steiner 2009: 255–7.
16 Garrard 1998: 43–60 and Garrard 2002: 320–36.
17 Russell 2007: 675; Calder 2015: 118.
18 It might also be argued that Garrard’s theory does not make for a qualitative distinction between evil
and ordinary wrongdoing on the strong version of the qualitative difference thesis that she accepts. For
if it is wrong, but not evil, to be mostly unmoved by a morally important consideration and evil to be
completely unmoved by the same morally important consideration, it seems that there is no property,
such as being unmoved by a morally important consideration, that no nonevil wrongful action has to
any degree and that all evil actions share.
19 Russell 2007 and Russell 2014: 112–21.
20 A backless chair is a stool.
21 Calder 2013: 180–81.
22 Ibid.: 181.
23 Russell 2014: 113–16.
24 I am not aware of anyone who holds a purely act-consequentialist theory of evil. However, it is a natural
position for an act-consequentialist about right and wrong to take.
25 Of course, the consequentialist would need to say something about how much harm is required for evil.
I will set that complication aside.
26 That is, assuming there is a qualitative difference between evil and wrongdoing.
27 Russell 2014: 116.
28 Card 2002: 3–22 and Card 2010: 3–27.
29 Card 2010: 6.
30 I will say more about the Kantian conception of wrongdoing in the section: ‘Evil is qualitatively dis-
tinct from ordinary wrongdoing’. Card’s account makes for a qualitative distinction between evil and
wrongdoing for another reason as well. For Card, evil actions must be inexcusable. By “inexcusable”
Card does not mean lacking adequate excuse. She means lacking any morally justifiable excuse at all
(Card 2010: 18–23). But wrongful actions are not essentially inexcusable in this sense on the noncon-
sequentialist theories of wrongdoing Card favors. For instance, on Kant’s conception of wrongdoing, it
is wrong to lie even if doing so would prevent crime, and thus if there is some (moral) reason to lie.
31 Liberto and Harrington 2016.
32 Ibid.,: 1595.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 It is controversial whether organizations, themselves, are able to perform wrongful actions or cause
harm, or whether all putatively collective actions are reducible to the actions of individual members.
See French 1991: 133–49;Velasquez 2003: 531–62 and Isaacs 2011.The hypothetical theory of evil I am
considering here need not assume that organizations, themselves, are able to do wrong or cause harm.
The theory might instead contend that individuals can perform evil actions only if they act wrongly or
cause harm by interacting with an organizational structure.
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36 As far as I know, this position has not been argued for in print. However, Keith Thomas, who attended
some public lectures I gave on evil at the Spring Garden Memorial Public Library in Halifax, Nova
Scotia, Canada, in the fall of 2014 vigorously argued for this position during question period.This posi-
tion also bears some similarity to Hannah Arendt’s conception of the radical evil of totalitarian regimes.
See Arendt 1994: 437–59.
37 Liberto and Harrington 2016: 1598–9.
38 Evil and wrongdoing are qualitatively distinct on Card’s conception of evil for another reason as well:
Card argues that evil actions are essentially inexcusable in a sense that wrongful actions are not. See
note 29.
39 Moore 1963: 25–6.
40 See Jackson 1991: 461–82.
41 Calder, “Is Evil Just Very Wrong?” pp. 183–4.
42 Kant 1997.
43 Calder 2013: 184–7. See also Calder 2005: 229–44.
44 Kant 1997: 38.
45 Kant 1997: 36–9. See also Calder 2005: 238–43.
46 Kant 1997: 38.
47 The claim that harm is an essential component of evil is controversial. See, e.g., de Wijze 2018: 25–35;
Garrard 1998: 45–9; Morton 2004: 60; and Russell 2014: 61–8. Unfortunately, I do not have the space
here to argue for this claim. Note, however, that the claim is not that evil actions must cause harm. It
may be sufficient to witness and take pleasure in harm. A white lie does not involve a victim’s harm at
all, whereas evil actions must involve a victim’s harm in some respect.
48 Evil and wrongdoing, on the Kantian conception of wrongdoing, do not share other essential properties
as well. As I will explain below, it is essential for evil that evil actions are performed for certain sorts of
reasons: to cause or allow significant harm for unworthy goals. On the Kantian conception of wrongdo-
ing, wrongful actions need not be performed for these sorts of reasons.
49 See Calder 2015: 113–30.
50 I say a person normally situated because for someone who is routinely subjected to significant harms
one more significant harm might not stand out or be memorable for this person. However, the harm
might still be significant enough for evil. See Card 2002: 16.
51 We can imagine different scenarios of this sort. For instance, we might kill one person to harvest his
organs to save five others who are in need of organ transplants.
52 This chapter began as a presentation at the Understanding Evil conference at the University of
Amsterdam, May 18–19, 2016. I would like to thank Thomas Nys and Stephen de Wijze for organizing
this conference. I would also like to thank participants of the conference for their thoughtful questions.
Special thanks go to Stephen de Wijze for his careful reading and helpful comments on previous drafts
of this chapter.
References
Arendt, H. (1994 [1951]) The Origins of Totalitarianism, San Diego, CA: Harcourt.
Calder, T. (2005) “Kant and Degrees of Wrongness,” Journal of Value Inquiry 39(2), pp. 229–44.
Calder, T. (2013) “Is Evil Just Very Wrong?” Philosophical Studies 163(1), pp. 177–96.
Calder, T. (2015) “Evil and Its Opposite,” Journal of Value Inquiry 49(1–2), pp. 113–30.
Card, C. (2010) Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cole, P. (2006) The Myth of Evil: Demonizing the Enemy, Westport, CT: Praeger.
de Wijze, S. (2009) “Recalibrating Steiner on Evil,” in S. de Wijze, M.H. Kramer, and I. Carter (eds.)
Hillel Steiner and the Anatomy of Justice, New York: Routledge.
de Wijze, S. (2018) “Small-Scale Evil,” Journal of Value Inquiry 52(1), pp. 25–35.
French, P. (1991) “The Corporation as a Moral Person,” in L. May and S. Hoffman (eds.) Collective
Responsibility: Five Decades of Debate in Theoretical and Applied Ethics, Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, pp. 133–49
Garrard, E. (1998) “The Nature of Evil,” Philosophical Explorations: An International Journal for the Philosophy
of Mind and Action, 1(1), pp. 43–60.
Garrard, E. (2002) “Evil as an Explanatory Concept,” Monist, 85(2), pp. 320–36.
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Haybron, D. (2002) “Moral Monsters and Saints,” Monist 85(2), pp. 260–84
Isaacs, T. (2011) Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jackson, F. (1991) “Decision-Theoretic Consequentialism and the Nearest and Dearest Objection,” Ethics
101(3), pp. 461–82.
Kant, I. (1997 [1785]) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. M. Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Liberto, H. and Harrington, F. (2016) “Evil, Wrongdoing, and Concept Distinctness,” Philosophical Studies
173(6), pp. 1591–602.
Moore, G.E. (1963 [1912]) Ethics, London: Oxford University Press.
Morton, A. (2004) On Evil, New York: Routledge.
Russell, L. (2006) “Evil-Revivalism Versus Evil-Skepticism,” Journal of Value Inquiry 40(1), pp. 89–105.
Russell, L. (2007) “Is Evil Action Qualitatively Distinct From Ordinary Wrongdoing?” Australasian Journal
of Philosophy 85(4), pp. 659–77.
Steiner, H. (2002) “Calibrating Evil,” Monist 85(2), pp. 183–93.
Steiner, H. (2009) “Responses,” in S. de Wijze, M.H. Kramer, and I. Carter (eds.) Hillel Steiner and the
Anatomy of Justice, New York: Routledge.
Velasquez, M. (2003) “Debunking Corporate Moral Responsibility,” Business Ethics Quarterly 13(4),
pp. 531–62.
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17
EVIL CHARACTERS
Peter Brian Barry
If, as Claudia Card has suggested, “To call someone evil without qualification is to imply that
the person’s character is evil” (Card 2002: 22), understanding what makes a person evil demands
understanding evil character. A person’s character is composed primarily of her character traits
and the relationships between them and character traits are largely made up of clusters of inter-
related mental state dispositions (Miller 2014). A character trait like compassion, for example,
will involve a disposition to form the belief that one should help people in need, a disposition to
form a desire to help another person for their own sake, and so forth. What sort of mental state
dispositions are constitutive of evil character? Different answers are offered by proponents of
(1) action-based, (2) absence-based, (3) affective, (4) hybrid, and (5) extremity accounts of evil character.
Action-based accounts
Action-based accounts of evil personhood postulate a tight conceptual connection between evil
personhood and evil action. On such accounts, the concept of evil action is given conceptual
priority over the concept of evil personhood, such that the latter is defined and understood in
terms of the former (Russell 2012). On the simplest sort of action-based account, evil people
and evildoers are simply identified: an evil person just is an evildoer. Call this the identity thesis
(Barry 2013). While the identity thesis surely has its adherents and displays an elegant simplicity,
it suffers from the fatal defect of being pretty clearly false. We have good reason to deny that
someone is an evil person only if she is an evildoer since a genuinely evil person who never
actually engages in any evildoing is conceivable: a mean-spirited misanthrope paralyzed by fear
of divine retribution or enfeebled by age might be well regarded as evil even if he never actually
does anything (Haybron 1999); so might a sedated and restrained voyeur who relishes the end-
less stream of images of suffering and torture he is exposed to with orgasmic delight (McGinn
1997). If there are plausible examples of evil people who do not and will not engage in evildo-
ing, we have good reason to reject the identity thesis left-to-right.
We similarly have good reason to reject the identity thesis right-to-left and deny that some-
one is an evildoer only if she is an evil person. Mass murder and genocide are paradigmatic
examples of evildoing (Card 2002) but the typical perpetrators of such evildoing are not that
different from the rest of us, “extraordinary only by what they did, not by who they were”
(Waller 2002: 8). But if typical evildoers just are evil people, then, supposing that evil people are
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not that different from the rest of us but for their evildoing, most of us are evil people too since
our characters are not terribly different from theirs. This result is at odds with the popular belief
that evil people are rare (Barry 2013; Haybron 2002a; Russell 2014). Insofar as the identity thesis
implies otherwise, it can’t be a surprise that the identity thesis is widely rejected (Barry 2013;
Card 2002; Formosa 2008; Haybron 2002a; Morton 2004; Russell 2014).
Action-based accounts need not suppose that evil people just are evildoers, supposing instead
that evil people are disposed to engage in evildoing. We are told that an evil person is a “regular
source of evil” (Kekes 1990: 47–8), that “evil people do [evil] regularly, excessively, malevo-
lently, and inexcusably” (Kekes 2005: 130), that a person is evil if he is “often enough prone
to do evil acts” (Thomas 1993: 82), and so forth. Call these dispositional accounts. The simplest
dispositional account – the “basic dispositional account” – holds only that someone is evil if and
only if she is disposed to evildoing (Russell 2012: 233). The basic dispositional account can avoid
the counterexamples that plague the identity thesis: for example, the fact that a paralyzed and
aphasic misanthrope never actually gets around to any evildoing does not show that he is not
disposed to do so. Dispositions generally are masked when their manifestation is prevented from
occurring when their manifestation conditions obtain, but masked dispositions are dispositions:
a crystal vase remains fragile even though it fails to shatter when thrown on the hard ground
because it is wrapped securely in bubble wrap, and the misanthrope remains disposed to evil
action even when rendered paralyzed and mute since the intrinsic properties that ground his
disposition – say, his misanthropic nature – have not been altered.
For various reasons, the basic dispositional account is probably too simplistic (Russell 2012;
Russell 2014), although it can be improved upon. It is common to suppose that character traits
are “deep” such that, for example, someone possesses the virtue of generosity only if her ten-
dency to perform generous actions in the right circumstances with the right feelings and such
is not easily alterable or corruptible (Hursthouse 1999). Accordingly, evil people must have a
highly fixed disposition to engage in evildoing, such that it is difficult to alter or undo their ten-
dency to act as such. Dispositions to act can also be weaker and stronger, and while it is difficult
to spell out what it is for a disposition to be stronger or weaker it probably has something to
do with manifesting in a greater range of circumstances. Finally, while rather many of us might
engage in, for example, genocidal acts were we in the grip of powerful situational influences
that do not favor our autonomy, we would presumably refrain were we in conditions that do
favor our autonomy. Evil people, by contrast, would not refrain; they would pursue evildoing
even in autonomy-favoring conditions, suggesting their evildoing really is the product of their
character, not their situation. So, suitably amended, the most plausible dispositional thesis cur-
rently on the market holds that someone is an evil person if and only if she is strongly and highly
fixedly disposed to perform evil actions when in autonomy-favoring conditions (Russell 2012:
347; Russell 2014: 173). Whether or not S is evil is “settled” by whether S is strongly and highly
fixedly disposed to evildoing when “in those conditions in which S is able to do what he really
wants to do” (Russell 2014: 174).
Can a dispositional account of evil personhood suffice as a conception of evil character?
Arguably, accounts of evil personhood that appeal only to the motivational proclivities of evil
people are “not especially illuminating as a theory of character” (Haybron 1999, 133). As noted
above, character is composed of clusters of interrelated mental dispositions, but dispositions of
various kinds including a wide variety of dispositions beyond dispositions to act in certain ways –
for example, dispositions related to personality, emotions, beliefs, feelings, and still more. A
more restrictive sense of the word “character,” the sense that appears to be the one that Aristotle
has in mind, will focus primarily on the virtues and vices of the person in question. But no
virtue ethicist worth her salt will allow that the virtues can be understood solely in terms of
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dispositions to act; rather, the virtues (and probably the vices) are complicated multitrack dis-
positional states that dispose their bearers to act, but also to think and feel and reason, in certain
constitutive ways (Barry 2013; Hursthouse 1999). Insofar as dispositional accounts look solely
to the motivational tendencies of evil people, they are doomed to yield seriously impoverished
accounts of evil character. Note, too, that dispositional accounts of evil personhood probably
do not yield adequate sufficient conditions for evil personhood. After all, someone might be
possessed of a strong and fixed disposition to engage in evildoing yet be greatly remorseful
or ashamed of his actions and his tendency to act as such. But the capacity to experience and
express emotions constitutive of contrition is morally redeeming and not the sort of capacity one
would expect an evil person to have (Barry 2013). But that means that not even a strong and
highly fixed disposition to engage in evildoing is enough to make someone evil. They must lack
some component of character, something that would otherwise morally redeem them.
Evil people may well be disposed to evildoing, even if there is more to evil character than
being consistently motivated to act in terrible ways. What else is tied up with evil character? A
different sort of account is evident given the suggestion above that evil people must lack morally
redeeming aspects of their character.
Absence-based accounts
There is a long history in philosophy of attempting to understand evil in terms of a privation, as
is evident in the Augustinian tradition (Calder 2007). More recently, contemporary thinkers like
Mary Midgley hold that “Evil . . . is essentially the absence of good, and cannot be understood
on its own” (Midgley 1984: 14). Whereas dispositional accounts focus on the motivational ten-
dencies of the evil person to illuminate what makes her character evil, absence-based accounts
suppose that evil people will lack certain mental state dispositions and that evil character consists
in the absence of particular motivations or beliefs or feelings. Again, by way of example, Midgley
holds that wickedness – a term she uses more or less interchangeably with “evil” – is “nega-
tive” in a fairly straightforward sense: it is the result of “the absence, the failure of other motives
which ought normally to balance self-regard” (Midgley 1984: 158). No mad or remarkable
motives are necessary to have an evil character; it is enough that someone consistently lacks
concern for others or an interest in considering the consequences of their actions.
I have already suggested one cluster of mental state dispositions that evil people seemingly
must lack: something like remorse or shame or regret in response to their own wrongdoing. But
lacking contrition is not sufficient for evil character; someone might be disposed to lack contri-
tion on philosophical grounds – say, because she endorses hard incompatibilism and has purged
feelings of contrition from herself on philosophical grounds. Similarly, evil character cannot just
be a function of lacking one particular feeling – say, empathy. For some persons who lack a
capacity for empathy are not plausibly regarded as evil people – say, persons on the autism spec-
trum who suffer from Asperger’s syndrome. A global absence-based account does not suppose
that evil character consists in lacking some particular mental state disposition or even some small
set of them, but in lacking any morally redeeming mental state disposition.
Daniel Haybron defends the most developed global absence-based account. Haybron holds
that a person is evil in virtue of consistently lacking morally virtuous character traits; as Haybron
puts things, evil people will “lack any significant moral virtues” such that they have “no ‘good
side’” (Haybron 2002b: 63). The thesis that evil people will lack significant moral virtue admits
of a weaker and a stronger reading, and Haybron argues for the stronger. On a weak reading,
while evil people lack morally significant virtue, they may still possess “morally insignificant”
virtue – that is, virtue that does not contribute to or otherwise improve the overall moral quality
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of their character. This weak reading allows that an evil person might be slightly generous to a
select group of people or a bit kind to dogs. A strong reading rules out the possession of moral
virtue entirely, significant or otherwise (Haybron 2002b). However, if the weak reading were
true, then mere ne’er-do-wells – that is, those who genuinely care about the good of others but
are never adequately motivated to act accordingly – suffer from evil character (Haybron 2002b).
Such people lack significant moral virtue as evidenced by the fact that they, well, never do well.
Yet they still might care a bit about other people and about doing the right thing. Ne’er-do-
wells are hardly admirable characters but they could be much, much worse and for that reason
Haybron is right to suggest that they are implausibly regarded as evil people. If the weak reading
should be jettisoned in favor of the stronger, then on Haybron’s account evil character consists
in the consistent absence of moral virtue, period.
One consequence of Haybron’s absence-based account is that a terribly minor change in a
person’s character can have a remarkably significant impact on the overall moral quality of her
character. If an evil person acquires just a tiny bit of seemingly insignificant moral virtue, then
she would no longer be evil, a significant improvement but arguably an implausible one: if a
terribly unjust and malevolent and cruel and callous person acquired just a bit of patience or
generosity or whatever, then on Haybron’s account we can no longer rightly claim that she is
evil, whatever we can say of her (Barry 2009; Barry 2010; Barry 2013). Similarly, no matter how
strongly someone is motivated to engage in the very worst kind of evildoing, their status as an
evil person is undermined if they possess a modest degree of virtue: someone greatly disposed to
torture children who displays at least a bit of compassion for the elderly could not be evil on this
account (Calder 2009). This sort of an objection plagues absence-based accounts quite gener-
ally. As Card suggests, being evil “is to have something real . . . in one’s character, in virtue of
which one’s evildoing would be no accident” (Card 2002: 22). But, insofar as absence-based
accounts only speak to what evil people lack, they will struggle to make sense of the plausible
assumption that evil character involves being prone to acting and behaving in terrible ways, to
being a reliable source of harm and suffering, and so forth. After all, lacking moral virtue does
not entail possessing morally dubious motivation – think again of the ne’er-do-well. In short,
absence-based accounts will be chronically unable to explain why evildoing is the nonaccidental
product of evil character.
Accordingly, absence-based accounts probably cannot, by themselves, suffice as accounts
of evil character. But that is not to say that they fail to contribute to our understanding of
evil character at all. If evil people will tend to lack contrition or empathy or whatever, then
absence-based accounts are onto something. Perhaps absence-based accounts can be part of a
more complicated theory of evil character. I shall have more to say about such accounts below,
but consider first another contender.
Affective accounts
Return to the sedated and restrained voyeur who relishes the horrific images of suffering and
torture that he is continuously exposed to. The voyeur is supposed to obviously seem evil
even if he lacks any tendency to engage in evildoing, given that he has such perverse and hei-
nous feelings. “Affect” as a term is used equivocally in philosophy and psychology, but I shall
understand it in a broad sense to include feelings generally. Affective accounts of evil personhood
locate the constitutive elements of evil character in an evil person’s affective dispositions – that
is, in her tendencies to experience seriously morally inappropriate feelings. On one version of
such accounts, “possessing a certain kind of disposition to have a certain kind of evil feelings is
enough to make a person evil” (Russell 2014: 176). An affective account of evil personhood
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Peter Brian Barry
might instead claim that a disposition to have evil feelings is necessary to be an evil person.
There is an argument available for making proclivity for evil feelings a necessary condition for
evil personhood, not simply a sufficient condition. Take any ostensibly evil person – say, some-
one with a strong and highly fixed disposition to engage in evildoing – who lacks any tendency
to have evil feelings. Then imagine a counterpart otherwise identical but possessed of such a
tendency. If the counterpart is plausibly regarded as suffering from a worse sort of character,
then the counterpart is at least a stronger candidate for being described as evil.
What sort of affective tendencies might be tied up with evil character on an affective account?
What sort of feelings are most plausibly regarded as evil feelings? The most obvious and popular
examples are antisympathetic feelings – that is, feelings involving taking pleasure in another per-
son’s pain and suffering or feeling pain in response to another’s happiness or success (Haybron
1999; McGinn 1999; Russell 2014). The voyeur would seem to suffer from a particular kind
of antisympathetic feeling, some variety of Schadenfreude that disposes him to take great pleasure
in the suffering of others. The typical affective account takes pleasure in the suffering of others
to be the prototypical evil feeling. In the same way that some philosophers think that there is a
close connection between evil action and pleasure (Steiner 2002), Colin McGinn suggests that
there is a “close connection between evil and pleasure” (McGinn 1997: 91) with respect to evil
people. McGinn proposes the beginnings of an affective account in the following passage:
Imagine the following two species of beings—call them the G-beings and the E-beings.
The G-beings are such that when another member of the species experiences pleasure,
they too experience pleasure, while when another experiences pain they feel pain. The
interpersonal laws of feeling preserve pleasure and pain, so that cause and effect will
be of the same hedonic type. The E-beings, on the other hand, exemplify the oppo-
site laws of social psychology: pleasure in one causes pain in another, and pain causes
pleasure. . . . What matters is that the two species invert each other’s interpersonal
hedonic laws. Their hedonic dispositions are the exact reverse of each other.
(McGinn 1997: 61)
McGinn’s E-beings are disposed to feel pleasure when the rest of mankind suffers pain and
feel pain when the rest of mankind feels pleasure. But some care is appropriate here. Are all
cases of Schadenfreude morally dubious? No less than Immanuel Kant notes without objection
that everyone enjoys seeing the right good beating of a pest who annoys and vexes peace-
loving folk. Of course, the suffering of the pest is probably deserved and for that reason taking
some degree of pleasure in his misery might not be morally objectionable. It would remain
plausible that evil feelings involve, or most typically involve, “inexcusable morally deprived
pleasure . . . taken in witnessing or contemplating the extreme suffering of particular innocent
victims” (Russell 2014: 180).
While McGinn follows the usual route of the proponent of affective accounts insofar as he
discusses Schadenfreude, his discussion of E-beings suggests another candidate for evil feelings as
well. Note that, on McGinn’s proposal, an evil person has another kind of inverted hedonic
tendency distinct from a tendency for Schadenfreude: she feels pain at the pleasures of others.
Here, too, McGinn’s proposal needs refinement. Envy is also an antisympathetic feeling but if
taking pleasure in another person’s extreme pain is worse than feeling pain in response to their
extreme pleasure, then even a heightened capacity for envy might not count as an evil feel-
ing (Russell 2014). Further, just as it is not clear that it is always morally inappropriate to take
pleasure in another person’s pain, it is not clear that it is always morally inappropriate to feel
pain in response to another person’s pleasure. A perfectly just person may well be pained upon
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Evil characters
seeing the wicked flourish and suffer terribly when she sees the especially wicked flourish greatly
(Barry 2016). McGinn also implicitly suggests that, while an evil person might be disposed to
have evil feelings, the scope of her evil feelings might be quite limited. Indeed, her evil feelings
might be focused on one small class of people or even one single person. McGinn regards the
wicked Claggart from Herman Melville’s Billy Budd: Sailor as the sort of character who “neatly
encapsulates the conception I am working with—the idea of an inversion of the usual laws of
interpersonal feeling” (McGinn 1997: 64; cf. Barry 2016). But, if Claggart is an evil person, he
isn’t evil in virtue of being disposed to find pleasure in the suffering of others generally; as far as
the text suggests, Claggart’s lone target was the moral exemplar, Billy Budd. Perhaps evil people
need to be sufficiently misanthropic as to feel inexcusable pleasure in response to the grave suf-
fering of others quite generally, but perhaps a disposition to feel such pleasure in response to the
grave suffering of some small proper sub-set of humanity suffices as an evil feeling too.
There might be other antisympathetic feelings that don’t involve taking pleasure in anoth-
er’s pain or pain in her pleasure. In a very different context, David Lewis suggests that “it is
evil to admire someone evil in full recognition of the characteristics and actions that express
their evil” (Lewis 2007: 239). Evil character thus functions as a kind of contagion: admiring an
evil person makes the admirer evil as well. In any case, Schadenfreude, envy, and evil admiration
are all examples of “pure vices” – that is, “attitudes that are inappropriately oriented to their
objects, including the love of an evil” (Hurka 2001: 92). And, if the pure vices are the worst
among the vices (Hurka 2001), then they would seem to be plausibly regarded as constitutive
components of evil character.
How plausible are affective accounts of evil character? Consider yet again the sedated
and restrained voyeur, an archetype of the affective account. One might question whether
the voyeur’s evil feelings are enough to make him evil on the grounds that fantasizing or
relishing in evil is not as bad as actually desiring or intending it (Formosa 2008). Parity of
reasoning suggests that being disposed merely to take pleasure in evil is not as bad as being
disposed to engage in it. But is the voyeur not disposed to engage in evildoing? To moti-
vate affective accounts, the voyeur must be strongly and highly fixedly disposed to have
evil feelings yet demonstrably lack any corresponding disposition to evildoing. Sentiments
and feelings are conceptually distinct from desires and intentions, so perhaps there is no
obvious contradiction in having the former disposition in spades but lacking the latter
entirely (Russell 2014: 183). However, I confess to uncertainty here. In particular, I confess
to being uncertain as to whether having a strong and highly fixed disposition to feel evil
pleasure but lacking any tendency to engage in evildoing is genuinely conceivable. Such an
individual would have to take so much perverse pleasure in the gratuitous and undeserved
suffering of others that he is indisputably evil yet lack any desire to do trivial things to bring
about or prolong that suffering. For example, he would have to lack even the slightest incli-
nation to reach an inch to his right to push a button that activates a torture machine or nod
his head to indicate that his victim should continue to be put through agony. Intuitions will
vary, but I find it difficult to conceive of such a person. At least, since he takes absolutely
no means to realize his end of relishing the suffering of others, he is instrumentally irrational
to the point that he does not clearly count as agent at all.
There is an important lesson about dispositions that will become relevant later. While it is
notoriously difficult to spell out the relevant manifestation and stimulus conditions for dispo-
sitions, they tend to be “clustered” such that, if A is disposed to M in circumstances C, A is
probably also disposed to do things similar to M in circumstances similar to C. Fragile vases
are disposed to shatter if thrown to the ground but also to shatter into several pieces if thrown
against the wall, to break if struck with hammers, and so forth. If the sadistic voyeur is strongly
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Peter Brian Barry
and highly fixedly disposed to take pleasure in the undeserved suffering of others, that disposi-
tion is probably clustered with other dispositions that manifest in similar ways in similar circum-
stances, including the disposition to cause or prolong the unjustified suffering of others when he
can easily do so. But that suggests that he really is disposed to engage in evildoing if he is strongly
and highly fixedly disposed to have evil feelings. For these reasons, I question whether the
voyeur is a counterexample to action-based accounts, but I also question whether the voyeur
leads the advocate of affective accounts where he wants to go.
Affective accounts are also prone to their own counterexamples. Arguably, it is possible to
conceive of an indisputably evil person who lacks any disposition to have evil feelings: Anton
Chigurh from Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men seems to be like this, and there is
a popular image of Nazi doctors like Mengele as cold, bloodless operators who experimented
on unwilling Jews solely for the sake of scientific pursuit. Such characters appear to operate
at the “hedonic zero,” seemingly lacking in any tendency for evil feelings although greatly
disposed to engage in evildoing (Barry 2009; Barry 2013; Barry 2016; Russell 2014). There is
no obvious reason to think that there really is some disposition for evil feelings that is being
masked and arguably it is at least partly the lack of appropriate feeling that makes such charac-
ters plausible examples of evil people (Barry 2013, 2016). Contrary to the argument that began
this section, someone who lacks a disposition for evil feelings but is very greatly disposed to
engage in evildoing might be so indisputably evil that an otherwise similar counterpart who
has evil feelings is not a worse sort of person. And this would be the case if only because the
fellow lacking evil feelings is so terrible in the first place. Note too that psychopaths are com-
monly regarded as paradigmatic examples of evil persons, but they are also commonly thought
to lack affect. If psychopaths, so understood, are evil, then evil character seems not to require
anything like evil feelings. If all this is right, then affective accounts do not supply even a
necessary condition for evil character.
Hybrid accounts
I have questioned whether action-based, absence-based, and affective accounts of evil person-
hood suffice as accounts of evil character. Yet it remains exceedingly plausible to suppose that
evil people will be disposed to engage in evildoing, that they are missing something that barely
morally decent people will have, and that a proclivity for evil feelings is at least suggestive of a
seriously dubious character. Perhaps an adequate account of evil character will not look to just
one of these accounts but to some combination of them. Hybrid accounts combine some of the
above accounts insofar as they articulate what it is to have an evil character. Hybrid accounts can
be either agglomerative or disjunctive. Agglomerative accounts make evil personhood a function
of some combination of a disposition to evildoing or tendency to have evil feelings or to lack
some morally significant mental state disposition, perhaps all three. Disjunctive accounts suppose
that one or more of the three accounts is individually sufficient for evil character, though none
is singularly necessary.
Exactly what an agglomerative account will look like varies from proposal to proposal, yet
such accounts are pretty common. For example, Paul Formosa contends that an evil person is
“an unreformed person who repeatedly perpetrates, or at least intends to perpetrate, evil acts”
(Formosa 2008, 233). Formosa rightly notes that “[a]lmost all of the work in this conception of
evil persons is performed by the prior conception of evil acts that it builds on” (Formosa 2008,
233) but it also requires that an evil person be “unreformed” – presumably, lacking in contri-
tion. While Haybron suggests that being evil amounts to lacking significant moral virtue, he also
explicitly favors an “affective-motivational” account: on this account, evil people are moved
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and motivated in ways that differ radically from even from ordinary wrongdoers, but they also
lack the moral sensibilities of decent citizens and typical violent criminals alike (Haybron 2002a:
271). Hillel Steiner at least suggests a hybrid account, although he officially offers an account
of evil action and not an account of evil personhood in defending the thesis that evil actions
are morally wrong acts that are pleasurable for their doers (Steiner 2002). If a merely morally
prohibited action is wrong but not-quite-evil, then parity of reasoning suggests that someone
merely disposed to wrongdoing is also not-quite-evil. And, if an evil action is both wrong and
pleasurable, then perhaps an evil person is both disposed to evildoing and to have evil feelings.
Adam Morton comes close to combining all three insofar as he commends thinking of an evil
person as “one whose personality has as a central element some way of negotiating the barriers”
that keep the rest of us from engaging in evil acts (Morton 2004: 65). If the personality of an
evil person allows her to negotiate the barriers to evildoing that restrain the rest of us, then she
seems to be disposed to evildoing. But presumably those barriers will include painful feelings
associated with guilt or shame or remorse; the evil person will thus lack any tendency to feel
those feelings. And finding pleasure in the suffering of others is an incentive to navigating those
barriers. Agglomerative accounts can be pretty demanding, clearly more demanding than any
single account considered thus far, but the sort of character they describe is going to be pretty
undeniably evil, a virtue of such accounts.
Disjunctive accounts are interestingly common. Russell’s “full account of evil personhood”
allows that being strongly and highly fixedly disposed to evildoing or to have unrepudiated
evil feelings is sufficient for being evil (Russell 2014: 192). Stephen de Wijze entertains the
possibility that an evil person has the disposition to “welcome evil actions” manifested by
either engaging in evildoing or by enjoying the commission of evil actions by others (de Wijze
2002: 231). Card suggests that someone “may rightly be judged to be an evil person on the
basis of persistent and effective evil motives or intentions (or both) or on the basis of persistent
gross negligence or recklessness” (Card 2002: 21). The former basis suggests sympathy with
an action-based account, while the latter basis, insofar as it suggests that an evil person lacks
an adequate concern for the harm or risk that she places others in, suggests an absence-based
account. Todd Calder proposes that there are evil characters “wholly, or almost wholly, lack-
ing in empathy and concern” and that there are evil characters possessed of “evil motives or
intentions on a regular basis” (Calder 2009: 26). If there is more than one route to being evil,
then disjunctive accounts may well seem plausible.
The plausibility of a disjunctive account of evil personhood will depend on what one thinks
of conceptual pluralism about evil – that is, the view that there are a number of folk concep-
tions of evil personhood but no sufficient reason to prefer one conception against the others
(Russell 2014). If one is generally unopposed to conceptual pluralism, then one may well be
fine with a disjunctive account; if not, then not. More problematically, a disjunctive account
is only as plausible as its individual disjuncts. I have suggested reasons for thinking that action-
based, absence-based, and affective accounts of evil personhood do not suffice as accounts of evil
character. But, if none of those accounts is individually adequate as an account of evil character,
then a disjunction of them isn’t going to be adequate either.
Agglomerative accounts have better prospects here; even if no one account of evil character
is sufficient on its own, the deficiencies of any one might be overcome when paired with a dif-
ferent account. However, there has to be some worry that an agglomerative account is going
to be overly demanding. It is difficult enough to find people who have an adequate disposi-
tion to be moved to evildoing; it will be even more difficult to find an actual evil person with
the requisite motivational disposition and some requisite affective disposition, for example. So,
there has to be some worry that agglomerative accounts will simply define the evil person out
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Peter Brian Barry
of existence, the downside to their demanding nature noted above. More problematically, if
agglomerative accounts of evil character are at all plausible, then a different and arguably richer
account of evil character should seem even more plausible. I discuss this account below.
Extremity accounts
I have already suggested that a person’s character is composed of a series of mental state dis-
positions and their relations. These dispositions can be fairly coarse-grained and general – say,
a disposition to do just things – or fairly fine-grained and specific – say, a disposition to give
moderate assistance to other persons in close physical proximity who are in dire need. Things
can come in degrees here. The more that a description of a person’s character includes fine-
grained dispositions and the more such dispositions it names, the richer it is. An especially rich
account of evil character will appeal to multiple fine-grained dispositions, and thereby proffers
a more complete and correspondingly richer explanation of the evil person’s predictable ten-
dency to engage in evildoing.
Talk of multiple fine-grained mental state dispositions suggests a different account of evil
character. Again, the virtues are best understood as multitrack dispositional states that dispose
their bearers to think and act and feel and reason in particular constitutive ways. Arguably, the
vices should be understood in a similar way (Barry 2010; Barry 2013). But then there should be
an obvious sense in which an account of evil character will have to make some sort of appeal
to the vices of the evil person. For example, John Kekes suggests that “[t]he vices of some
people are lasting and predictable sources of evil, and calling people dominated by their vices
evil merely registers this fact” (Kekes 1990: 8). But this can’t be quite right. There is a range
of moral vices, some of which are comparatively worse than others, and evil people are not
well understood as being evil in virtue of being merely unkind or somewhat lazy (Barry 2010;
Barry 2013). If suffering from moral vice was sufficient to suffer from evil character, evil people
would be implausibly common.
Extremity accounts focus on moral vice as the essential component of evil character, but not
just any sort of vice: it is extreme vice that makes for evil character on such accounts. Virtues
and vices can be more or less extreme as a function of both their intensity and the value of their
object (Hurka 2001; Barry 2013). The intensity of a vice involves its motivational capacity: other
things being equal, the more a vice disposes its agent to act, the more intense that vice. Vices
can also count as extreme in virtue of having especially morally disvaluable objects. Two different
vices might both have morally disvaluable objects but, if the object of one vice is worse than
the other, then it is more extreme in this second sense. Vices might be extreme in one sense but
not the other; slight maliciousness is possible, as is exceptional rudeness. Most plausibly, people
suffer from evil character when they suffer from vices that are extreme in both senses – that is,
when their characters are marked by vices with especially morally disvaluable objects possessed
to significant degrees. So understood, evil people are not merely very boorish or somewhat cal-
lous; rather, they are greatly possessed of some of the very worst vices (Barry 2009; Barry 2010;
Barry 2013; Barry 2016).
Extremity accounts need not mandate that any one vice in particular is constitutive of evil
character and they can allow that multiple extreme vices suffice for being evil; for example,
someone might suffer from evil character in virtue of being greatly cruel or in virtue of being
exceptionally callous. An extremity account of evil character is disjunctive, but not wildly so,
since the various extreme vices that suffice for evil character are interrelated. Here, too, relevant
dispositions will tend to “cluster.” For example, the disposition to act in ways that injure others
is constitutive of malice but also of miserliness and injustice, while reliably lying is constitutive
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of dishonesty but also unhelpfulness and excessive humility (Barry 2013). No surprise, then, if
persons suffering from one extreme vice will tend to suffer from others, too. Evil character, so
understood, will manifest in any number of serious character flaws that ensure that an evil per-
son is thoroughly wicked and reprehensible (Barry 2013).
Note too that extremity accounts effectively incorporate the most plausible parts of the other
accounts of evil character considered above. Insofar as the vices are multitrack dispositional
states, extremity accounts can allow that evil character will involve a disposition to act in ter-
rible ways; vices will certainly involve tendencies to act in certain ways in certain circumstances.
They can also allow that the evil person will lack compassion or empathy or simple decency as
absence-based accounts would have it since the possession of extreme vice will tend to drive
out such things. They can finally allow that evil people will tend to suffer from something akin
to evil feelings since the vices involve dispositions to feel in certain constitutive ways. To the
extent that agglomerative accounts promise to locate evil character in motivational and affec-
tive dispositions, they approach extremity accounts although extremity accounts offer a more
straightforward account of evil character. After all, what are more obvious examples of character
traits than the virtues and vices?
Extremity accounts are plagued by their own challenges. Note that Russell’s dispositional
account defined evil personhood in terms of a complicated disposition to engage in evildoing; so
understood, evil personhood is defined in terms of a propensity for evil action. Extremity accounts
do not define evil personhood in terms of evil action; there is no vice, extreme or otherwise,
that is plausibly understood as involving a coarse-grained disposition to engage in evildoing –
as opposed to cruel actions or unjust actions or callous actions, or whatever. If there are good rea-
sons to think that evil action needs to be well understood prior to understanding evil personhood
(de Wijze 2016; Russell 2014) then extremity accounts seem to get things backwards. Further,
extremity accounts too threaten to drive the evil person out of existence in virtue of being too
demanding. As allowed above, nonevil people can engage in evildoing; can evil people similarly
engage in nonevildoing, perhaps even right action? That would suggest that evil people can
possess moral virtue, a result that seems at odds with extremity accounts. Extremity accounts thus
seem to demand that evil people lack any capacity for morally decent or morally neutral action, a
result that would shrink the evil person to a mere conceptual possibility (de Wijze 2014).
Conclusion
The philosophical literature on evil is rich with a mélange of accounts of evil character.
For all that, the literature could be richer still if enriched by psychology and other sibling
disciplines that can inform the study of character generally. If talking literally of evil and
evil persons is consistent with a commitment to some version of naturalism (Barry 2011;
cf. Cole 2006), then philosophers interested in evil character should have little hostility to
incorporating psychological research and theory into their accounts. At least, if other areas of
philosophy can profit by being informed by psychological research (Miller 2014), philosophi-
cal understanding of evil could similarly profit.
References
Barry, P.B. (2009) “Moral Saints, Moral Monsters, and the Mirror Thesis,” American Philosophical Quarterly
46(2).
Barry, P.B. (2010) “Extremity of Vice and the Character of Evil,” Journal of Philosophical Research 35.
Barry, P.B. (2011) “Wickedness Redux,” Philo 14(2).
Barry, P.B. (2013) Evil and Moral Psychology, New York: Routledge.
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Peter Brian Barry
Barry, P.B. (2016) The Fiction of Evil, New York: Routledge.

Calder, T. (2007) “Is the Privation Theory of Evil Dead?” American Philosophical Quarterly 44(4).
Calder, T. (2009) “The Prevalence of Evil,” in A. Veltman and K. Norlock (eds.) Evil, Political Violence and
Forgiveness, Lanham, MD: Lexington.
Card, C. (2002) The Atrocity Paradigm, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cole, P. (2006) The Myth of Evil, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
de Wijze, S. (2002) “Defining Evil: Insights from the Problem of ‘Dirty Hands,’” The Monist 85(2).
de Wijze, S. (2016) “Searching for the Mark of Cain—Barry’s Exploration of Evil Persons,” The Journal
of Value Inquiry 50(2).
Formosa, P. (2008) “A Conception of Evil,” The Journal of Value Inquiry 42.
Haybron, D. (1999) “Evil Characters,” American Philosophical Quarterly 36(2).
Haybron, D. (2002a) “Moral Monsters and Saints,” The Monist 85(2).
Haybron, D. (2002b) “Consistency of Character and the Character of Evil,” in D. Haybron (ed.) Earth’s
Abominations: Philosophical Studies of Evil, New York: Rodopi.
Hurka, T. (2001) Virtue, Vice, and Value, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hursthouse, R. (1999) On Virtue Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kekes, J. (1990) Facing Evil, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kekes, J. (2005) The Roots of Evil, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Lewis, D. (2007) “Divine Evil,” in L. Antony (ed.) Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and
the Secular Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McGinn, C. (1997) Evil, Ethics and Fiction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Midgley, M. (1984) Wickedness, New York: Routledge.
Miller, C. (2014) Character and Moral Psychology, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Russell, L. (2010) “Dispositional Accounts of Evil Personhood,” Philosophical Studies 149(2).
Steiner, H. (2002) “Calibrating Evil,” The Monist 85(2).
Thomas, L. (2008) The Problem of Evil, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Waller, J. (2002) Becoming Evil, New York: Oxford University Press.
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18
DEFINING EVIL ACTIONS
Different approaches
Luke Russell
The word “evil” evokes a range of different reactions. To some people it conjures up a comic
book world in which superheroes use their powers for good, not evil, and in which stylized
villains erupt with maniacal laughter when contemplating their self-consciously evil deeds. Yet
the word “evil” is not merely a joke or a theatrical convention. Many of us reach for this word
when we are confronted with the most horrendous wartime atrocities and acts of terrorism, or
when we read about the actions of a torturer or a serial killer. In these contexts, when we seek to
convey a sense of somber moral gravity, “evil” seems to fit the bill. But what is evil? How does
the judgment that something is evil differ from the judgment that something is bad or wrong?
In recent years a philosophical dispute has arisen in response to these questions. In this chapter
I survey and assess various attempts to define evil actions, and reflect on the nature of this task.
Why define evil?

Most recent philosophical accounts of evil begin as responses to the pressure of a skeptical chal-
lenge. Even among those who agree that morality is deeply important, there is disagreement as
to whether anything counts as evil. According to evil-skeptics, the concept of evil is explanato-
rily useless (Baron-Cohen 2011: 100; Clendinnen 1998: 104), and evil is nothing more than a
dangerous myth (Cole 2006: 236). Evil-revivalists or evil-realists take themselves to be defend-
ing the view that evil is no myth or fiction, and that the concept of evil has an important role
to play in contemporary morality (Garrard 1998; de Wijze 2002; Haybron 2002; Calder 2002;
Neiman 2003; Morton 2004; Russell 2006; Formosa 2008). Philosophers on both sides of this
disagreement are required to tell us what the word “evil” means, and to delineate the concept
of evil. This kind of requirement is familiar from other skeptical disputes. If theists and atheists
are to engage in a fruitful disagreement over the existence of God, they must tell us what “God”
means. Two importantly different kinds of philosophical disagreement arise in such disputes.
First, there can be disagreements over which is the correct definition of the relevant word,
or the proper delineation of the concept at hand. For instance, we can disagree over whether
“God” means the creator of the universe, or the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent
creator of the universe, or the entire universe itself. Second, there can be disagreements over
whether anything in existence corresponds to the specified definition or analyzed concept.
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For instance, we can disagree over whether a tri-omni creator of the universe exists. Both of
these kinds of disagreement arise in philosophical disputes over the existence of evil.
There are philosophers and others who have denied the importance of definitions in relation
to evil (Neiman 2003: 8; Morrow 2003: 142). But, if we launch into a philosophical discussion
without clarifying the concept at hand, we end up talking at cross purposes. One way of clarify-
ing the meaning of “evil” would be to point to paradigm cases of evil, and then claim that “evil”
refers to these paradigms and to anything that resembles them closely enough (Neiman 2003:
286). The more common approach, which promises greater precision, is to set out the necessary
and sufficient conditions for something counting as evil. Most evil-realists attempt to analyze
the concept of evil in this way, and then go on to claim that this concept does pick out moral
properties in the real world (e.g., Garrard 1998; Formosa 2008; Russell 2014).
To some eyes there is a flexibility in the evil-realist’s task that makes it look too easy, and
rather pointless. If we have the freedom simply to invent any definition of the word “evil”
that we like, then of course we can defend the claim that evil exists. Yet, philosophers who
are theorizing about evil ought to do more than merely stipulate what henceforth they will
mean by the word “evil.” The task of constructing a plausible philosophical definition should
be constrained in various ways. It should be constrained primarily by folk usage of the word
“evil.” This includes both the claims that nonphilosophers make about the nature of evil, and
the specific things – the actions, the persons – that they label evil. Philosophers whose definition
of evil diverges too far from folk usage of the word “evil” will rightly be accused of changing
the subject; that is, giving an account not of evil but of something else.
However, folk usage of a term is sometimes inconsistent, and there may be other theoretical
goals that are better achieved by definitions that revise folk usage to some degree. Some evil-
realists think that the skeptical challenge requires them to show not only that evil exists but that
the property of evil is qualitatively distinct from any other moral properties, and that there is a
sharp dividing line between evils and nonevils (Haybron 2002: 262; Garrard 2002: 321; Steiner
2002: 184; de Wijze 2002: 213; Calder 2013: 178). In order to secure this theoretical goal, they
are willing to defend definitions of evil that are more complex and perhaps less closely aligned
with folk discourse about evil (see Card 2002: 3; Russell 2007: 670). Other evil-realists aim
merely to show that the concept of evil applies to some real things, not that evil is radically dis-
tinct from other moral properties. These philosophers are open to the idea that the category of
evil merely forms the extreme end of another moral category, such as the category of culpable
wrongdoing (Russell 2014: 120). Regardless, any evil-realist must be ready to meet two objec-
tions from the skeptics: that their proposed definition of evil fails to map onto the concept of
evil, and that nothing in the actual world falls under their proposed definition.
The concept of evil action

In attempting to give a definition of evil, philosophers are not aiming to set out every meaning
of the word “evil” as it is used in everyday English. The word “evil” is ambiguous. Originally
it was a synonym for the word “bad,” and this usage persists in some contexts (Russell 2014:
16–18). An earthquake, for instance, is sometimes described as a natural evil, meaning a bad
event that was not caused by humans. The word “evil” is sometimes used to pick out the
concept of morally wrong action, as in Aquinas’s basic principle of natural law: “Good is to be
done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided” (Aquinas, ST I–II q. 94 a. 2). Neither of these uses
correspond to the sense of “evil” that is in play in contemporary debates about whether acts
of military torture are evil, or whether a spree killer such as Anders Behring Breivik did evil.
All parties in these contemporary disputes agree that the acts in question are bad and morally
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Defining evil actions
wrong, but they disagree as to whether those actions are evil. The kind of ambiguity present in
the word “evil” is not unusual. Philosophers who give an account of moral responsibility claim
that some everyday uses of the word “responsible” pick out the concept of causal responsibility
rather than the concept of moral responsibility, and that these uses place no constraint on philo-
sophical accounts of moral responsibility. Similarly, when giving a philosophical account of evil,
contemporary philosophers set aside uses of the word “evil” that pick out the concept of bad or
the concept of morally wrong, and focus instead on those that pick out the narrower and more
extreme concept of evil. This initial winnowing occurs in all recent accounts of evil (e.g., Card
2002: 5; Neiman 2003: 268; Russell 2014: 18–19), but it is not carried out by everyone in the
same way. Some differences in philosophical definitions of evil are grounded in disagreements
over which everyday claims involving the word “evil” pick out the concept of evil rather than
the concept of bad.
The two central folk uses of “evil” that pick out the concept of evil are cases in which peo-
ple say that something is not merely a wrong action but an evil action, and cases in which
people say that someone is not merely a bad person but an evil person. These serious and
emphatic moral judgments are common responses to extreme violations of morality. For
instance, some people say that Mengele’s medical experiments at Auschwitz were evil, and
that the serial killer Ted Bundy was not merely confused and dangerous but evil. Some people
say that military bombing campaigns that cause so-called collateral damage are evil, or that
politicians who set harsh policies concerning asylum seekers are evil. When we are look-
ing to give a more precise account of evil we need to think about the relationship between
evil actions and evil persons. Initially we might hope to give a unified account of the moral
property of evil, which can be possessed by both actions and persons. We might claim that
evil is the property of being extremely morally deplorable, and that both an action and per-
son can be morally deplorable. However, this unity appears to be superficial. What makes an
action morally deplorable is not the same thing as what makes a person morally deplorable.
Moreover, it is plausible that part of what it is to say that an action is evil is to say that it mor-
ally ought not be performed, but it does not even make sense to say that person ought not be
performed (Russell 2014: 40). Instead of attempting to give a unified account, recent authors
have offered separate but connected accounts of evil actions and evil personhood.
Both Haybron and Singer suggest that we ought to begin with accounts of evil personhood,
and from these derive accounts of evil action (Haybron 2002: 280; Singer 2004: 190). Their
idea is roughly this: an evil person is a person with a certain sort of morally corrupt character.
Perhaps an evil person is someone who has “profoundly deadened or perverted moral sensibili-
ties” (Haybron 2002: 280) or someone who is morally bad in every respect (Haybron 2002:
269). From this foundation, Haybron and Singer hope, we could define evil actions as being
the actions that manifest this evil character. This “person-first” approach to evil is more difficult
than it seems (Russell 2014: 33). In relation to many kinds of character trait, such as generosity,
deceitfulness, and foolhardiness, it is hard to see how you could define the character trait with-
out relying on a prior definition of the connected type of action. A deceitful person, for exam-
ple, is someone who is strongly disposed to perform certain kinds of actions, namely to lie and
to mislead. Granted, we cannot define lying without specifying the occurrent motives or the
psychological states that sit behind a lie. Lying requires an intention to mislead. But granting that
motives must feature in a definition of lying is not equivalent to defining “lie” in terms of what
it is to be a characteristically dishonest person. After all, on rare occasions a characteristically
honest person might tell a lie, and most of the things that a characteristically dishonest person
does – breathe, walk to the shops, order coffee, watch television – are not dishonest actions. In
order to understand what makes someone characteristically dishonest, we need to zero in on the
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things that they say, do, and feel that are relevant to their dishonesty. This requires us to have a
definition of “dishonest action” that is prior to our definition of “dishonest person.”
This same problem arises for those who want to define evil action in terms of a prior under-
standing of evil personhood. Most of the things that an evil person does are not evil actions, and
not every evil action is performed by an evil person (e.g., Card 2002: 22; Garrard 2002: 321;
Haybron 2002: 279; Calder 2003: 367; Morton 2004: 65; Singer 2004: 190; Formosa 2008:
234; Russell 2010: 232). As yet, the advocates of a person-first approach to defining evil have
not spelled out the details of how their kind of account would work. The more promising and
far more popular approach is to begin with a definition of evil action, and then to define evil
personhood with reference to evil action (e.g., Card 2002: 21; Calder 2003: 367; Kekes 2005: 2;
Morton 2004: 66; Formosa 2008: 233; Russell 2010: 233). For example, an evil person might
be defined as someone who has done more than a specified number of evil actions, or who
performs evil actions regularly (Singer 2004: 197; Stone 2009: 23). Alternatively, an evil person
could be someone who is strongly and highly fixedly disposed to perform evil actions when in
certain conditions (Russell 2014: 173).
Evil and wrongdoing

We have seen why philosophers attempt to define evil action, and what role that definition will
play in an overall account of evil. Let us now assess the specific definitions of evil action found
in recent philosophical literature. There are many points over which philosophers disagree. The
first of these concerns whether all evil actions, by definition, are morally wrong actions. There is
a strong case for saying that they are, yet both Kekes and Calder have rejected the view that evil
actions should be defined such that all evil actions are moral wrongs. What is at issue here is not
the thought that, when confronted with a case of sadistic torture and murder, it would be too
weak merely to say that it was morally wrong, and that if we are to express our full condemna-
tion of the action clearly we must say instead that it was an evil action. Rather, Kekes and Calder
endorse the view that one and the same action might be evil and morally right. As Kekes says,
perhaps sometimes “exceptional circumstances demand that evil be done in order to prevent
even greater evil” (Kekes 2005: 207). If it is true that sometimes you ought to choose the lesser
of two evils, perhaps it could be morally right to do something evil.
While some people might say that an action is evil yet justified in virtue of being the only
means to an important end, this does not imply that philosophers should allow for the pos-
sibility of actions that are evil but morally right. As we have seen, there are cases in which the
ambiguous word “evil” is used to express nothing more than the concept of bad. These uses
are especially common when people employ stock phrases such as “the lesser of two evils.” The
best way to interpret Kekes’s claim that sometimes evil should be done to prevent greater evil is
to suppose that the word “evil” here means “bad” and does not pick out the concept of evil at
all. The fact that an action is bad in some respect – it harms an innocent victim, for instance –
does not imply that it is morally wrong. Elsewhere Kekes himself claims that evil actions lack a
“morally acceptable excuse” (Kekes 2005: 2), so perhaps he too ultimately believes that all evil
actions are morally wrong.
Calder offers a different argument for the conclusion that some evil actions are morally right.
He imagines a case in which person A performs an action – the hiring of person C rather than
person B – that is foreseeably and actually extremely harmful to person B but that is morally
justified on consequentialist grounds. Calder thinks that person A’s hiring of C, even though
morally right, would also be evil if A was motivated entirely by a sadistic and malicious desire to
harm person B and had no thought for the greater good (Calder 2013: 184). Many deontologists
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and virtue ethicists can simply reject the claim that A’s action is morally right, because they build
evaluation of motive into the conditions for right action. They can say that A’s action was both
evil and wrong. For consequentialists, though, Calder’s example is troubling. There is some-
thing morally awful about A’s hiring of C, as performed by the malicious agent, even though
consequentialists believe that it is best that he hires C. Calder maintains that what A has done
could be evil yet morally right.
However, if we distinguish actions in a more fine-grained way, even consequentialists can
reject the idea that A has performed an action that is both evil and morally right. Objective list
consequentialists, as opposed to utilitarians, can claim that some types of motive are intrinsi-
cally bad. They could argue that A’s motive for not hiring B is morally deplorable, and that A’s
taking pleasure in the suffering of B is an evil action, but that A’s hiring of C is neither wrong
nor evil. After all, consequentialists would say, it is morally right to hire C in this scenario,
and, if A were not there to hire C, we would encourage someone else to step in and hire C
(Russell 2014: 42). Calder’s view appears to clash with what some of us think are platitudes
about evil action: that evil actions ought to be prevented, that we ought to discourage people
from doing evil, that evildoers deserve to be punished for their evil deeds, and so on. Roughly
speaking, Calder thinks that the category of evil actions consists in that of extremely deplor-
ably motivated actions, whether those actions are morally wrong or not. Many philosophers
disagree with Calder and maintain that evil actions by definition are morally wrong (Thomas
1993: 74; Joyce 2001: 43; Card 2002: 17; de Wijze 2002: 224; Morton 2004: 9; Singer 2004:
193; Russell 2014: 43). For those who disagree with Calder, when someone has done the right
thing for the wrong reason, he has not done something evil.
Evil and extremity

Another definitional question concerns the extremity of evil actions. Most recent writers assume
that the concept of evil action does not apply to moral wrongs that are merely minor or trivial
(e.g., Thomas 1993: 77; Singer 2004: 193; Kekes 2005: 1). According to Card:
“Evil” is a heavy judgment. Much that is bad is disappointing, undesirable, inferior,

even unjust or unfair, but not evil. Many wrongdoings are trivial. Evils never are, even
if their perpetrators are ordinary people and their motives are not unusual.
(Card 2002: 7)
McGinn and Steiner, in contrast, give sadistic accounts of evil action that allow for minor evils
that are “only marginally” wrong (Steiner 2002: 190; see McGinn 1997: 62). These accounts
clash with the common folk assumption that evils must be morally extreme. On these grounds,
McGinn and Steiner could be accused of changing the subject; that is, of providing a definition
of sadistic wrongdoing, rather than a definition of evil action (Russell 2007: 670). Evils are not
merely wrong; they are very wrong, or so we might say. Yet, saying this does not tell us enough.
There are several distinct dimensions along which wrong acts could be ordered, and it is not
clear which of these dimensions, if any, allows us to pick out the relevant notion of the very
wrong (Russell 2014: 50). For instance, it might be that evils are those wrong actions that are
extreme in that they inflict an enormous amount of harm (Card 2002: 20; Singer 2004: 193;
Formosa 2008: 230). Alternatively, it might be that the extremity of evils lies in our reaction to
them, rather than in the harm they do. Perhaps evils are those wrong actions that are extremely
incomprehensible, or that evoke extreme horror in victims and witnesses (de Wijze 2002: 213;
Singer 2004: 196; Stone 2009: 21).
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While there are numerous advocates of both of these accounts of the extremity of evil
action, it is not obvious that either is correct. First, some harmless yet extremely wrong
actions are good candidates for being classed as evil. These include wrong actions that are
failed attempts to inflict extreme harm, such as a failed attempt by terrorists to kill innocent
civilians in a suicide bombing. It is unclear why mere chance should dictate that this action
is less morally grave, and less worthy of condemnation, than an identically impermissible and
identically motivated successful attempt. Hence there are grounds for saying that some evil
actions are harmless failed attempts (Russell 2014: 53). Further potential examples of harmless
evil actions are cases in which a sadistic voyeur takes extreme pleasure in secretly witnessing
the extreme suffering of an innocent victim, even though the voyeur does not cause any suf-
fering himself (McGinn 1997: 66; Haybron 2002: 265; Calder 2002: 56). Kramer maintains
that such actions do inflict harm on the victim, in that they fail to respect her dignity (Kramer
2011: 219). Thus Kramer can maintain that the sadistic voyeur’s action is both evil and
extremely harmful. Nonetheless, if either sadistic voyeurism or failed attempts are correctly
categorized as harmless wrongs, there are good grounds to think that there can be harmless
evil actions (Russell 2007: 676).
One way to make room for the possibility of harmless but extreme evil actions would be
to define evils as actions that are extremely horrendous or extremely difficult to comprehend.
Sadistic voyeurism, for example, could well be harmless, yet utterly incomprehensible. Appeals
to the incomprehensibility of evil are common, but they require clarification. If I say that I find
an action incomprehensible, I could mean that I cannot see what caused the agent to perform
it, or that I cannot see what the agent was trying to achieve, or that I am incapable of picturing
myself performing that action, or that I think that I would never freely choose to perform that
action (Russell 2012: 64–8). Regardless of which more precise kind of incomprehensibility we
select, the view that evil actions by definition are incomprehensible has surprising and unattrac-
tive implications. Such an account renders it impossible for someone to do evil self-consciously
under that description, yet such evildoers are common in fiction and arguably appear in the real
world as well (Russell 2014: 59).
Another problem is that, if evils are by definition incomprehensible, then the property of evil
turns out to be relativized to particular groups of observers. We could try to avoid this relativism
by specifying that evils are incomprehensible to a certain unified group of observers; perhaps
to “ordinary decent reasonable” human beings, as Singer suggests (2004: 196). But there are
minor wrongs that are incomprehensible to decent human beings in virtue of being viscerally
disgusting, or in virtue of being costly but pointless. These actions are incomprehensible wrongs
but are not plausible candidates for being evil (Russell 2014: 60). A final problem is that some
evil actions might turn out to be comprehensible and reprehensible to morally decent people.
Situationist social psychologists claim that ordinary decent reasonable people would choose to
perform horribly wrong actions when placed in certain environmental conditions, such as those
present in Milgram’s obedience experiment. If some such actions are so bad as to be evil, and if
we recognize that we ourselves probably would perform these actions in compliance with the
orders of authority figures, then it seems that some evil actions are comprehensible after all, in
light of the flawed frailty of human nature.
Rather than claiming that evil actions count as extreme in virtue of their harmful effects or
their incomprehensibility, we might instead say that evil actions are extreme in a more hetero-
geneous range of ways. Russell claims that the extremity of evil actions lies in their being appro-
priately connected in one of specifiable number of ways to actual extreme harms or extreme
suffering, or to merely possible extreme harms that would have been inflicted, had the action
been successful. Appropriate connections include being a culpable cause of an extreme harm,
250
culpably intending to cause an extreme harm (a harm that may or may not actually be inflicted),
and culpably taking pleasure in actual extreme harm or in the actual extreme suffering of inno-
cents (Russell 2007: 676). De Wijze goes further than this, defending the idea that there can be
harmless “small-scale evils” that are connected only to minor or imagined suffering but which
possess sufficient moral gravity due to the extreme deplorability of the motives and emotions
that lie behind them (de Wijze 2018: 31).
Banality v. psychological thickness

Many of the philosophers who have engaged in the recent dispute about evil would agree that
evil actions are an extreme subset of the category of morally wrong actions. Some of those
philosophers believe that, once we have specified the right kinds of wrongness, culpability, and
extremity, our definition of evil action is complete. Evil actions, they believe, are extreme cul-
pable wrongs (Russell 2014: 76). These philosophers are building on a view famously expressed
by Hannah Arendt in the early 1960s in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. In her earlier 1951
book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt said that the Holocaust revealed a “radical evil” that
goes beyond ordinary wrongs motivated by “self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust
for power, and cowardice” (Arendt 1967: 459). According to this line of thinking, evil actions
must be the product of a distinctive set of motives. Ten years after making these claims Arendt
observed some of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. This led her to revise her view
of evil. She expected Eichmann to have been an “abnormal monster” who was motivated by
extreme malice and anti-Semitism, yet she discovered that Eichmann was “terrifyingly normal”
(Arendt 2006: 276). Rather than being motived by extreme malice, Eichmann was just doing
his job and not thinking clearly about the nature of his actions, or so Arendt believed. Eichmann
was “neither perverted nor sadistic” (276), and he did not knowingly defy morality or seek out
wrongdoing for its own sake (287). Despite his ordinary motives, Arendt maintained, Eichmann
did evil; his actions revealed the “banality of evil” (2006: 252).
Arendt’s claims about the banality of evil have been very influential, despite the fact that she
appears to have egregiously misrepresented Eichmann’s actual motives and character (Cesarani
2007: 353). Regardless of whether Arendt portrayed Eichmann accurately, some contemporary
philosophers agree with her suggestion that evil actions do not share a narrowly circumscribed
set of motives but can be done for all sorts of reasons, and by a very diverse set of moral agents
(Card 2002: 9; Calder 2002: 366–8; Neiman 2003: 283–4; Formosa 2008: 220). This gives rise
to the psychologically thin account of evil action. While some evildoers act out of malice and
hatred of their victims, other evildoers act purely for financial gain, or merely because they are
following orders. Some evildoers take sadistic pleasure in the suffering of their victims, while
others are pained by their own evil actions or perform them merely with a grim satisfaction.
Some evildoers know that they are doing wrong, while others are mistakenly convinced of their
rectitude. What makes each of these diverse actions evil, according to the psychologically thin
account, is that each is an extreme culpable wrong.
Advocates of the psychologically thin account of evil action appear well positioned to deflect
the skeptical challenge regarding the existence of evil. Their view is that evils are simply a certain
kind of extreme moral wrong, and there are plenty of real examples of those. Unsurprisingly,
though, there are philosophers who reject this definition of evil action, on the grounds that
it does not correctly pick out the concept of evil. Some think that evil must be more spe-
cial or more distinctive than is suggested in the psychologically thin account. An alternative
approach is to suppose that the concept of evil is psychologically thick, in the sense that calling
an action “evil” tells us something about the motives that lay behind the action, or about other
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Luke Russell
psychological states that accompanied the action (Russell 2014: 79). Many other moral concepts
are thick in precisely this way. For instance, an action counts as compassionate only if it was
performed from a certain kind of motive: a desire to alleviate the suffering of other for their own
sake. Similarly, an action counts as a lie only if it was performed with an intention to mislead an
audience. Perhaps an action counts as evil if and only if it is an extreme culpable wrong that was
performed from a specified motive, or that was accompanied by certain distinctive psychological
states. Several philosophers have defended psychologically thick accounts of evil action. They
think that evils are distinct from ordinary nonevil wrongs not merely in virtue of being extreme,
but also in virtue of possessing a psychological hallmark.
Advocates of psychologically thick accounts of evil action claim to have identified a variety –
a troubling variety – of quite different psychological hallmarks. The most common suggestions
are those so-called monstrous traits that Arendt expected to find in Eichmann. Arendt’s final
view is that evil actions can be banal, in the sense that they need not be the product of malice
or sadistic desires and need not be performed in knowing defiance of morality. Kekes, Thomas,
and Vargas claim instead that an action can be evil only if it flows from malice toward the vic-
tim. Evildoers, Kekes says, are “motivated by malevolence to gratuitous excess. They treat their
victims with ill will, rage or hatred” (Kekes 2005: 2; see Thomas 1993: 76; Vargas 2010: 75).
A wrong action performed out of malice seems morally worse than a wrong performed with-
out malice, ceteris paribus. Malice exacerbates the wrongfulness of actions. If we are looking for
a psychological feature of evil actions that distinguishes them from nonevil wrongs, we might
well latch on to malice and the seemingly gratuitous nature of malicious wrongdoing. Plenty of
extreme wrongs are performed out of malice – hate crimes, murders committed by serial killers,
and murders of spouses by their partners – and thus are candidates for being evil actions, accord-
ing to this thick account. However, if this account is correct, very many extreme wrongs fail to
count as evil solely in virtue of the fact that they are performed without any ill will toward the
victims. Torture performed purely out of a desire to extract useful information from a prisoner
could be extremely wrong, on this view, but not an evil action. When considering the claim
that malice is a necessary condition for evil action, philosophers need to ask whether this limit
to the extension of the concept of evil action clashes with folk judgments about evil, and, if so,
whether a revision of these folk beliefs is justified.
Some philosophers propose that the psychological hallmark of evil is not malice but the
sadistic pleasure that the evildoer takes in the suffering of his victims (e.g., McGinn 1997: 62;
Perrett 2002: 304; Steiner 2002: 189). This fits the common stereotype of the fictional evil vil-
lain who feels great pleasure upon contemplating his dastardly plans: from Satan, as portrayed by
Milton in Paradise Lost (1993: 552, Bk X, 485–93), to Dr Evil in the Austen Powers movies.
Like malice, sadistic pleasure is an exacerbator of wrong actions. There are plenty of real-life
cases of extreme wrongdoing that are accompanied by sadistic pleasure, including vengeful kill-
ings, and the rape, torture, and murder committed by serial killers such as Dennis Rader. Given
that sadistic pleasure taken in extreme suffering is shocking and repulsive to many of us, it might
look like a natural dividing line between nonevil wrongs and evil actions. Yet if we offer this
kind of definition of evil action, we commit ourselves to saying that no nonsadistic actions are
evil. Arguably this includes unpleasant and difficult actions performed with mere grim satisfac-
tion by ideologically motivated war criminals. Many people would disagree with the claim that,
if Himmler’s or Hoess’s murderous actions were not sadistically pleasurable, then they did not
do evil (Bennett 1994: 300; Levi 2000: 20). Again, folk judgments about the extension of the
concept of evil may undermine the plausibility of this definition of evil action.
A third possible psychological hallmark of evil action is knowing defiance of morality. If
all evil actions by definition are morally wrong actions, then every evil action is a violation
252
of morality. But not every violation is a case of knowing defiance. Some extreme wrongs are
performed by agents who mistakenly believe that they are doing the right thing, whereas other
extreme wrongs are performed by agents who know that what they are doing is morally wrong.
Perhaps evil actions are not merely extreme culpable wrongs, but extreme culpable wrongs in
which the wrongdoer knowingly defies morality.
Some wrongdoers not only knowingly defy morality; they do what is wrong because it is
wrong. When Milton’s Satan says “Evil be thou my good” (Milton 1993: 251, Bk IV, 110), he
expresses a commitment to this kind of self-conscious antimoralism. This also seems to be the
motive behind the young Augustine’s theft of the pears, “seeking no profit from the wickedness
but only to be wicked” (Augustine 1951: 24 (Confessions Bk 2, IV)). Some misanthropic serial
killers also appear to desire to do wrong because it is wrong. However, not all defiant wrongdo-
ing is motivated by a desire to do wrong for its own sake. Many purely instrumentally motivated
wrongdoers nonetheless defy morality through their knowingly wrong actions. Some people do
what they know to be deeply immoral simply as a means to make money, or to dispose of trou-
blesome rivals. Defiance, like malice and sadistic pleasure, seems to be an exacerbator of wrong
actions, so it is no surprise that some philosophers have claimed that it is a necessary condition
for evil action (e.g., Rawls 1972: 439; Singer 2004: 205; Perrett 2002: 304). Like the other
psychologically thick accounts of evil, this definition of evil action is contentious. It implies that
an extremely wrong action cannot be evil if the person who performed that action mistakenly
thought that it was morally permissible. If Hitler believed that his actions were morally justi-
fied for the good of Germany, for example, then this account would imply that Hitler did not
do evil. Here, too, folk judgments about which actions are evil might render a philosophical
definition implausible. Arendt and her followers would claim that we ought not include malice,
sadistic pleasure, or defiance in our definitions of evil action.
Hidden essences and pluralism

While most psychologically thick accounts of evil action clash with Arendt’s claim about banal-
ity, there are alternative thick accounts that do not. It might turn out that there is a distinctive
psychological hallmark of evil action, but that it is not one of the motives or psychological states
that Arendt initially expected to lie behind Eichmann’s evil actions. The essence of evil action
might be some other complex psychological property. Often we define natural kind terms like
“water” or “kidney” by pointing to complex essences possessed by all members of the relevant
class, even if those essences are not immediately apparent to many of the folk who successfully
wield the relevant concept. Water, by definition, is H2O, and this is true even though many of
the people who successfully wield the concept of water do not know the molecular structure
of water. A kidney, by definition, is a bodily organ whose function is to filter the blood, even
though many people who can recognize a kidney remain unaware of the function of kidneys.
Morton and Garrard offer definitions of evil action that in some ways resemble these natural
kind definitions. Morton thinks that evil actions are wrongs in which agents overcome a specific
inbuilt mental mechanism that ordinarily functions to inhibit violence (2004: 41, 57). Garrard
posits a complex psychological hallmark of evil:
an act is evil if it is wrongful, and if the agent silences the reasons against doing the act,
which reasons are themselves metaphysical silencers, and where the agent’s reasons for
doing the act are members of the class of considerations which are in this case meta-
physically silenced.
(Garrard 1998: 55)
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Luke Russell
This kind of definition of evil action creates some epistemological challenges. Often it is
extremely difficult to know whether a particular action was the result of the inhibition of a
specific mental mechanism or was the result of the silencing rather than the outweighing of
a certain class of considerations (Russell 2014: 104). Garrard believes that such silencing is
present in Nazi war criminals who treated their victims’ lives as being of no consequence. But
how are we to know which of these war criminals absolutely silenced the moral significance
of the lives of their victims, and which of the war criminals did give some small deliberative
weight to the lives of their victims, but then outweighed this with misguided thoughts about
the good of the Fatherland? If Garrard’s definition of evil action is correct, it seems that we
ought to withhold judgment as to whether many specific atrocities were also evil actions.
“Hidden essence” definitions of evil, including those offered by Morton and Garrard, also
raise methodological puzzles. When it comes to defining scientific natural kind concepts, we
often begin the process from a position of broad pretheoretical agreement over the extension of
the concept in question. Prior to scientific investigation, there was agreement as to which sam-
ples count as water and which do not. When scientists then discovered that every one of these
samples had the complex and hidden property of being H2O, it was plausible to say that they
had discovered the hidden essence of water. In contrast, there is significant and recalcitrant pre-
theoretical disagreement among the folk over which specific actions count as evil. This makes
it much harder to assess the claim that evil has a hidden essence. For example, suppose that we
did discover that many of the atrocities committed in the Holocaust were not the product of
Garrard’s specific kind of silencing, in that the perpetrators deliberatively outweighed rather
than silenced the moral significance of the lives of their victims. In this case, many philosophers
will maintain that these atrocities are evil, and hence that Garrard’s definition of evil action must
be incorrect. Yet Garrard could claim that these particular atrocities, surprisingly, turn out not
to have been evil after all. In the absence of prior agreement on the extension of the concept of
evil, settling this kind of definitional dispute will be difficult.
Recent philosophical disagreements over the nature of evil have resulted in myriad compet-
ing definitions of evil action. Some definitions clash egregiously with widely shared folk judg-
ments as to which actions are evil, and thus seem implausible. The psychologically thin account,
according to which evil actions are simply extreme culpable wrongs, suggests that evil is an ordi-
nary moral property, and that plenty of actual actions are evil, but it strikes some philosophers
as being too broad to count as a definition of evil. Several of the rival thick accounts pick out
interesting and important sub-classes of the category of extremely wrong actions, but there is
much disagreement as to whether any one of these gets things right. When we encounter several
viable competing philosophical definitions of a key concept, we need to ask whether any one
of them is the single best contender as an analysis of the concept in question, or whether there
are two or more equally good contenders. Perhaps the best response in this case is to adopt a
restricted conceptual pluralism; that is, to allow that several definitions of evil action are respect-
able, and to ask that philosophers who are making claims about evil specify which of these viable
definitions they are using in any particular case (Russell 2014: 129).
References
Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae (A Treatise on Theology), Parts I (1265–8), I–II (1271–2), II–II (c.1271),
III (1272–3).
Arendt, Hannah (1967) The Origins of Totalitarianism, London: Allen and Unwin.
Arendt, Hannah (2006) Eichmann in Jerusalem, New York: Penguin.
Augustine (1951) The Confessions of St. Augustine, translated by F.J. Sheed, London and New York: Sheed
and Ward.
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Baron-Cohen, Simon (2011) Zero Degrees of Empathy, London: Penguin.

Bennett, Jonathan (1994) The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn, in Peter Singer (ed.) Ethics, 294–305,
Calder, Todd (2002) “Towards a Theory of Evil Acts: A Critique of Laurence Thomas’s Theory of Evil Acts,”
in Daniel Haybron (ed.), Earth’s Abominations: Philosophical Studies of Evil, 51–61, New York: Rodopi.
Calder, Todd (2013) “Is Evil Very Wrong?”, Philosophical Studies 163: 177–96.
Card, Claudia (2002) The Atrocity Paradigm, New York: Oxford University Press.
Cesarani, David (2007) Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a “Desk Murderer,”
London: De Capo Press.
Clendinnen, Inga (1998) Reading the Holocaust, Melbourne: Text Publishing.
Cole, Phillip (2006) The Myth of Evil, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.
de Wijze, Stephen (2002) “Defining Evil: Insights from the Problem of ‘Dirty Hands,’” The Monist 85(2):
210–38.
de Wijze, Stephen (2018) “Small-Scale Evil,” Journal of Value Inquiry 52: 25–35.
Formosa, Paul (2008) “A Conception of Evil,” The Journal of Value Inquiry 42: 217–39.
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Garrard, Eve (2002) “Evil as an Explanatory Concept,” The Monist 85(2): 320–36.
Haybron, Daniel (2002) “Moral Monsters and Moral Saints,” The Monist, 85(2): 260–84.
Joyce, Richard (2001) The Myth of Morality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Kekes, John (2005) The Roots of Evil, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Kramer, Matthew H. (2011) The Ethics of Capital Punishment: A Philosophical Investigation of Evil and Its
Consequences, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Morrow, Lance (2003) Evil: An Investigation, New York: Basic.
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Perrett, Roy (2002) “Evil and Human Nature,” The Monist 85(2): 304–19.
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Russell, Luke (2006) “Evil-Revivalism Versus Evil-Skepticism,” The Journal of Value Inquiry 40: 89–105.
Russell, Luke (2007) “Is Evil Action Qualitatively Distinct From Ordinary Wrongdoing?” Australasian
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Russell, Luke (2014) Evil: A Philosophical Investigation, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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19
DIFFERENT SUBSTANTIVE
CONCEPTIONS OF EVIL
ACTIONS
Paul Formosa
Introduction
All morally wrong actions deserve some form of moral condemnation. But the degree of that
condemnation is not the same in all cases. Some wrongs are so morally extreme that they
seem to belong to a different category because they deserve our very strongest form of moral
condemnation. For example, telling a white lie to make a friend feel better might be morally
wrong, but intuitively such an act is in a different moral category to the sadistic, brutal, and
violent rape and torture of a child. The former act is merely wrong and not evil. In contrast, the
latter act seems so morally extreme that we need to call it “evil” and not merely “wrong” if we
are to do justice both to the moral seriousness of that act and the strength of our condemnation
of it. The task of a theory or substantive conception of evil is to spell out what is an evil action
and how it differs from a merely wrongful action. But what does a plausible substantive theory
of evil look like? To explore this question, I spell out the concept of evil and illustrate four dif-
ferent types of substantive conceptions of evil actions: victim, perpetrator, spectator, and mixed
theories. Of these four options, I argue that mixed theories are the most plausible type of the-
ory, before investigating in detail the promising mixed theory recently defended by Matthew
Kramer (2014b). Finally, in light of my analysis of Kramer’s view, I present a reformulated
version of my combination theory of evil (Formosa 2008; Formosa 2013).
The concept of evil

The concept of an evil action that we are focusing on here is the concept of an action that is
above and beyond mere moral wrongness because of its extreme moral gravity.1 The job of a
theory or a substantive conception of evil is to give an account of what exactly it is about evils
that constitutes their extreme moral gravity and puts them in a separate moral category from
lesser wrongs. Moral evil is thus a subset of moral wrongness. However, evil is not the only sub-
set of moral wrongness in which we are interested. For example, crimes might be understood
as that subset of moral wrongs that should be punished by the state. But evils and crimes are not
the same subset of wrongs. While at least most evils (such as torture or rape) are crimes,2 not all
crimes are evil (such as fraud or theft). There are still further ways that we might carve up the
broader category of moral wrongness. Perhaps, for example, we need the concept of a moral
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Different conceptions of evil actions
wrong that is of such minor moral gravity that it is hardly worth condemning at all. So-called
“white lies” would seem to fit into this subcategory. These different moral subcategories can be
useful both as a moral shorthand and as a way of equipping us with precise moral language for
properly expressing the appropriate type and strength of our moral condemnation of an action.
Evil is often thought to be the conceptual opposite of the good. But this is a mistake, at
least as we are understanding the concept of evil here. If badness is the opposite of goodness,
and wrongness is the opposite of rightness, then the opposite of an evil act is (roughly) that of a
morally supererogatory act. A morally supererogatory act is an act that goes above and beyond
the call of moral duty (Urmson 1958). It is good, but not required.3 For example, it might be
morally good and even morally required to help someone in desperate need when it will cost
us little of moral importance (Singer 1972). However, when it will cost us our life to help an
unknown stranger in need, such an act of sacrifice seems supererogatory as it goes above and
beyond the call of moral duty. If supererogatory acts constitute an extreme form of moral right-
ness (or goodness), then evil acts constitute an extreme form of moral wrongness (or badness).
For example, it might be morally wrong to rob an unconscious stranger of his money, but it is
evil to rob him of his money and then poke his eyes out and chop off his fingers for the fun of
it. This example shows us that evil acts go beyond mere wrongdoing in a way that is analogous
to the way in which supererogatory acts go beyond mere rightdoing.4
Four types of conceptions of evil actions

At the highest level, theories of evil action are either act-first or character-first views. Act-first
views start with a conception of evil actions and then define evil persons in terms of that. For
example, an evil act might be one that sadistically inflicts great harm on others, and an evil per-
son is a person who is habitually disposed to perform evil actions under autonomy promoting
conditions (see Russell 2014: 173). In contrast, character-first views start with a conception of
evil persons and then define evil actions in terms of that. For example, an evil person might
be a person with extreme vices, such as extreme cruelty, and an evil action is one that only an
evil person will characteristically perform (see Barry 2013). We shall focus here only on act-
first conceptions because these are the most common type of view and it allows us to set out a
theory of evil actions, which is our focus here, without first having to spell out a theory of evil
persons. We can divide different substantive act-first conceptions of evil actions into (at least)
the following four categories: victim, perpetrator, spectator, and mixed views. What makes
these different kinds of views are that they each take a different position on what type of factor
or factors transform a mere wrong into an evil.
According to victim conceptions (e.g., Adams and Balfour 2001: 19; Card 2002: 3), it is
something about the extreme type or degree of harm or disrespect that victims suffer that alone
is sufficient for transforming mere wrongs into evils. For example, what transforms a mere
wrong into an evil might be that the victim of that wrong suffers a life-wrecking harm such as
torture or life-ending harm such as murder (see Formosa 2008). Since it seems at least part of
what horrifies us about evil actions is how much damage they tend to do to their victims, this
focus on the harm done to victims has prima facie appeal. However, victim conceptions suffer
from the following counterexample. Assume that I act wrongly by failing to take due care when
holding a loaded gun. While acting wrongly in this way I slip over. This causes the gun in my
hand to go off and kill my friend who is standing next to me. While I have clearly inflicted a
great life-ending harm through a wrongful action, my action doesn’t intuitively seem to be evil.
This example suggests, contra victim views, that the harm done to victims alone is not a sufficient
condition for transforming a wrong into an evil.
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Paul Formosa
According to perpetrator conceptions (e.g., Garrard 1998: 53–4; Midgley 1984: 22–4; Morton
2004: 57), it is something about the morally extreme motivations, manners or responses of
perpetrators that alone is sufficient for transforming mere wrongs into evils. For example, what
transforms a mere wrong into an evil might be that the perpetrator of that wrong is motivated
by sadism, acts in a cold-hearted manner, and experiences no immediate remorse. Since it seems
at least part of what horrifies us about evil actions is the morally heinous motives, manners, and
responses that perpetrators of evil tend to have, this focus on the perpetrator’s reprehensible
psychological states has prima facie appeal. However, perpetrator views suffer from the following
counterexample. Imagine someone who, from the most sadistic motives possible, very mildly,
but wrongly, insults a bus driver in a cold-hearted manner to make him feel a little bad about
himself for a few seconds, and who never feels any remorse about doing so (see Russell 2007:
676). Although the action here is wrong and the perpetrator’s motive and response are morally
heinous, given that the harm involved here is so very minor (i.e., getting the bus driver to feel
bad about himself for a few seconds), we would not intuitively judge the act to be evil. Acts
such as this are both wrong and motivated in morally heinous ways and yet they don’t seem to
be evil. This example suggests, contra perpetrator views, that the perpetrator’s reprehensible psy-
chological states alone are not sufficient for transforming a wrong into an evil. What is missing
in such cases is significant harm, which seems to suggest that significant harm is a necessary but
not sufficient condition for a wrong to become an evil.5
According to spectator (or audience-response) conceptions, it is something about the response
of spectators or judges of an act, typically their horror and incomprehension, that alone is suf-
ficient for transforming a mere wrong into an evil. For example, what transforms a mere wrong
into an evil might be the utter moral incomprehension that is provoked by our contemplation as
spectators of a wrongful act (see de Wijze 2002; Russell 2014). Given that it seems at least part
of what makes an evil act evil is the horror and incomprehension that such acts tend to produce
in us, since we cannot understand how anyone could act that badly, this focus on spectator
response has prima facie appeal. However, spectator views suffer from two kinds of counterex-
amples. First, assume that it is morally wrong to eat the most disgusting-looking bug that you
can imagine (because the bug is endangered or belongs to someone else) and that if we were to
contemplate this act as spectators it would provoke utter moral incomprehension or horror in
us (for a similar example see Russell 2014: 60). We simply can’t understand how someone could
do such a disgusting and bizarre wrongful act. Nonetheless, such an act doesn’t seem intuitively
to be evil. This first example suggests, contra spectator views, that negative spectator responses
of incomprehension are not sufficient for transforming a wrong act into an evil. Second, assume
that the extreme and malicious torture of a suspected terrorist for fun is wrong and that if we
were to contemplate this torture as spectators it wouldn’t provoke moral incomprehension or
horror in us since we care very little about terrorists. Nonetheless, such an act may intuitively be
evil. This second example suggests, contra spectator views, that negative spectator responses are
also not necessary for transforming a wrong act into an evil. Our spectator responses of moral
incomprehension and horror are at best semi-reliable epistemological indicators of, or responses
to, the presence of evil actions, rather than essential features of evil actions themselves.
According to mixed conceptions (e.g., Calder 2013; Formosa 2008; Kekes 2005: 2; Vetlesen
2005: 21) it is some mixture of victim, perpetrator, and spectator components that are together suf-
ficient for transforming a mere wrong into an evil. For example, what transforms a mere wrong
into an evil action might be that the perpetrator of that wrong is motivated by sadism and the
victim of that wrong suffers a great harm.6 Mixed views are appealing because by requiring
both harm and malicious motivation they can avoid the obvious counterexamples examined
earlier that cause problems for other types of views. This includes cases of: wrongs involving
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great harms that are not evil because they are not maliciously motivated (such as mild reckless-
ness in handling a gun that causes death); wrongs involving very malicious motivation that
are not evil because they are not very harmful (such as maliciously motivated but very minor
insults of bus drivers); wrongs that cause incomprehension in spectators (such as bizarre bug-
eating behavior) without being evil because they are neither very harmful nor maliciously
motivated; and wrongs that fail to cause incomprehension in spectators (such as the malicious
torture of a terrorist for fun) despite being evil since they are both very harmful and maliciously
motivated. Given that mixed views can avoid these important counterexamples, they seem
to be the most promising type of substantive conception of evil actions.7 Since they are the
most promising type of view, we shall now examine in detail as an example the mixed theory
recently defended by Kramer (2014a; 2014b).8
Kramer’s mixed theory of evil actions

For Kramer (2014b: 49), an evil act (or what he calls “evil conduct”) is conduct “underlain
by sadistic malice or heartlessness or extreme recklessness that is connected to severe harm
in the absence of any significant extenuating circumstances.” Kramer’s act-first theory of evil
actions is a mixed view because it includes both victim and perpetrator components. While
Kramer (2014b: 51) mentions the “shuddersomeness” of our typical response to evil, he does
not include a spectator component as a necessary feature of evil actions.
For Kramer (2014b: 50), an evil act is brought about by one of three states of mind: sadistic
malice, heartlessness, or recklessness. Negligence is not one of those states of mind. A per-
petrator with one of these three states of mind must be appropriately connected to a severe
harm. This raises two questions: what is an appropriate connection and what is a severe harm?
Harm forms a continuum. There are clear cases where a harm is severe (such as torture) and
clear cases where it is not (such as a soft kick in the shins). Consequently, there will be
borderline cases where it is unclear whether an act is evil or not since there is vagueness
around whether the harm is sufficiently severe. Nonetheless, Kramer (2014b: 73–84) rejects
views, such as those held by de Wijze (2002), Garrard (2002), and Morton (2004), that hold
that an appropriate connection to a great or serious harm is not necessary for an act to be evil.9
The appropriate connection between a severe harm and the above three states of mind includes:
directly wanting, intending, and desiring a great harm; failed attempts to bring about a great
harm; realized and unrealized reckless risks of great harms; being in some way morally respon-
sible for a great harm, such as by working in a factory that produces ammunitions used in war
crimes; or being voyeuristically linked via spectatorial pleasure to a great harm (Kramer 2014b:
65–73). When one of the three listed culpable frames of mind is appropriately connected to a
severe harm, then the action is evil, otherwise it is not evil.
There are many appealing features of Kramer’s theory. It includes both harm and perpetrator
components, tries to list all the culpable states of mind that underlie evil, and spells out clearly
the different ways that an evildoer can be morally linked to a great harm. Further, by accepting
that harm is a continuum, the view can say that some evils are worse than others, although all
evils are very morally serious because they involve a culpable frame of mind appropriately con-
nected to a great harm. Nonetheless, despite these positives, there are several issues that arise for
this view. We shall focus on two of these here.
The first issue is whether Kramer is right that acts of recklessness but not acts of negligence
can count as evil. What is the difference between the two? “Both negligent conduct and reck-
less conduct give rise to risks, but the risks engendered by the former are inadvertent whereas
the risks engendered by the latter are knowingly hazarded” (Kramer 2014b: 64). On Kramer’s
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account, negligence is risking a harm unknowingly, whereas recklessness is risking a harm know-
ingly. To be knowingly hazarded, the harm must be foreseen and not merely reasonably foresee-
able. A lack of knowing about or foreseeing harms can therefore turn what would otherwise be
recklessness into negligence.
But sometimes negligent acts can be evil. For example, imagine that I decide to drop a
nuclear bomb on an island to test it. As far as I know no one lives there, but I do nothing to
find out for sure. In fact, thousands of people live there and, while this fact is widely known, I
am totally ignorant of it. When I test my bomb, I kill half of the island’s inhabitants right away
and the other half die slow and horrifically agonizing deaths over the next few weeks. However,
dropping a nuclear bomb on the island seems to be negligent rather than reckless since I don’t
knowingly hazard harms to anyone. This amounts to culpable negligence, given that I surely had
a duty to check whether anyone lived there before testing my bomb. Nonetheless, even though
my connection to a severe harm in this case is a form of culpable negligence and not reckless-
ness, it seems that my act still counts as evil. The extreme reprehensibility of my negligence in
not even bothering to find out whether a harm to persons would be hazarded by such conduct,
combined with the staggering amount of harm inflicted on thousands of people, is in combina-
tion reprehensible enough to make my act evil. If that intuition is right, then negligence can be
an appropriate connection between a harm and a perpetrator in the case of some evils.
The second and more important worry focuses on the perpetrator component of Kramer’s
theory. One of the most important problems faced by both perpetrator views and mixed views
with perpetrator components is the difficulty of pinning down exactly which states of mind in
the perpetrator are necessary for making an act evil. The simplest perpetrator component says
that there is only one state of mind that is necessary. That state of mind might be described
either in terms of the presence of a particular motive, such as sadism, or the absence of a particular
state of mind, such as psychological barriers to harming others that ought to have been there
(see Midgley 1984: 22–4; Morton 2004: 57). Such views face the problem that the single listed
state of mind doesn’t seem to be necessary as it is not the only state of mind that can make an
act evil. For example, while some evils are motivated by sadism or occur without the presence
of psychological barriers to harming others, not all evils are motivated in this way. Some evils
result from heartlessness rather than sadism and other evils result from willfully ignoring barri-
ers to violence that are present. The solution to this problem that Kramer adopts is to replace
a single state of mind with a list of exactly three states of mind – sadism, heartlessness, and
recklessness – that can result in evil.
The obvious worry with a list approach is that it seems ad hoc and incomplete. In an earlier
paper I argued that:
Motives such as envy, malice, greed, hatred, boredom, honor, pride, revenge, ambi-
tion, thoughtlessness, a lack of self-esteem, ideology, and faith can all, at times, be
roots of evil. . . . Philosophers who think that there is a single root of all evil, be it
money, pride or a lack of self-esteem, are simply suffering from the effects of a poverty
of examples.
(Formosa 2008: 220)
It will be extremely difficult for a list approach to handle the fact that people can perpetrate
evils from all these sorts of motives and likely many more as well. Can Kramer’s view accom-
modate this full range of motives? To see if he can, we need to look at how Kramer under-
stands sadism and heartlessness. A person “motivated by sadistic malice . . . derives pleasure
260
(usually involving thrilled excitement) from somebody else’s suffering” (Kramer 2014b: 50).
Heartlessness is a “frame of mind” that involves regarding other people’s “woes as instrumen-
tally gratifying (rather than as inherently gratifying [as sadism does])” (Kramer 2014b: 52). But
can we really place all motives for perpetrating evils (that don’t involve mere recklessness) under
one of these two states of mind?10
Consider the following example. Jack is in an outlaw motorcycle gang and he murders his
best friend and fellow gang member Mack because he correctly believes that Mack has killed
his wife. However, Jack could have gone to the police and, if he had done so, Mack would
have been arrested and sentenced to life in prison. But Jack doesn’t go to the police, since he
thinks that would show his fellow gang members that he was weak. Instead, Jack deceptively
lures Mack to his death and shoots him in cold blood in front of all of Mack’s family to get his
revenge. He then uses his knife to cut the gang tattooed skin off Mack’s back while Mack’s
family look on with horror and plead with him to stop. He ignores their pleas and finishes cut-
ting off the tattooed skin in stony silence. In committing this bloody deed, Jack is motivated
by revenge and by wanting to send a message to Mack’s family and his fellow gang members.
Jack doesn’t relish his task or take pleasure in cutting the tattooed skin off Mack’s back. But he
doesn’t shy away from it either.
Can Kramer’s list approach deal with this example? Jack’s murder of Mack is intentional, so
it is clearly not a case of recklessness, and Jack’s actions are not sadistically motivated, since he
gets no pleasure from the harm he inflicts. But Jack’s action doesn’t seem to be a case of heart-
lessness either. Jack does not regard Mack’s woes, or the terror he inflicts on Mack’s family, to
be instrumentally or intrinsically gratifying. He feels he must revenge himself against Mack and
send a message to Mack’s family and his fellow gang members, and does so through his actions,
but he regards the harm he causes as necessary and not gratifying. Nonetheless, Jack does not
have twinges of regret either. He knows what he has to do, and he does it coldly and methodi-
cally. Jack’s bloody and violent act of revenge seems to be an example of an evil action. He kills
his best friend in cold blood and cuts the skin off his back in front of Mack’s family when he
had the option to go to the police and receive justice. But Jack’s act is not sadistic, heartless, or
reckless. Yet his bloody and gruesome act of revenge still seems to be evil. This is a problem for
Kramer’s view in particular and for list approaches in general. There are many motivating states
of mind that when properly connected to great harms can make an act evil, but these many
states of mind can’t all be reduced to a short list.
In everyday talk, acting from malice is different to acting from envy, which in turn is differ-
ent to acting from hatred, ingratitude, fear, disgust, dislike, boredom, revengefulness, pride, or
a desire to intimidate (and so on). Kramer’s theory needs to reduce all these motives (and many
more as well) for intentionally (i.e., not recklessly) inflicting severe harm on others to just two
categories: sadism (when it gives rise to pleasure) or heartlessness (when it doesn’t give rise to
pleasure). But what about someone who, for example, acts from anger or fear and gets no pleas-
ure from the severe harm they inflict? Since these can’t be cases of sadism (as there is no pleasure),
it follows that acting from anger or fear must count for Kramer as heartlessness. But surely acting
out of anger or fear is not the same thing as acting out of heartlessness. Nonetheless, someone
who horribly tortures someone out of anger or fear might still be perpetrating evil (depending on
the details), even if they are not heartless, sadistic or reckless. As such, Kramer’s attempt to limit
the states of mind that can lead to evil to a list of three is too narrow and too restrictive. One
solution to this problem is to expand Kramer’s list. If not three, then maybe there are just four or
five states of mind that can lead to evil? But whatever list we develop for this purpose will most
likely be either incomplete or ad hoc. I present a better option in the next section.
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Formosa’s combination theory of evil

In this section I present a modified version of my own substantive mixed view (Formosa 2008;
2013), which I call the combination theory of evil. We can start with a preliminary rendering of
this theory which says: an evil act is a morally wrong act in which a perpetrator acts very badly by being
appropriately connected to a very serious harm. This rendering is preliminary since it fails to explain
what counts as the perpetrator acting very badly, what makes a harm very serious, and what an
appropriate connection is between the perpetrator and the harm. Nonetheless, this preliminary
version clearly sets out the three essential elements of a plausible mixed substantive theory of
evil: a perpetrator component, a victim harm component, and an account of the appropriate
connection between the two. Note that this theory (like Kramer’s) lacks a spectator component.
This is because, as argued above, our spectator responses of incomprehension and horror are
best understood as imperfect epistemological guides or appropriate responses to the presence of
evils, rather than constitutive features of evil acts themselves.
The revised theory, based on Formosa (2013: 245), builds on this preliminary rendering by
adding enough detail to pitch the theory at the right level of generality. The revisions incor-
porated into the theory here are based, in part, on the preceding analysis of Kramer’s view.11
According to the combination theory of evil, an evil act is a morally wrong act in which:
1 a perpetrator acts very badly – where “acting very badly” is determined by the combined rela-
tive severity of at least the following five scalar properties: reprehensibility of the motive;
the degree and type of harm; the directness of the connection to the harm; the reprehensi-
bility of the perpetrator’s affective responses; and how effectively the harm is realized;
2 and a victim or victims suffer what would at least normally be a very significant harm – where a very
significant harm is one that is life-ending, life-wrecking or significantly autonomy impair-
ing, or in some other way very serious (such as significantly undermining well-being or
involving the expression of very extreme forms of disrespect);
3 and the perpetrator is appropriately connected to the harm done to a victim or victims – where the
connection is appropriate if the perpetrator intends the harm (whether or not the intention
succeeds); or acts recklessly in knowingly risking a likely harm (whether or not the harm
eventuates); or acts negligently in risking a reasonably foreseeable but unforeseen harm
(whether or not the harm eventuates); or acts in some other way such that they are at least
partially morally responsible for the harm; or takes voyeuristic pleasure in the harm.
For a wrongful act to count as evil, all three components must be jointly satisfied. While this
view is complex, it is arguably pitched at the right level of complexity. Given that evil is a com-
plex phenomenon, a theory of evil needs to be similarly complex. We shall now look in more
detail at the three elements of this theory in reverse order.
The third component holds that a necessary feature of an evil act is that the perpetrator is
appropriately connected to a harm. The perpetrator can be appropriately connected to a harm
by intending it, recklessly or negligently risking it, being in some other way morally responsible
for it,12 or voyeuristically enjoying it. With this component of the theory I follow Kramer’s
account closely, with the main departure being the addition of negligence as a possible appro-
priate connection. I have already justified this addition above with the example of the negligent
nuclear bomber. In such cases, if the negligence is especially egregious and the harm is very great
and easily foreseeable, even if not foreseen or known about, the act may still be evil (depending
on the victim and perpetrator components). The other important change here is that I don’t
follow Kramer in listing recklessness as an underlying state of mind in the perpetrator. This is a
262
mistake because recklessness is not usually a motive in the same way that sadism and heartlessness
are motives. Instead, recklessly risking harm is better understood as an appropriate connector
between a perpetrator and a harm, along with intending, negligently risking, being morally
responsible for, or voyeuristically enjoying. Further, in this revised version I have explicitly
added voyeurism as an appropriate connection, rather than include voyeurism as an instance of
moral responsibility as I did previously, since a voyeur might enjoy a harm without being even
partially morally responsible for that harm. Finally, the harm the perpetrator is appropriately
connected to does not need to eventuate for the act to be evil. For example, a failed attempt to
intentionally kill a group of toddlers for fun that is foiled because the perpetrator slips over at the
last moment could still count as an evil action even though the harm isn’t realized.
The second component holds that it is a necessary feature of an evil act that a perpetrator
is appropriately connected to a victim suffering what would at least normally be a very signifi-
cant harm. A very significant harm is either life-ending as it kills its victim, such as murder, or
it is not. If it is not life-ending, to count as a very significant harm it will often have to be a
life-wrecking or significantly autonomy impairing harm, such as torture or rape. These sorts of
harms tend to permanently scar their victims, wreck their lives, and significantly impair their
autonomy (see Formosa 2013). But not every very significant harm is significant in the same
way. Other cases, such as the extreme torture of babies or kittens, are very significant harms,
even if they don’t impact negatively on nonexistent autonomy competences or induce trauma,
because they significantly undermine well-being or involve the expression of very extreme
forms of disrespect.13 Since these harms are spelled out primarily in terms of the impacts that
they have on the lives of victims, to account for super-resilient victims we need to add the clause
that the harm would at least normally have these life-wrecking effects. If extreme torture nor-
mally has life-wrecking impacts on its victim, it still constitutes a significant harm to use extreme
torture against a super-resilient victim on whom it doesn’t have the usual life-wrecking impacts.
The perpetrator component holds that it is a necessary feature of an evil act that a perpetrator
acts very badly in being appropriately connected to what would at least normally be a very sig-
nificant harm. The complexity of this third component mirrors the complexity of the motivat-
ing states that can lead to evil and the myriad ways in which a perpetrator can act very badly. As
I argue above against Kramer’s view, we cannot reduce the underlying psychological states that
can lead to evil to one item or a short list of items, such as sadism or heartlessness. Nonetheless,
the badness of the perpetrator’s psychological states is a necessary feature of evil acts. But how
else, other than developing a longer list, can we deal with this complexity? My proposal is a
multifactorial account that focuses on the relative degree of five factors of differing importance.
These five factors are listed below in roughly decreasing order of importance.
1. Reprehensibility of the motive: all else being equal, the more reprehensible the motive, the
more likely the act is evil. Focusing on the reprehensibility of the motive, rather than trying to
name all relevant reprehensible motives, allows the view to avoid the problem faced by single
item or list accounts of being unable to account for the rich diversity of evil-inducing motives.
We can judge the reprehensibility of the motive in terms of what it says about the perpetrator’s
attitudes toward the dignity (or autonomy) and well-being of his or her victim or victims. For
example, sadism is a highly reprehensible motive as it takes the pain and suffering of others to
be positively valued and pleasurable. Anger, in contrast, is a comparatively less reprehensible
motive as it need not express the attitude that the autonomy or well-being of others is com-
pletely worthless. Highly reprehensible motives are more likely to be present where a harm
is directly intended, and less likely to be present when a harm is risked by, or the result of,
recklessness or negligence. When I intend to harm another, I am (usually) regarding that harm
as inherently or instrumentally valuable, thereby making the motive (whatever it is) highly
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Paul Formosa
reprehensible. In contrast, when I am reckless or negligent I am more likely to be merely giv-

ing the risked harm insufficient consideration, which is usually less reprehensible than positively
valuing the harm. Nonetheless, the greater the recklessness or negligence displayed, the more
reprehensible the motive, as the consideration given to others becomes comparatively less. The
more reprehensible the motive is, the worse the perpetrator acts.
2. Directness of the connection to the harm: all else being equal, the more directly the perpetrator
is connected to the harm, the more likely the act is evil. The link to the harm is more direct if
the perpetrator intends the harm for its own sake and less direct if it results from recklessness and
even less direct again if it results from negligence. Voyeurism is also less direct than intending
the harm. The more direct the connection is between the harm and the perpetrator’s psycho-
logical state, the worse the perpetrator acts.
3. Degree and type of harm: all else being equal, the greater the degree and type of harm the
perpetrator is appropriately connected to, the more likely the act is evil. All evils involve an
appropriate connection to a very serious harm. But harm is a continuum and above the vague
threshold of a very serious harm, even more harm is possible. The more harm that the perpetra-
tor is appropriately connected to, the worse the perpetrator acts.
4. Reprehensibility of the perpetrator’s affective responses: all else being equal, the more repre-
hensible the perpetrator’s affective responses to the harm that they are appropriately connected
to, the more likely the act is evil. Pleasure in the infliction of harm is more reprehensible than
not being moved at all, which in turn is more reprehensible than regret and sorrow. The more
reprehensible the perpetrator’s affective responses are to the harm that they are appropriately
connected to, the worse the perpetrator acts.
5. How effectively the harm is realized: all else being equal, the more effectively the harm that
the perpetrator is appropriately connected to is realized, the more likely the act is evil. Not all
intentions to inflict harm are fully realized. Some intentions fail, such as when the perpetra-
tor slips over allowing the victim to get away. The more fully that intentions to harm others
are realized, and thus the more harm that is actually inflicted, the more likely the act is evil.
Likewise, not every serious harm risked by wrongful recklessness and negligence eventuates.
The more risked harm that eventuates, the more likely the act is evil, all else being equal.
This is because realized harms are often semi-reliable indicators of a greater perseverance and
commitment to carrying out intentions to harm (e.g., the perpetrator gets up and tries again
after they slip over), or of higher degrees of recklessness or negligence, or of a more perverse
form of voyeurism.
Paradigmatic and uncontroversial cases of evil will tend to involve harms that are clearly
very serious and a perpetrator who acts badly in all or most of these five ways by scoring highly
on each scale. In contrast, borderline and controversial cases of evil will tend to involve harms
that are not clearly very serious or perpetrators who score lowly on some or all five scales. For
example, imagine a perpetrator of a wrong who intentionally tortures and horribly disfigures ten
women for the sadistic pleasure of it and who laughs about it afterwards. Here we have a wrong
act in which the perpetrator is appropriately connected to a very serious harm. But does he also
act very badly? He does indeed, since he scores highly on all five perpetrator scales: his motive,
sadism, is highly reprehensible; he directly intends the harm; the degree and type of harm he
intends is extremely serious; the perpetrator’s affective response of laughter is highly reprehen-
sible; and the intended harm is fully realized. In combination the presence of these multiple
factors to a high degree, together with an appropriate connection to life-wrecking harms, makes
the act a clear-cut case of evil.
In contrast, imagine a perpetrator who acts wrongly in recklessly causing a woman to lose
her leg by losing control of his car while speeding very slightly to get to an important meeting.
264
Afterwards the perpetrator is shattered and remorseful and he never drives again. Here we have
a wrong act in which the perpetrator is appropriately connected to a very serious harm (i.e., the
loss of a woman’s leg). But does the perpetrator also act very badly? Not badly enough to make
the act evil since he scores lowly on most of the five perpetrator scales: his motive, speeding
very slightly to get to an important meeting on time, is not highly reprehensible; he is not very
directly related to the harm since it results from his recklessness; the degree and type of harm that
results is probably not far above the threshold for a very serious harm; the perpetrator’s affective
response is not at all reprehensible; and the harm his wrongful recklessness likely risks is only
partly realized (i.e., no one died, as they could have, since he swerved to try to miss the woman).
In combination, these multiple factors make the act a clear-cut case of an act that, despite the
appropriate connection to a serious harm, is merely wrong and not evil.
While there are many clear-cut examples of evils and many clear-cut examples of mere
wrongs, there are also many cases that genuinely seem to be borderline cases of evil. They
are borderline either because it is borderline whether the harm involved is very serious or
because it is borderline whether the perpetrator is acting very badly. It is borderline whether
the perpetrator is acting very badly when the perpetrator scores highly on some of the five
perpetrator scales but lowly to middling on others (e.g., he has a highly reprehensible motive
but very nonreprehensible affective responses) or scores middling to lowly on all five scales.
In such cases, it is unclear whether there are enough relevant perpetrator factors present to
a high enough degree to make the act evil. When this happens, it might be reasonable to
reach different judgments about whether the act in question is evil or not and any judgments
reached in this regard will need to be tentative. Thus, to its merit, the combination theory of
evil can make sense of why borderline cases of evil are borderline and why clear-cut cases
of evil are clear-cut, while still leaving sufficient room for the work of judgment to respond
to the specificity of each case.
Conclusion
I started this paper by outlining four different types of act-first substantive theories of evil
actions: victim, perpetrator, spectator, and mixed theories. Of these four types, I argued that
mixed theories are the most promising. To demonstrate this promise, I examined in detail
the strengths and weaknesses of Kramer’s (2014b) mixed theory. Building on this critical
analysis, I presented a revised version of my combination theory of evil. According to this theory,
when we judge an act to be evil, we are saying that the action deserves our strongest form of
moral condemnation because it involves a perpetrator acting very badly in being appropriately
connected to a very serious harm.
Notes
1 There are other concepts of evil besides this one. In Formosa (2013) I call these other concepts of evil
the concept of an evil-w action, according to which an evil action is another name for a wrong action,
and an evil-b action (or event), according to which an evil action or event is another name for badness
in general.
2 Small-scale acts of extreme and sadistic humiliation might be examples of acts that are evil but are not
crimes.
3 Whether there is such a class of actions, how we should define them, and whether a moral theory needs
to be able to accommodate them, are all much debated issues. See Baron (2015).
4 The claim that evil acts are the perverse mirror image of supererogatory acts has clear similarities to the
much discussed “mirror thesis,” which is the claim that evil persons are the perverse mirror image of
moral saints. See Barry (2013), Haybron (2002), and Russell (2014).
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5 Advocates of the possibility of small-scale evil, such as de Wijze (2018), do not seem to feel the
intuitive pull of such examples and they consequently deny that significant harm is a necessary
feature of evil acts.
6 Given that I have just argued against the inclusion of a spectator component in a plausible theory of evil,
I won’t include a spectator component in my example of a mixed view.
7 Of course, mixed views still face questions of their own, such as how much harm is necessary for
an action to count as evil and what types of motivations underwrite evil actions. We return to these
issues below.
8 There are several other similarly plausible mixed views, such as Calder (2013), that we cannot examine
here for reasons of space.
9 I share Kramer’s rejection of such views – for further defense see Formosa (2013).
10 We can ignore recklessness here since sadism and heartlessness are the only relevant states of mind when
we are focusing on intentional harm.
11 The main revisions are: (1) to significantly modify the connection component in light of Kramer’s
work; and (2) to spell out more clearly the perpetrator component of the view. The harm component
of the view stays more or less the same.
12 Kramer (2014b: 70–71) discusses a case in which someone has a small part in a big harm, such as aiding
genocide by working in a Nazi munitions factory. In this case, the best way to think of the connection
between the act and the harm is in terms of partial moral responsibility for a collective harm, rather
than in terms of intention, recklessness, negligence, or voyeurism.
13 There may be still other ways in which a harm could be very significant. For example, perhaps (as some
of my students have suggested) extreme cultural harms, such as the wanton destruction of very signifi-
cant cultural artifacts or artworks for ideological reasons, might count as very significant harms.
References
Adams, G. and Balfour, D. (2001) “The Mask of Administrative Evil,” in J. Roth and E. Maxwell (eds.)
Remembering for the Future, New York: Palgrave, 19–35.
Baron, M. (2015) “A Kantian Take on the Supererogatory,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 33(4):347–62.
Barry, P. (2013) Evil and Moral Psychology, New York: Routledge.
Calder, T. (2013) “Is Evil Just Very Wrong?” Philosophical Studies 163(1):177–96.
Card, C. (2002) The Atrocity Paradigm, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
de Wijze, S. (2002) “Defining Evil – Insights from the problem of “dirty hands”” The Monist 85:210–38.
de Wijze, S. (2018) “Small-Scale Evil,” Journal of Value Inquiry 52:25–35.
Formosa, P. (2008) “A Conception of Evil,” Journal of Value Inquiry 42:217–39.
Formosa, P. (2013) “Evils, Wrongs and Dignity,” Journal of Value Inquiry 47:235–53.
Garrard, E. (1998). “The Nature of Evil,” Philosophical Explorations 1:46–60.
Garrard, E. (2002) “Evil as an explanatory concept,” The Monist 85:320–36.
Haybron, D. (2002) “Moral monsters and saints,” The Monist 85:260–84.
Kekes, J. (2005) The Roots of Evil, Cornell, NY: Cornell University Press.
Kramer, M. (2014a) The Ethics of Capital Punishment, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kramer, M. (2014b) “The Nature of Evil,” The American Journal of Jurisprudence 59:49–84.
Midgley, M. (1984) Wickedness, London: Routledge.
Russell, L. (2007) “Is Evil Action Qualitatively Distinct from Ordinary Wrongdoing?” Australasian Journal
of Philosophy 85: 659–77.
Russell, L. (2014) Evil, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Singer, P. (1972) “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1: 229–43.
Urmson, J. (1958) “Saints and Heroes,” in A. Melden (ed.) Essays in Moral Philosophy, Seattle, WA:
University of Washington Press.
Vetlesen, A. (2005) Evil and Human Agency, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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PART III
Evil and other issues

20
EVIL AND PUNISHMENT
Leo Zaibert
The view that the problem of evil and the problem of punishment are inextricably related is
very widespread. Even if one does not agree with Jeremy Bentham’s famous dictum whereby
“all punishment in itself is evil,” it seems hard to disagree with the view that it is for the evil that
they do that people are punished (Bentham 1962: 83). Indeed, the use “evil” as a synonym of
“bad,” as an antonym of “good,” as in the opposition between “good and evil” is extraordinar-
ily widespread (Rorty 2001). When people speak of “evil befalling someone,” by “evil” they
typically mean “misfortune.” When people wonder about the existence of evil in the world, the
question tends to be about the existence of suffering in the world; their question really is: why
do bad things happen? Furthermore, choosing the “lesser of two evils” is a common legal (and
moral) defense, and, again, the idea here is that an “evil” is just a “harm,” or a “bad thing.” Even
those who admit a difference between the evil and the bad often draw it in such a way that the
term “evil” functions merely as an intensifier: when something is extremely bad, then they call
it evil. Murder, from this perspective, may perhaps count as evil when contrasted against theft,
but not when contrasted against genocide, for example.
Perhaps this either deflationary or relativistic understanding of evil may turn out to be ulti-
mately correct. Perhaps this is really all there is to our use of the term evil. I will, however, here
entertain the possibility that “evil” captures a form of wrongdoing qualitatively different from
the merely bad. Two features of this possibility need to be emphasized at the outset. First, as
the term “wrongdoing” indicates, the focus here will be on actions. This does not mean that the
term evil cannot be properly applied to other phenomena: say, to character traits, to thoughts, to
dispositions, to governments, to policies, and so on. But since this entry is about evil and punish-
ment, and it is for their actions that people are paradigmatically – if not necessarily – punishable,
this focus is important. Second, insofar as the distinction between the evil and the merely bad is
taken to be qualitative, it follows that evil actions are not necessarily worse than the merely bad
actions, at least not in the sense of necessarily being more harmful or causing more pain. In this
context, the word “merely” seeks to underscore the fact that evil actions possess a quality absent
in bad actions. Evil actions are, in a sense to be explored, different from the merely bad actions.
Surely this difference between the evil and the merely bad complicates the relationship
between evil and its punishment. Without it the relationship between evil and punishment
would be remarkably simple: ceteris paribus, the worse an action is, the more severe its punish-
ment. But if “evil” is qualitatively different from “bad” then it is not clear how punishment is
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supposed to capture such qualitative difference. I think that this complication actually renders
our investigation much more interesting, even though, as we shall see, recognizing (tacitly or
otherwise) something like this qualitative difference has led down some puzzling paths.
It could be objected that the simplicity that I seek to overcome obtains only because I pre-
suppose, too facilely, something like the retributive theory of punishment (i.e., the view that the
severity of punishment should track the blameworthiness of the action). I do not wish to deny
that considerations other than desert are important in determining the severity of punishment.
The ceteris paribus clause just invoked is meant to recognize precisely considerations other than
desert. Complications would admittedly arise regarding the interplay of desert and other (con-
sequentialist) considerations even if “evil” and “bad” were only different quantitatively, or if
they were indeed synonyms. It should be clear that the simplicity I seek to overcome obtains
independently of retributive intuitions: it obtains, eo ipso, if one denies qualitative differences
between evil and bad.
Responding to this objection immediately reveals something important. Classical (i.e.,
Benthamite) utilitarians cannot countenance the notion of a qualitative difference between
“evil” and “bad.” For them, wrongdoing is simply a matter of diminution of pleasure (or aug-
mentation of suffering): a given act can only be worse than another if it creates more suffering
(or diminishes more pleasure). The differences they can accept are all quantitative.1 Interestingly,
then, the discussion of the relation between “evil” (again, as qualitatively different from the
“bad”) and punishment turns out to offer a surprisingly neat way of distinguishing between
these two classical schools of thought regarding the justification of punishment. Classical utili-
tarianism inspires the many and influential consequentialist justifications of punishment (which
justify punishment by attending to the good consequences – i.e., the diminution of suffering –
that punishment is supposed to bring about) have to see the question that animates this chapter
as rather unintelligible.
If the pedestrian, monolithic quantitative ethos of consequentialist justifications of punish-
ment is incapable of admitting qualitative difference between forms of wrongdoing, a differ-
ent, grander strategy is inadequate as well. Those who endorse this other strategy may perhaps
recognize some qualitative difference between evil and bad, but they would either base it on
fiat allegiance to a sacred text, or explain it away by grounding it in the inscrutable will of a
deity. Rejecting this other approach and what I take to be its manifest argumentative deficit,
the discussion of evil herein is wholly secular: the possibility that evil is qualitatively different
from bad need not presuppose satanic or otherwise supernatural sources. I thus reject both the
limp computations of consequentialist approaches and the deus ex machina of theistic approaches.
Evil and the limits of philosophy

In Problems at the Roots of Law, the last book of Joel Feinberg’s long and illustrious career, he
discusses the problem of evil (Feinberg 2003). Feinberg commented that his “original interest
in crime was stimulated by the reported frequency with which cruel and apparently senseless
crimes are committed” (Feinberg 2003: viii). Arguably, Feinberg was distinguishing between
merely bad crimes and evil crimes along essentially qualitative lines. A hint that the difference he
had in mind was not quantitative is his appeal to the notions of cruelty and senselessness, which
are not necessarily linked to amounts of suffering.
Rather than offering a systematic account of evil, Feinberg, circuitously suggested that, “in
our effort to understand pure evil, we naturally begin by analyzing Adolf Eichmann” (Feinberg
2003: 184). And, in analyzing Eichmann, Feinberg turned to Hannah Arendt’s famous
Eichmann in Jerusalem, a book whose subtitle was A Study in the Banality of Evil (Arendt 1994).
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Unlike Feinberg, Arendt was not quite a punishment theorist, though her report on Eichmann’s
trial was evidently about punishment.
Arendt admitted that “probably the most powerful motive” behind her decision to report
on Eichmann’s trial was “the wish to expose [herself] – not to the deeds, which, after all, were
well known, but to the evildoer himself” (Arendt 2007: 475, emphasis added). In anticipa-
tion of her face-to-face encounter with a high-ranking Nazi official such as Eichmann, Arendt
expected to see the devil personified – a really malevolent monster. Instead, however, what she
thought she found was a mediocre and drab parvenu – a mindless, cliché-ridden bureaucrat. In
one (infamous) word, Arendt found Eichmann to be above all banal, and she found this banality
“word-and-thought-defying” (Arendt 1994: 252). In a now-famous letter to her friend Karl
Jaspers, Arendt admitted that she found it very difficult to understand Nazi crimes, because they:
explode the limits of the law; and that is precisely what constitutes their monstrousness
[. . .] this guilt, in contrast to all criminal guilt, oversteps and shatters any and all legal
systems. [. . .] We are simply not equipped to deal, on a human, political level, with a
guilt that is beyond crime [. . .] and an innocence that is beyond goodness or virtue.
This is the abyss that opened before us as early as 1933 (much earlier, actually, with
the onset of imperialistic politics).
(Quotation taken, including ellipses, from (Aschheim 1997: 131))
The talk of the “abyss” seems to have started as soon as Arendt began thinking about the Nazis;
as Steven Aschheim points out, upon learning of the existence of Auschwitz, Arendt affirmed:
it was really as if an abyss had opened. . . . This ought not to have happened. And I
don’t mean just the number of victims. I mean the method, the fabrication of corpses
and so on. Something happened there to which we cannot reconcile ourselves. None
of us ever can.
(Aschheim 1997: 126)
On first approximation, it may not be entirely clear what exactly Arendt found so perplexing
about Eichmann (or about the Nazis in general). Banal wrongdoers are utterly common; they
are tried daily in courtrooms all over the world. Their existence hardly seems “word-and-
thought-defying.” Ordinary, banal, people regularly do awful things – and this is as true of the
Nazis as of anyone else. Was Arendt wedded to a romanticized – if not downright kitsch –
version of a Nazi? Was she expecting Eichmann to have horns? Why did she believe that being
a boring, unimaginative bureaucrat was at odds with doing bad things?
Before delving directly on Arendt’s bewilderment, it is worth briefly considering a few
examples of wrongdoing that may help delineate the contours of evil actions. Consider someone
who decides to rob his neighborhood liquor store, but who, after emptying the cash register
and carrying as much booze as he could, decides to disfigure the attendant’s face with a knife.2
Robbing the store is bad, but disfiguring the attendant’s face is a better candidate for being evil.
It is important, however, to warn one last time against the admittedly tempting thought that the
disfiguring is a likelier candidate to being evil than the robbery because it is more harmful. In
her insightful “The Nature of Evil,” Eve Garrard discusses the following example: “a tyrannical
state executes by firing-squad a young dissident; and then bills the grieving relatives for the cost
of the bullet” (Garrard 1998: 45). As Garrard points out, “clearly the main disvalue produced in
this case is the killing of the young man. But it is the charging of the bullet that is more likely
to strike us as evil” (Garrard 1998: 45).
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Consider a harrowing, writ-large version of the sort of case Garrard presents. On November
9 and 10 of 1938, significant numbers of German citizens, instigated by their Nazi leaders, car-
ried out a notorious pogrom against German Jews, the infamous Kristallnacht. Perhaps no other
attack on Jews has been so systematically reported – by professional journalists and foreign dip-
lomats stationed in Germany at the time, and by ordinary citizens. Time and time again, reports
indicated “an uncontrollable lust for destruction and humiliation of the victims on the part of
the perpetrators.” (Friedländer 1997: 277). The same sorts of things were repeatedly reported
from the big cities to the smallest towns: “the sadistic brutality of the perpetrators, the shameful
reactions of some of the onlookers, the grins of others, the silence of the immense majority, the
helplessness of the victims” (Friedländer 1997: 278). The vast majority of Jewish synagogues in
Germany (and in Austria) – hundreds – were either partially or completely destroyed; thousands
of stores owned by Jews were ransacked, and Jewish cemeteries were profaned. More than
30,000 Jews were abducted from their homes and sent to concentration camps. About 90 deaths
were confirmed by the Nazi regime during Kristallnacht itself, and, among those hundreds of
thousands who were not able to escape Germany, the majority perished within the next few
years in extermination camps (Gilbert 2006).
All of this was, needless to say, extraordinarily bad. But consider the conference of high-
ranking Nazi officials that Herman Goering convened only a couple of days after Kristallnacht,
which has become infamous in its own right for “its sadistic inventiveness” (Friedländer 1997:
281). At this meeting it was decided that “the Jews would bear all the costs of repairing their
businesses”: it was decreed that “the Jews of German citizenship will have to pay as a whole
a contribution of 1,000,000,000 RM to the German Reich” (Friedländer 1997: 281). Having
destroyed Jewish stores, cemeteries, synagogues, and lives, for the Nazis to then force their very
victims to pay a fine for this destruction strikes me as evil, and not just as bad (no matter how
incredibly bad Kristallnacht itself undoubtedly was). As in Garrard’s example, it is here clear
that the destruction, indignity, and death that took place during Kristallnacht was extraordinar-
ily more harmful than the fine – but the fine that followed Kristallnacht is a better candidate to
being evil (even if much less harmful than Kristallnacht).3
With these sorts of examples in view, we could return to Arendt’s bewilderment. Arguably,
it was because Arendt thought that what Eichmann (and the Nazis) did was evil (and not merely
bad) that she found his (and their) “banality” so “word-and-thought-defying.” We may sup-
pose that, had Eichmann (and the Nazis) committed merely bad deeds, Arendt would not have
been bewildered. Indeed, Arendt thought that it was a deep “misunderstanding” to think “that
a direct line existed from the early anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party to the Nuremberg Laws and
from there to the expulsion of Jews from the Reich and, finally, to the gas chamber.” It was
a mistake to think that the “horror of Auschwitz” was “not much more than the most hor-
rible pogrom in Jewish history.” This deep misunderstanding, she thought, “is actually at the
root of all the failures and shortcomings of the Jerusalem trial” (Arendt 1994: 267). “None of
the participants [in Eichmann’s trial] ever arrived at a clear understanding of the actual horror
of Auschwitz, which is of a different nature from all the atrocities of the past.” The wrongs of
the Nazis were unique: “politically and legally . . . these were ‘crimes’ different not only in
degree of seriousness [i.e., quantitatively] but in essence [i.e., qualitatively]” (Arendt 1994: 267).
Pogroms were unquestionably very bad, but the Holocaust was evil.
Perhaps this is enough to understand Arendt’s position. But it clearly does not save it from
facing a variety of problems. I will ignore here the famous alleged inaccuracies of her interpreta-
tion of Eichmann himself, and focus only on her more theoretical views on evil as such. Some
thought that Arendt’s understanding of evil may unwittingly endow evil acts with some sort of
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grandiosity – perverse grandiosity no doubt, but grandiosity nonetheless. Some thought, that
is, that perhaps Arendt was guilty of “overblown analysis” and that she may have rendered the
evil that Eichmann and the Nazis did as “operatic,” “metaphysical,” “biblical,” and “ecstatic”
(Aschheim 1997: 129–30). Be that as it may, the real problem is that even if we can now better
understand why Arendt was so bewildered, this by itself does not help us understand the relation
between evil actions (as different from bad actions) and punishment.
To be sure, Arendt distanced herself from the position (somewhat popular at the time)
according to which, insofar as “Eichmann’s deeds defied the possibility of human punishment,”
this would entail that “it was pointless to impose the death sentence for crimes of such mag-
nitude.” Arendt insisted that, however bewildering she took Eichmann’s behavior to be, this
“could not conceivably mean that he who had murdered millions should for this very reason
escape punishment” (Arendt 1994: 250). This of course sounds utterly plausible: it would be a
peculiar theory of evil that suggested that evil actions ought to be met with impunity. While
Arendt agreed with the specific punishment (death) to which Eichmann was sentenced, she
disagreed with the court’s rationale for it, and suggested that the court should have “dared” to
address Eichmann in the following terms:
just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with
the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations – as though you and
your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit
the world – we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be
expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason,
you must hang.
(Arendt 1994: 279)
The problem is that, since Arendt asserts both that Eichmann did horrible evil things and that
we cannot fully understand those horrible evil things, it is hard to see how exactly Eichmann’s
punishment should be responsive to his horrible evil deeds. What exactly does justice demand
in the case of evil (so construed)?
The fact that no one can be expected to want to share the Earth with Eichmann does not
strike me as a particularly good reason, let alone the only reason, for his execution, or even for
the fact that he should be punished at all. Needless to say, I am not suggesting that he should
not have been punished – only that the fact that people “could not be expected to want to
share the earth with him” is not a very good reason for punishment. So, the “only” reason
Arendt finds for executing Eichmann appears remarkably flatfooted: it presupposes a sort of
desire-satisfaction approach to ethics: the good seems to be to give people what they want. This
approach evokes the classical utilitarianism that I rejected at the outset and that Arendt herself
also rejects. In this regard, Arendt’s take on the relation between evil and punishment strikes
me as an abdication.
Interestingly, Feinberg, a much less “operatic” author, and surely one much less prone to
“overblown analyses” than Arendt may have been, appears to abdicate in strikingly similar ways.
Apropos his discussion of Arendt’s views on the Eichmann trial, Feinberg tells us: “genuinely
evil persons are like wild beasts or mad dogs” (Feinberg 2003: 190). While Feinberg is of course
aware that this position is “not popular with philosophers,” he nonetheless believes that “there
is surprisingly much to be said” for it (Feinberg 2003: 190). And Feinberg then adds that, when
dealing with evildoers, we should forget about desert, justice, and philosophy in general, and
instead treat them like wild beasts:
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we do not hate the wild bear, nor waste our moral judgment on her. There is just
one thing to do. Shoot her and get it over with, in the same spirit as that in which
we would cope with other natural calamities – fires, storms, slides, quakes, and floods.
(Feinberg 2003: 190)
Just like people are not expected to want to share the Earth with Eichmann, they are not
expected to want to experience quakes and floods. Eichmann, other Nazis, and in general evil
agents are equated to wild beasts and to natural calamities. And these things ought to be pre-
vented or eliminated in as simple and straightforward way as possible.
No one, I think, would be seriously conflicted about putting out a fire, or putting down a
rabid dog. But the way in which Arendt and Feinberg “cope” with evil is not only an abdica-
tion; it is a particularly uninspiring one. First, because there is a sense in which it is hard to see
how this “coping” mechanism is even a punishment. Evidently, to kill a rabid dog is not to
punish it, and much less is putting fires out to somehow “punish” nature. Even killing a person
just because the rest of humanity cannot be expected to want to share the world with him is not
necessarily to punish him (since it is not clear that the killing is even a response to wrongdoing).
Second, because, while neither Arendt nor Feinberg is a classical adherent to consequentialist
approaches to punishment, what they suggest we do with evildoers – to defer to what people
want us to do with them, or to “cope” with them as we would with natural calamities – seems
at home within those approaches. As it turns out, then, their laudable gesturing toward recog-
nizing a qualitative difference between the bad and the evil uninspiringly dissolves, in the final
analysis, into the very classical utilitarian approach to punishment rejected at the outset.
Harm and malevolence

I registered some misgivings about Arendt’s and Feinberg’s takes on the relation between evil
and punishment, mostly in order to underscore how truly difficult it is to qualitatively distin-
guish evil from bad, and to explain how this distinction may affect our punishment practices.
In the next section I will return to Arendt and Feinberg after I discuss, in this section, other
approaches to evil and its relation to punishment that I find even more problematic than theirs.
It is somewhat surprising that I will find these other approaches wanting, since they seek to dis-
tinguish evil from bad by attending to either the amount of harm evil generates or the “malevo-
lent” motives of the evildoer (or on both) – and these seem at least as promising ways, if not
the most obvious ways. While these approaches are very common, for ease of exposition I will
analyze just one recent and systematic version among them: John Kekes’s.
Kekes’s views can profitably be divided into two periods. Early in his career, Kekes explicitly
acknowledged the existence of both moral and nonmoral evil (Kekes 1990: 45). The essence
of evil for the early Kekes is the occurrence of “undeserved harm”; if an undeserved harm is
the result of, say, an earthquake, then this would be a nonmoral evil, whereas, if an undeserved
harm is the result of someone’s actions, then (if other conditions obtain) this would be a moral
evil. Independently of the fact that this account equivocates between two distinct senses of evil –
evil as something we do and evil as something that happens to us – I find it fundamentally inca-
pable in shedding light as to how we should punish evil actions. Such a project makes as little
sense in Kekes’s cases of nonmoral evil as it did in Feinberg’s discussion of natural calamities:
discussing the punishment of these events is not a fruitful enterprise.
More recently, Kekes has focused his attention on evil as something that we do (rather than
as something that happens to us, say, as a result of earthquakes or meteorites). He has now
espoused the view that “evil has an ominous connotation that goes beyond badness. It is perhaps
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the most severe succinct condemnation our moral vocabulary affords, so it should not be used
casually and the conditions of its justified ascription should be made clear” (Kekes 2005: 1).
Of course, such ominous connotation makes little sense regarding his earlier “nonmoral evil,”
which is a further reason to abandon his early approach.
Kekes has presented the following analysis: “the evil of an action . . . consists in the com-
bination of three components: the malevolent motivation of evildoers; the serious, excessive
harm caused by their actions; and the lack of morally acceptable excuse for the actions. Each of
these components is necessary, and they are jointly sufficient for condemning an action as evil”
(Kekes 2005: 2).4 I will discuss these components not in the order Kekes presents them but in
increasing order of plausibility.
Consider Kekes’s third component: “the lack of morally acceptable excuses [and justifica-
tions, etc.].” At best, this type of condition would indeed belong to the analysis of evil actions,
but, unhelpfully, it would belong too to the analysis of any bad action whatsoever. If so, it
would not shed light as to the peculiarities of punishment for evil actions. At worst, however,
the condition would be wholly inadequate, for, as will become clear below, unlike merely bad
actions, evil actions cannot be mitigated in the usual ways that bad actions can.
The second component of Kekes’s definition of evil focuses on the malevolent motives of
the evildoer. This of course diametrically opposes Arendt’s view that people without any par-
ticularly bad motivation (such as – rightly or probably wrongly – she took Eichmann to be) can
do evil acts: unlike Arendt, Kekes takes malevolent motives to be necessary for an action to be
evil. Thus, had Arendt’s view on Eichmann the man been correct, Kekes would have denied
that Eichmann was or did evil. Consider a more mundane case and the difficulties that it gener-
ates for positions such as Kekes’s. Recall the real-life case of Tonya Harding, a figure skater who,
jealous of the success and talent of her teammate Nancy Kerrigan, conspired with her husband
to injure her rival, so that Kerrigan could not possibly defeat her in the forthcoming winter
Olympics. Presumably, Harding’s motives were malevolent. Even stipulating that Kekes’s other
two components also obtained, however, Harding’s act would still not strike me as evil – and it
would not have so struck me had Harding actually killed Kerrigan.
Perhaps this is just an impasse of intuitions. Kekes could argue that, rather than pre-
senting a difficulty to his definition of evil, cases such as Harding’s confirm it: Harding’s
action was not evil, he may say, because her motivation was not sufficiently malevolent.
Unfortunately, this response just pushes the question further: what is it for a motive to be
malevolent? My “intuition” is that getting your skating rival out of commission by brutally
breaking her leg (or, say, by killing her) evinces a malevolent motivation. If Kekes disagrees,
then he owes us an account of motivation. Analyses such as Kekes’s thus face the following
dilemma. If they admit that Harding’s action was not evil, because although her motiva-
tion was unquestionably bad it was not sufficiently malevolent, then, absent an analysis of
“malevolent,” they would be utterly uninformative and potentially viciously circular. If,
trying to avoid this problem, adherents to accounts such as Kekes’s instead suggested that
actions such as Harding’s are indeed evil, then they may perhaps be extending the meaning
of “evil” beyond usefulness.
In the end, then, the potential of accounts such as Kekes’s may have for distinguishing bad
from evil turns on what Kekes calls “serious, excessive harm.” This component is, in Kekes’s
case, two components in one: the harm must be both serious and excessive (though it is inter-
esting that he combines them together under one single heading). By “serious” Kekes means
something quite analogous to what Card means by “intolerable”; he tells us: “evil involves
serious harm that causes fatal or lasting physical injury, as do, for example, murder, torture, and
mutilation” (Kekes 2005: 1).5
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Leo Zaibert
These sorts of accounts face difficulties in dealing with prima facie cases of evil that do
not cause much harm, such as those presented above. One such difficulty, rather general in
scope, is this: assume that X, Y, and Z are evil acts; presumably, attempting to do X, Y, and
Z would be evil too – and attempted evil acts need not cause harm at all. So, if evil can be
attempted, definitions of evil that focus on harm – like Kekes’s and many others – cannot do.6
After all, if evil can indeed be merely attempted, then harm (serious or otherwise) does not
belong in the analysis. To suggest that evil can be done but cannot be attempted strikes me
as remarkably odd.
So much, then, for the “serious” harm part of Kekes’s third component; let us then turn to
“excessive” harm: “evildoers cause more serious harm than is needed for achieving their ends”
(Kekes 2005: 2). This is much more promising, and it is in fact useful in explaining cases such
as the liquor store robber who did not need to disfigure the attendant’s face, among others.
Unfortunately, Kekes says very little about this excessiveness. And the little that he does say,
again, does not help us distinguishing evil from bad. The problem with attempted evil acts just
discussed obviously applies here as well: attempted evil acts (which ex hypothesi cause no harm)
cause no excessive harm either. But even in cases of completed acts that cause harm, this sort of
approach runs into difficulties.
Consider a hit man, Jack, who kills Jill, and imagine that all of the conditions in Kekes’s
analysis of evil obtain, except that the harm is not “excessive” (i.e., Jack does exactly what he
needed in order to achieve his end) – then Jack’s act is bad, not evil. But consider a second
scenario identical to the first in every respect except that now Jack also kills Susan – something
Jack did not need in order to achieve his end of killing Jill. I do not see why this ex hypothesi
“excessive” harm should transform his bad action into an evil action.
Nothing, however, highlights the inadequacy of this sort of approach than Kekes’s own
admissions. When “evil actions are the only ways of preventing much worse evil” (Kekes 2005:
201), they are justified, and sometimes we could demand that “evil be done in order to prevent
even greater evil” (Kekes 2005: 207) and that those who behave like this “deserve praise, not
condemnation” (Kekes 2005: 207). Kekes suggests that evil can sometimes be demanded and
praised. This is a position for someone who also claims, as we noted above, that “evil” is “the
most severe succinct condemnation our moral vocabulary affords.”
In general, justified agents are not praised for their actions as Kekes has it: for example, killing
in self-defense, to mention the classical example of justification, is, even if not quite blamewor-
thy, certainly not necessarily praiseworthy either. Furthermore, if evil actions can be justified
along the lines Kekes suggests, this would evidently contradict his own view that the harm of
evil actions needs to be excessive. When a so-called “evil” action is done because it is the only
way to avoid greater evil (or greater bad?), then it cannot be evil, for there is nothing excessive
about the harm it produces. Analyses such as Kekes’s generate a contradiction: if presumptive
evil can be justified (to prevent greater evil) then it was not really evil to begin with, since it
would not have been excessive, and being excessive was supposed to be a necessary condition
for an action being evil.
Exposing the errors in approaches such as Kekes’s foregrounds one crucial aspect of the
qualitative contrast between the evil and the merely bad. Contra Kekes (and others), evil acts can
never be justified, and in this they differ from the merely bad. Bad actions, no matter how bad
we imagine them to be, could, in theory, be justified. Imagine variations on being forced to
torture, rape, and kill innocent children as the only way of, say, saving the entire world from
extinction (or saving many other children from being tortured, raped, killed, etc.) – a person
may, in theory, be justified in doing this. But, if an act is truly evil, there is no possibility of it
ever being justified: it is not that this or that act happens to be unjustifiable – it is that an act,
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if evil, is essentially unjustifiable. This is a crucial qualitative difference between evil actions and
bad actions: and it is not at all related to (thus far unexplained) malevolent motives that allegedly
generates them, nor to the amount of harm that they generate.
Senselessness, thoughtlessness, pointlessness, and

essential unjustifiability
Neither Feinberg nor Arendt distinguished evil from bad by looking at amounts of harm or
malevolent motives. Instead, Feinberg suggested that there is something “senseless” about
evil actions. And Arendt, even more forcefully and explicitly, suggested that the essence of
evil action is neither the magnitude of harm nor the presence of malevolent motives. As for
the first concern, recall her view: “and I don’t mean just the number of victims. I mean the
method, the fabrication of corpses and so on” (Arendt 1994: 126). As for her second concern
recall her view that:
Eichmann was not Iago, and not Macbeth. . . . Except for an extraordinary diligence
in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. And this dili-
gence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his
superior in order to inherit his post.
(Arendt 1994: 287)
In Arendt’s mind, it was precisely the absence of malevolent motives that rendered Eichmann’s
evil actions banal. Instead, the essence of evil action relates, in Arendt’s estimation, on a certain
“thoughtlessness” (Arendt 1994: 287).
While it may be clear how Arendt’s and Feinberg’s positions differ from positions such as
Kekes’s, it is not clear how exactly they are better. We do not after all know what exactly this
“senselessness” and this “thoughtlessness” may turn out to be. Moreover, Arendt and Feinberg
may have painted themselves into a corner: if neither results nor motivations will explain the
nature of evil actions (and justify us in punishing them), then what? In trying to answer this
question, consider one more example.
When cattle cars were insufficient for transporting victims to extermination camps, the Nazis
would use regular passenger trains. In these occasions, victims were forced to pay the regular
one-way fare for the journey (to their certain death). As with previous examples, while being
sent to a gas chamber is obviously the most harmful thing done to the passengers, charging them
the one-way fare is what strikes us as evil. For the charging was utterly pointless: every victim
was going to be dispossessed of everything they owned anyhow. It was pointless in the sense
that it defies understanding, that it is hard to wrap our minds around it: not in the sense that it
is “excessively” harmful. And I think that this pointlessness is very closely related to (but better
than, as I will argue immediately) the “thoughtlessness” of which Arendt spoke and the “sense-
lessness” of which Feinberg spoke.7
Arendt was perfectly diaphanous in that “it was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no
means identical with stupidity – that pre-disposed [Eichmann] to become one of the greatest
criminals of that period” (Arendt 1994: 287–8). Moreover, Arendt suggested that there exists
a “strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.” Famously, Arendt connected
this thoughtlessness to the dehumanizing machinery of totalitarianism, but she said little about
how this “strange” interdependence could help us distinguish evil from bad in general, or
about whether evil could exist outside the political context. She did not explain exactly what
this strange interdependence amounted too, even though it was because of it that she found
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Eichmann to be evil: he was thoughtless, and (given this strange interdependence), he was
therefore (banally) evil. I take it that it would be a woefully inadequate account of evil one that
would exclude actors with malevolent motives from being evil, even if it did admit that some of
them (like Arendt’s Eichmann) could be (banally) evil even if lacking those malevolent motives.
I think that the notion of pointlessness I have just presented does a better job than Arendt’s
“thoughtlessness” (and also than approaches such as Kekes’s) at capturing what is qualitatively
unique about evil actions. Evil, as a qualitatively independent category of wrongdoing, is consti-
tuted by those acts that strike us as unintelligible. Sometimes these acts may be unintelligible in
light of the stunning thoughtlessness of the perpetrator, but other times in light of other reasons.
Part of what may justify the claim that the Nazi Holocaust was unique may have to do with
the nature of the evil it generated. Doubtlessly, all sorts of other genocides have occurred, but
perhaps none other was evil to the extent that the Holocaust was – in the sense of all the sys-
tematized pointlessness (in the sense alluded here) that it exhibited. This is neither to deny that
these other genocides were extraordinarily bad nor to suggest that, in their not being as evil as
the Holocaust, their perpetrators thereby necessarily deserve less condemnation or punishment.
And it is not to endorse Arendt’s view that evil thus understood was invented by, or somehow
linked to, totalitarianism (Arendt 1973: 459).
Imagine, however, that the Nazis charged their victims the one-way fare, attempting to
trick them into thinking that they were not traveling to their certain death, just as, for exam-
ple, they asked them to remember the stall number were they were leaving their clothes before
going to “the showers” in Auschwitz. Making the victims believe that they were going to take
a shower (rather than into a gas chamber) is horrible, but not pointless – there is a perverse stra-
tegic point to it. If charging the one-way fare was done for similar reasons, then it too would
have had a point, and thus would not have been evil. To the extent that their charging the fare
was partly a strategy seeking to keep the transports running smoothly and partly pointless, then
it was partly bad and partly evil.
It should be obvious that pointlessness can attach to actions that are not terribly harmful in
themselves. Geoffrey Scarre argues compellingly that, while the harm brought about by techno-
logically advanced nations may be of a larger scale than the harm of earlier times, they are not
for that any more evil:
When a sixteenth-century Japanese samurai warrior tested his new sword by slicing
through a dispensable peasant, or nineteenth century Amazonian rubber-planters used
the indigenous population for target practice, they showed an equal lack of awareness
of what Robert Nozick has called the “moral pull” of their victims [as do evildoers in
more technologically advanced contexts].
(Scarre 2004: 6)
To use humans as blade-sharpeners, or as training targets are clearly pointless activities – for one
could easily find other sharpeners and other targets: what is the point of ending a human life? Of
course, if the samurais did this in order to further solidify their hierarchical society (or something
like that), then their action – awful as it would no doubt still be, may not count as evil.
What emerges, then, is that, whatever else belongs in the analysis of evil actions, their point-
lessness belongs in it. This pointlessness is consistent not only with different degrees of harm,
but also with the presence of fully “malevolent motives” (as in Kekes’s account) and with “no
motives at all” (as in Arendt’s account of banal evil). The pointlessness, moreover, could be
exhibited even at the stage in which evil acts are only being attempted – thus avoiding the
problems accounts that, like Kekes’s, focus on excessive harm. The focus on pointlessness can
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accommodate both evil acts of agents who aim at the bad for its own sake (say, de Sade) and the
evil acts of drab bureaucrats (say, Arendt’s Eichmann). In pursuing bad for its own sake, sadists,
ex hypothesi, exhibit great pointlessness – it is hard to wrap one’s mind around acting only in the
pursuit of pain.8
As it turns out, the pointlessness of evil actions is directly connected to punishment theory.
The connection is effected via the essential unjustifiability of evil actions discussed above. It
is because they exhibit pointlessness that evil actions cannot possibly be justified. To justify
an action is to see that its prima facie wrongfulness is defeated by circumstances. We understand
why the justified agent acted they way she did. Insofar as they are pointless, evil actions cannot
be so understood – if they could, then they would not be pointless, and not really evil. It is
because they are essentially unjustifiable that the prima facie presumption in favor of punishment
is extraordinarily stronger regarding evil actions than regarding bad actions.
Evil and the severity of punishment

One last point remains and this is regarding the question as to how the mobilization of the
notion of pointlessness may allow us to address the questions regarding the severity of punish-
ment for evil actions. The suggestion that evil actions exhibit pointlessness may appear to have
the following corollary: that merely bad acts do not exhibit pointlessness (or not to the same
degree), that merely bad acts have a point. This corollary may, in the first instance, give rise to
various worries regarding the punishment of the merely bad: it may be thought to excuse or jus-
tify the merely bad. The first worry is dispelled by emphasizing that their “having a point” need
not diminish their wrongfulness. To say, for example, that we can see the point of the Nazis
deceiving their victims before entering the Auschwitz “showers” (so as to prevent chaos in the
antechambers) in no way entails that we thereby mitigate our condemnation of these horrible
murders. It is merely to say that we can understand, in a nonmoral sense, why they were doing it
(even if other aspects of the Nazi horror remain pointless). As pointed at the outset, to say that a
certain act was “merely” bad is not to say that it was less blameworthy than an evil act, or that it
caused less harm than an evil act: it is merely to conceptually distinguish it from this other form
of wrongdoing.9 Nothing in our understanding of bad acts prevents us from punishing them.
A second worry relates to the notion of pointlessness itself: complete pointlessness, it may
be argued, is impossible; everything has (or can be made to have) a point. Even the liquor store
robber who decides to disfigure the attendant’s face can have a point: for example, to see blood
gushing out of someone’s face. If this is so, then this seems like an unstable way of drawing the
distinction between the evil and the merely bad. For it is not clear when an action is pointless
enough so as to no longer being bad but evil. The worry, in other words, is that distinguishing
evil from bad may in the end turn out to be quantitative: evil acts are more (or much more) point-
less than merely bad ones.10 In response, one needs to underscore, first, that this sort of quantita-
tive distinction is quite unlike the quantitative distinction based on amount of harm. Second,
one need again underscore the importance of the essential unjustifiability of evil actions. Even
if they become essentially unjustifiable only after they pass a certain threshold of pointlessness,
once they do pass it they do become impossible to justify. And this essential unjustifiability
strikes me as a perfectly (let alone important) qualitative difference between evil and bad actions,
even if it may involve appeals to quantitative differences.
The final worry concerns itself directly with the severity of the punishment for evil actions.
Since Eichmann engaged in enough serious garden-variety bad actions that warranted that
court’s maximum punishment, the Jerusalem court did not need to focus on the alleged evil
of his actions. But to the extent that he did evil too, the question as to how to do justice to
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Leo Zaibert
it remains pertinent. If a difference between a “merely bad” mass murderer and an evil mass
murderer is admitted, then it is not clear how (if at all) the punishment for each should differ. It
seems that Eichmann – whom we are assuming to have done evil – was punished in the same
way a bad mass murderer would have been punished. Was this a shortcoming of the Jerusalem
court? Is it a shortcoming of any legal court?
Full and systematic answers to these questions will remain complex and elusive. But one
element in those answers is that the “hard treatment” aspect of punishment does not exhaust
what is valuable in our responses to wrongdoing (whether ordinary wrongdoing or evil).
Even if the exact words that Arendt recommended the court used to address Eichmann are
debatable (and much more so her reasons for recommending the court’s uttering them), that
a court in some way or another addresses wrongdoers (whether ordinary or evil) may be
extraordinarily valuable.
Even if Feinberg were right that we would “waste” our words and our moral judgment on
the truly evil agent, we would not thereby be wasting it on everyone else. Moreover, even if
Eichmann and everyone else were somehow incapable of understanding the message that justice
demanded, to call evil by its name, to condemn it, is not a “waste.” Rather, this calling things
by their name, this condemning what is condemnable, is a manifestation of integrity.
It is the very talk of “wastefulness,” with its evident utilitarian tinges, that we should aban-
don. Perhaps the only difference between the punishment of the merely bad murderer and
the evil murderer is a matter of expressing certain things. Perhaps it will never be possible to
perfectly articulate the words that justice demands; perhaps the words of justice in the face of
evil are inherently inadequate, or even ineffable. But this is not to deny that this inadequacy
and ineffability sometimes attaches to our responses to merely bad actions too. Nor is it to deny
that sometimes the mere saying of something – even if necessarily incomplete and uncertain – is
to affirm some of our constitutive convictions, and in so doing to importantly distinguish evil
from merely bad.11
Notes
1 Classical utilitarianism’s inability to entertain a qualitative difference between bad and evil may be seen
as a (somewhat unexplored) corollary to their much better known monism regarding pleasures and
pain.This is the sort of monism that led John Stuart Mill to (unsuccessfully, if valiantly) posit qualitative
differences between “higher and “lower” pleasures, as in Mill (2008: 136–158).
2 I owe this example to Felmon Davis.
3 Evidently, Kristallnacht itself contained a combination of both bad and evil actions. For the purposes of
the example I am focusing only on the bad of Kristallnacht.
4 Kekes’s analysis bears important resemblances to Claudia Card’s. Card claims that evils “have two
basic components: (intolerable) harm and (culpable) wrongdoing, neither reducible to the other”
(Card 2002: 4). But Card ends up privileging harm: it is “the nature and severity of the harms, rather
than perpetrators’ psychological states, [that] distinguishes evil from ordinary wrongs. Evils tend to
ruin lives, or significant part of lives” (Card 2002: 3). As we shall see, so does Kekes.
5 Kekes recognizes that harm need not be physical, but he nonetheless focuses on “simple cases of
physical harm” (Kekes 2005: 1).
6 Among those who recognize that evil need not be terribly harmful see Eve Garrard (1998, 2002),
Adam Morton (2004), and, very recently, Stephen de Wijze (2018).
7 Admittedly, “pointlessness” attaches more directly to actions than to agents, whereas “thoughtlessness”
and “senselessness” attach more directly to actions, and this may cast doubt on the closeness between
these notions, But actions can also be senseless and thoughtless, and agents, through their actions, can
exhibit pointlessness.
8 I leave masochists aside, not without noting that, although they appear to desire pain for its own sake,
what they really desire is complicated in that, first, it is not quite pain as such but a highly staged and
scripted instantiation of pain, and, second, it is in fact pleasant to them.
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9 Michael Ignatieff, for example, has distinguished between different types of terrorism by attending to
how much pointlessness they exhibit (though he does not use this word). To admit that we can under-
stand the point of a given terrorist act is not to thereby excuse or justify it: one can abhor it even if one
sees its point (Ignatieff 2004: 83–85).
10 I owe this objection to Matthew Anisfeld.
11 With thanks to Stephen de Wijze and Thomas Nys for comments on an earlier version of this chapter.
References
Arendt, H. (1973) The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt Brace.
Arendt, H. (1994) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Study in the Banality of Evil, New York: Penguin.
Arendt, H. (2007) The Jewish Writings, J. Kohn and R.F. Feldman (eds.), New York: Schocken.
Aschheim, S.E. (1997) “Nazism, Culture and the Origins of Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt and the
Discourse of Evil,” New German Critique 70, pp. 117–39.
Bentham, J. (1962) “The Principles of Morals and Legislation” in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, J. Bowring
(ed.) Vol. 1, New York: Russell & Russell.
de Wijze, S. (2018) “Small-Scale Evil,” The Journal of Value Inquiry 52(1), pp. 22–35
Feinberg, J. (2003) Problems at the Roots of Law: Essays in Legal and Political Theory, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Friedländer, S. (1997) Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939, New York:
Harper Collins.
Garrard, E. (1998) “The Nature of Evil,” Philosophical Explorations 1, pp. 43–60.
Garrard, E. (2002) “Evil as an Explanatory Concept,” The Monist 85(2), pp. 320–36
Gilbert, M. (2006) Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction, New York: Harper Collins.
Ignatieff, M. (2004) The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in the Age of Terror, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Kekes, J. (1990) Facing Evil, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kekes, J. (2005) The Roots of Evil, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Mill, J.S. (2008) On Liberty and Other Essays (John Gray, ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rorty, A. (ed.). (2001) The Many Faces of Evil, London: Routledge.
Scarre, G. (2004) After Evil: Responding to Wrongdoing, Aldershot: Ashgate.
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21
EVIL AND FORGIVENESS
Kathryn J. Norlock
Introduction
Evil and forgiveness share a short history in contemporary philosophy. Although one can find
philosophical works in any era in which each is occasionally addressed, the past 25 years offer
more literature on either topic than do many centuries combined. A happy consequence of
increased attention to both moral phenomena is a rich literature, and, inevitably, another con-
sequence is a variety of interpretations of evil and of forgiveness. A cluster of related questions
recur in philosophical discussions of forgiving evils. In this essay, I start with discussion, and the
eventual rejection, of the conception of evil as that which is unforgivable. Once that definitional
stop is out of the way, it is easier to consider related issues at the intersection of evil and forgive-
ness. My treatment of contentious issues is influenced by my interest in empirically informed
approaches to moral theory, the better to take seriously the experiences of survivors of evils. I
draw upon nonideal and feminist theorists as I argue that the material actualities of occasions for
forgiveness of evil should direct and constrain our theorizing about forgiveness.
In what follows, I take up (1) the question whether evils are, by definition, unforgivable; if
this were settled in the affirmative, then no other issues need be entertained. I identify a nonideal
approach to ethical theory as a main reason for my rejection of (1). After outlining objections to
(1), I move on to related issues: (2) the contention that evils may be forgivable but that forgive-
ness cannot entail reconciliation with one’s evildoer, (3) the concern that only direct victims
of evils are in a position to decide if forgiveness is appropriate, (4) the conceptual worry that
forgiveness of evil may not be genuine or complete if forgiveness is only complete when the last
drop of hard feeling is overcome, (5) the interest of many in holding that forgiveness is never
required and always a nonobligatory gift, in tension with Christian traditions that recommend
or require forgiveness, and (6) the concern that analyses of evil ought to prioritize the suffering
and credit the perspectives of victims of evils, in tension with the possibility that forgiveness con-
cerns the well-being of offenders. I raise more issues than I resolve, in the interests of providing
the reader with an overview of the complexity of literature on forgiveness and evils.
In what follows, I limit my discussion to forgiveness of moral evils: as Bernard Dauenhauer
says, “those that human beings knowingly and willingly commit” (2007: 207). I omit dis-
cussion of natural disasters and accidents resulting from excusable human error. I rely on
Claudia Card’s description of evils as “foreseeable, intolerable harms produced by culpable
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wrongdoing” (2002: 3). I proceed from the position that humans contribute themselves to a
great deal of moral activity including moral responses to the (at least partly) chosen actions of
others, and forgiveness is of interest as one moral response.
Evil as the unforgivable

The position that evils are just those things which are unforgivable may be an ontological
position regarding the impossibility of forgiveness as constitutive of the nature of evil, an
ethical position that forgiveness is wrong even if possible, a descriptive claim that forgiveness
of evils is psychologically difficult even if possible and right, or a combination of the three.
It is not always possible or necessary to disentangle the motives in all writings which further
this view. For example, consider the responses to a narrative by Holocaust survivor Simon
Wiesenthal (1998), who asks participants in a symposium at the end of his book what he
should have done when a dying Nazi soldier asked him for forgiveness. Several participants
held that unforgivable evils are to be maintained whether it is for psychological or ethical
reasons. (Some argue conceptual objections.) Matthew Fox (9), a priest, and Wole Soyinka
(172), a playwright and poet, both argue that evils violate conditions of forgiveness because
intolerable harms cannot be atoned for adequately; since the conditions enabling a coherent
account of forgiveness do not obtain, forgiveness is conceptually impossible. Henry James
Cargas, a Catholic, responded that God may forgive, but “Simon Wiesenthal could not, I
cannot” (125), implying it is psychologically too much to ask. Human rights scholar Joshua
Rubenstein (240) objected that the request for forgiveness was morally callous, and Nechama
Tec, a Holocaust survivor, indicates similarly ethical objections that the soldier didn’t deserve
it, saying, “Even on his deathbed he seems to be denying to the Jews their humanity” (258).
Philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch, a Jew who lived in France through the occupation, argues
relatedly that forgiveness “died in the death camps,” and that crimes against humanity are
“inexpiable,” impossible to punish (1996: 567). “Get ahead of one’s victim, that was the
thing; ask for a pardon,” Jankélévitch adds, emphasizing the callousness of the expectation
that victims forgive (567).
As Marguerite La Caze (2005) explains, philosophers who hold that evils are the set of
unforgivable things tend to proceed on the assumption that forgiveness is only apt for that
which can be sufficiently punished. She (with others) cites Hannah Arendt’s ([1958] 1998)
formulation of the seeming impossibility to forgive, given the inadequacy of any punishment
or revenge for the worst of evils:
The alternative to forgiveness, but by no means its opposite, is punishment, and both
have in common that they attempt to put an end to something that without interfer-
ence could go on endlessly. It is therefore quite significant, a structural element in the
realm of human affairs, that men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish and
that they are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable. This is the true
hallmark of those offences which, since Kant, we call “radical evil” and about whose
nature so little is known, even to those of us who have been exposed to one of their
rare outbursts on the public scene.
(Arendt [1958] 1998: 241)
The above passage is widely quoted in support of positions that the worst of evils cannot be
forgiven, because there is no moral response adequate to the task of appropriately responding to
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Kathryn J. Norlock
the wrong. Evil “transcends all moral categories,” as she writes elsewhere, and forgiveness is a
merely moral response to something so heinous it defies morals (2003: 23).
Yet, in the chapter in which this passage appears, Arendt also commends forgiveness; as Glen
Pettigrove points out (2006: 487), “Forgiveness, unlike revenge, is not merely a reaction to the
misdeed.” One could argue that, because “so little is known” about the nature of radical evil,
we may not know what turns out to be unforgivable prior to our actions, including our crea-
tive and unconditioned responses. Arendt describes forgiveness as an alternative to punishment
because it is active and creative, less automatic than would be cycles of revenge:
[T]he act of forgiving . . . is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and
thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action.
Forgiving, in other words, is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts
anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore
freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven.
(Human Condition, 241)
Arguably, forgiveness is not simply defined as a reaction to another’s atonement for atonable
wrongs. As an active and creative process that exceeds what can be predicted, forgiveness
is not even limited to occasions that allow for punishment. Arendt suggests that revenge is
appropriately seen as predictable, as a reaction that perpetuates cycles of violence in a way that
forgiveness does not.
Arendt’s comment as to what men are unable to do moves me to shift attention away from
definitions of evils and unforgivable things, to what it is that different victims report being able
to do in the aftermath of evils, and, as it turns out, victims differ, with some reporting forgiving,
and some not. The study of forgiveness is the study of a set of emotions, expressions, choices,
and interactions so complex that the quest for a definition is doomed to inexactitude and coun-
terexamples. It is instructive to “shift the focus from the definition of the term to its value within
our lives,” as Nick Smith does in his exploration of apology (2008: 21). Margaret Walker says,
similarly, that it may be more productive to go beyond justifications of definitions; instead,
“let’s ask what it means for individuals, or for a group or society collectively, to declare an act
unforgivable. What is the moral power of that declaration?” (2006: 187).
Philosophers like Smith and Walker theorize about ethics with sensitivity to the actualities
of contexts that (just do) include evils and the morally compromised agents who must carry on
in the presence of conditions that are not of their making. High attention to the actualities of
living with evils is a hallmark of a nonideal approach to ethical theory, because we want ethics
to be “[relevant] to actual agents in actual conditions and [applicable] to the problems created
by” evils (Tessman 2010: 806), including the problems faced by those living with evildoers and
complicit agents in the aftermath. As Eduardo Rivera-López (2013) says, “the best or most
appropriate actions, rules, and institutions in this nonideal world are different from what they would
be in an ideal one” (3626). The rules are different partly because of the feasibility conditions that
constrain agents, regarding what is possible or desirable in context. I find nonideal theoretical
approaches appealing because they are empirically informed; taking seriously the actualities of
agents in a position to forgive or refuse forgiveness after evils has helped my own understanding
of the limits of what H.L.A. Hart (1959) called definitional stops, such as ending inquiries about
forgiving evils with the statement that evils are unforgivable. Some victims report forgiving evils
and some report refusing to forgive; the latter only makes sense if forgiveness is an option, a
moral power that they can sensibly claim. I proceed on the assumption that the moral powers of
individuals and groups to assert the meaningfulness of forgiving or refusing forgiveness should
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be the starting point for any theorizing about forgiveness. As Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela (2011)
argues, regarding her work in South African communities:
On the scale of horrible things that can happen to people, there are some for which the
language of apology and forgiveness may be entirely inappropriate. To say, however,
that horrific deeds committed in the context of systematic human rights abuses by
states are simply unforgivable does not capture the complexity and richness of all the
social contexts within which gross human rights abuses are committed.
(544)
Evils as possibly forgivable but never entailing reconciliation

Nonideal theory tends to avoid hard and fast rules in the absence of reported actualities, but
a context-sensitive ethic can offer normative recommendations in the interests of remaining
sensitive to agents’ different needs. One consistent recommendation regarding forgiveness of
evils is that forgiveness must not be confused with reconciliation. The intention behind philoso-
phers’ repetition of this point is well meant; when one has suffered serious harm at the hands of
another, we are reluctant to add to their suffering with any suggestion that victims must recon-
cile with offenders. Cautions that forgiveness does not entail reconciling increased in frequency
after the activities of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee gained attention. To
some, like the brother of an antiapartheid lawyer killed under apartheid orders, calls for recon-
ciliation and forgiveness amount to a betrayal: “Unless justice is done it’s difficult for any person
to think of forgiving” (quoted in Minow 1999: 81).
The stance that forgiveness does not entail reconciliation often relies on seeing forgiveness
as an internal, emotional state, while reconciliation is external and relational. If forgiveness is a
wholly interior state of mind, then it may be unilateral and chosen by a victim without regard
to the actions or repentance of the wrongdoer. Reconciliation, on the other hand, connotes
bilateral engagement, activities of living with each other that demand cooperative acknowledg-
ment. On this view, if forgiveness is morally optional, reconciliation is almost invisible; argu-
ments for reconciliation-free forgiveness are primarily concerned with “self-regarding duties,”
including a victim’s sense of her own self-respect, her interest in overcoming her resentment,
and her disposition to have a change of heart toward an offender (Norlock 2009: 20, 48). Not
coincidentally, philosophers who divorce forgiveness from reconciliation also tend to point out
that forgiveness need not even be communicated to a wrongdoer (Emerick 2017). As Jeffrie
Murphy (1988) says in distinguishing forgiveness from mercy, “Forgiveness is primarily a matter
of how I feel about you (not how I treat you)” (22).
Yet, studies indicate that subjects who are asked, “Is reconciliation a necessary part of forgive-
ness?” were more likely to answer Maybe or Yes than No (Belicki et al. 2008: 179). And depend-
ing on what evils are in question, it is difficult to discuss engaging in forgiveness for political or
systemic evils without discussing what comes next. As Jeremy Watkins (2015) observes, “One
of the familiar challenges facing post-conflict societies is to find an effective means of promot-
ing peace and reconciliation” (19), that is, not just promoting feeling better but living together
sufficiently well. I have argued elsewhere that forgiveness for evils includes self-forgiveness for
serious self-harm, but self-forgiveness usually entails reconciliation so that one may go on living,
or living well (2009: 151). I have come to agree with psychologist Marjorie Baker that “one
must, of necessity, reconcile with oneself if one is to forgive oneself” (2008: 64). Taking into
account the sense of some victims of evils that forgiveness and reconciliation are intertwined,
I recommend that nonideal approaches to ethical theorizing should resist the neat division
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Kathryn J. Norlock
between forgiveness as interior and reconciliation as exterior. Watkins notes that forgiveness
and reconciliation are both “complex and contested concepts” (21) and adds that “there are
attitudinal—as well as institutional—dimensions of reconciliation” (22). How one feels about
another may not be so easily separated from how one treats another. Unilateral forgiveness,
according to Watkins, “can sometimes be an effective route to reconciliation” (33), especially
when the repentance of wrongdoers is not forthcoming, and when wide agreement as to “the
moral complexion of the conflict” (39) is unattainable.
Evils as only forgivable by direct victims

Whether or not all survivors of conflict can agree on the moral complexion of a conflict, the sad
reality is that, in the aftermath of evils, the direct victims are often dead. Scholars of forgiveness
differ with respect to whether anyone can forgive evils on behalf of a victim or as a second-best
sort of forgiveness when the victim is dead, or alive but unwilling, or absent. The early stages of
the proliferation in forgiveness literature seemed to settle this question in favor of direct victims
having the only standing to forgive, and precluding all others from forgiving a victim’s evildoers.
Some of the interest in seeing direct victims accorded the only standing to forgive is due to the
influence of two major early theorists, Joram Haber (1991) and Jeffrie Murphy (1988), whose
accounts of forgiveness are primarily concerned with “the passion of self-respect” (Murphy
1988: 16). Understandably, if forgiveness overcomes resentment produced by protective self-
respect, then only the victim can report overcoming self-respect’s demand for resentment.
A consequence of this view is that Murphy and Haber both must then reach for explanation
when they each consider the example of a mother forgiving injuries to her son. Murphy argues,
“Sometimes, of course, I will psychologically identify with some persons and will see injuries
to them as in some sense injuries to me”; he later adds, “Parents can resent harms done to their
children, but this is the kind of exception that proves the rule. . . . Resentment only seems pos-
sible for the parents because they regard their children as somehow an extension of themselves”
(Murphy 1988: 21n9, 56n16). Haber similarly notes, “This is because the relationship between
mother and son is such that an injury to the son is an injury to the mother, so that the mother’s
forgiveness is really for her own injury” (1991: 49).
Authors who adhere to this view tend to argue that survivors of the direct victim are sec-
ondary victims, and that caring but more distant others are tertiary victims (Govier 2002).
Describing victims as secondary sufferers may be apt, but may overly idealize identifiable victims
of evils as direct or indirect in their suffering. People are embedded in relationships which affect
their senses of identification with others. As relational beings, harms to us from evils are not
reducible to matters of self-respect; we needn’t see our hurt loved ones as “extensions of our-
selves” in order to reflect on our attitudes toward their wrongdoers. Therefore, I resist describ-
ing the injury to the son as identical to the injury to the mother who identifies with her son, if
only because “identifying with” another is not the same as identifying as another.
More recent accounts of forgiveness have de-emphasized the notion of direct victims, and
offered more multidimensional models of forgiveness. As Glen Pettigrove (2012) argues:
the attempt to tie the friend’s, parent’s, or compassionate observers’ feelings to their
standing as secondary or tertiary victims misconstrues their emotional response. [Even]
if one takes forgiveness to be the overcoming or forswearing of resentment, this need
not commit one to the claim that only the victim has the standing to forgive.
(29)
286
Emotions have objects, Pettigrove emphasizes, and, as beings with multiple relationships,
our emotions may have other-centered objects, or relational objects, that vary qualitatively and
quantitatively. Evils are characterized by intolerable harm, and what is tolerable for survivors
of evils depends on the relationships they have with other victims and with evildoers. The sort
of social death involved in surviving genocide, for example, may be intolerable and severe on
dimensions that transcend whether one forgives or refuses to forgive for one’s own injury or that
of another. Indeed, surviving an evil inflicted on a group yields harms that one suffers precisely
because of one’s relationships.
Forgiveness of evils as inevitably incomplete or untrue

(especially when unilateral)
According to some philosophers, forgiveness is only complete or genuine when one has
overcome the last drop of resentment, and negative feelings do not recur (Horsbrugh 1974).
Epistemological problems surround paradigms of genuine forgiveness as complete. If anger
recurs, if agents later regret what they felt or extended, one may wonder if the agent really
forgave in the first place. It is also not clear how we know when forgiveness is complete. On
accounts like this, as Pamela Hieronymi (2001) says, “anger and forgiveness are not compatible”
(539–40). Howard McGary (1989) stresses the cessation of resentment; David Novitz (1998)
describes anger and forgiveness as banished and dispelled once one forgives.
Yet the requirement of completeness seems problematic. If forgiveness involves ridding one-
self of all negative feelings, and never rebuking one’s wrongdoer in the future for wrongs one
forgave in the past, then its completeness seems at best that which is eternally assumed, rather
than guaranteed. Even the most sanguine person cannot know that memories, regrets, and new
interpretations of old wrongs won’t intrude. Further, completeness is most easily achieved with
minor wrongs, which are hardly instructive of forgiveness on the occasions when it’s needed
more urgently, that is, after evils, at those times when the wrong in question is severe, has lin-
gering consequences, or occurs in relationships one cannot or will not leave. The literature on
trauma is instructive in the ways in which memories are unpredictable, and perceptions of dan-
ger, harm, regret, and guilt recur. Not all these perceptions are equally irrational. Claudia Card
(2002) argues for the role of “certain emotional residues” as “moral remainders,” “rectificatory
feelings regarding what otherwise proves unrectifiable by our actions. . . . These emotional resi-
dues . . . reveal our appreciation that all has not been made right, or that not all is as it should be
(or would be, ideally) between us” (169). I add that persons are not unchanging. Our apprecia-
tion of wrongs done to us is also subject to change; our feelings do not admit of permanence.
More accommodating treatments of forgiveness allow for the ongoing presence of nega-
tive feelings. Charles Griswold (2007) argues that forgiveness aims for overcoming resentment,
with “commitment to its continued abatement,” but “forswearing resentment does not require
giving up every negative feeling” (43, 41). Joram Haber (1991) argues that performative expres-
sions of forgiveness do not necessarily turn out to be infelicitous if we have angry feelings when
thinking about wrong acts at later dates. This speech act only misfires if the agent delivers it
while resentment “was festering in her,” (Haber 1991: 49–50). His insight is valuable; seeing
forgiveness as a performative speech act explains, without dismissing, our forgiving at an earlier
time even if we feel anger when reflecting on the harm done at a later date. Pettigrove (2012)
wisely observes that forgiveness is in the class of commissive illocutions, in other words, a com-
mitment both related to and distinct from promising, committing oneself “to a course of action”
that is “compatible with the speaker still feeling angry” (12, 13). Importantly, Griswold, Haber,
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Kathryn J. Norlock
and Pettigrove all attend more to behavioral and interpersonal aspects of forgiveness than purely
intrapersonal aspects; commitments to certain practices and behaviors, and performance of cer-
tain illocutions, do not require the completion of solitary and internal emotional work.
In short, the concern that forgiveness is only perfect, complete, or genuine when one has
overcome all negative feelings seems an idealized picture that does not take into account the
actualities of memory, trauma, and emotional cognition. An approach informed by nonideal
theory starts reasoning about forgiveness from the material realities that include the unpredict-
ability of future human experience and future thoughts. I hope the picture I draw of a nonideal
account of forgiveness is now coming into sharper focus; the multidimensional aspects of for-
giveness include forgiveness as a speech act, a commitment, and a set of practices and behaviors,
as well as an emotion or brain state. One may engage with some aspects of forgiveness before
others. One may extend it before permanently sanguine feelings have taken over one’s soul.
Accounts of forgiveness that are determined to exclude all but the “complete” variety are pri-
oritizing an idealized version of perfect forgiveness in less trying contexts over the experiences
of victims of evil who forgive.
Forgiveness of evils as an elective gift and never required

Theorists on either side of the above debates generally maintain that forgiveness is an elective
gift that can never be required of victims. To demand of those who suffer from intolerable
harms that they owe anything to their evildoers seems morally wrong, burdening the already-
burdened with caring for others when they need so much care themselves. Some of the argu-
ments for forgiveness as an elective gift are consequentialist; philosophers and psychologists in
postconflict areas point out that evils are so difficult to rectify that it is possible their victims will
never recover, and requiring their care for others detracts from victims’ slow recovery (Lamb
2002; Schott 2004). Some of the arguments are conceptual; philosophers including Pettigrove
(2012) and psychologists including Robert Enright (2012, 2015) argue for the centrality of love
to forgiveness, and point out that, as love cannot be commanded, forgiveness must be a gift.
Still other arguments are pragmatically sociopolitical; philosopher Renée Jeffery, with others,
notes that forgiveness is often seen as imposed upon victims from sectarian, usually Christian,
traditions, and observes that some find this unacceptable in the secular worlds of international
politics or the pluralist communities that must rally after evils (2008: 180).
The earnest assurance of scholars that forgiveness is not required, even as some urge victims
to consider forgiveness, is so ubiquitous in philosophical literature that one may wonder why
it is a worry; if almost everyone insists that forgiveness is elective, then why does electivity
continue to receive so much attention? Alice MacLachlan’s (2009) articulation of forgiveness
as “a moral power” suggests one answer: she describes moral powers as “individual capacities
for morally meaningful responses to others,” adding, “in exercising a moral power, we effect
some morally significant consequence” (152). Seeing forgiveness as the exercise of individual’s
moral responses, she argues, “draws us away from valuing forgiveness itself, and toward the value
of our capacity to choose forgiveness (or not)” (152, emphasis in original). The abstract ide-
alization of forgiveness, unconnected from the choices of individuals in a position to forgive
or refuse forgiveness, ought to be avoided in the course of attending to the actualities of vic-
tims’ experiences. MacLachlan adds that “thinking about forgiveness as a moral power . . .
appropriately recognizes the discretionary nature of forgiveness” and “frees us to value refusals
to forgive along with forgiveness itself, in ways that a duty-based or virtue-based approach does
not” (152). MacLachlan concludes that seeing forgiveness as an elective gift and an exertion of
288
a moral power even obviates the initial question as to whether some evils are unforgivable. An
appreciation of what different victims do leads one to the view that forgiveness “has character-
istic features, but . . . individual occasions of forgiveness may present one, two, or all of these
features, depending on the situation, the individuals involved, and the relationship between
them” (MacLachlan 2009: 152).
However, I agree with Per-Erik Milam that a deep tension exists between the belief that we
forgive for good reasons and the belief that forgiveness is always elective (Milam 2018). Some
relationships, especially between caregivers and those cared for, are (among other things) fidu-
ciary relationships, “marked by the expectation that one party will use his or her judgment to
act in the best interests of the other” (MacLachlan 2016: 366), and other relationships between
more equal parties (e.g., married adults) are structured in part by their explicit, expressed
commitments. Not all relationships are entirely chosen, and not all relationships leave trust-
building and wellness-maintaining activities to chance, so essentially elective forgiveness is in
error, because it is insufficiently responsive to the contexts that endow forgiveness with its
appropriate moral import.
My aim throughout this chapter has been to connect contentious aspects of forgiveness with
nonideal theory, and to emphasize sensitivity to the actualities of human experience. I ought
to note that idealizing conceptions of forgiveness as, if not required, at least incumbent upon
us, are often advocated by ethical and sensitive authors. Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1999) has
argued that, “without forgiveness, there really is no future” (255), but it would be difficult to
show that Tutu was insensitive to the suffering of his people. Margaret Holmgren (2012) argues
for the unconditional forgiveness of unrepentant evildoers (ix), but it is indisputable that she
demonstrates profound appreciation for the serious harms that shake victims’ senses of safety and
self-worth. Holmgren attends to the endangered well-being of offenders, especially those con-
victed in the criminal justice system of the United States, and her compassion for those offenders
made worse by punitive prison systems cannot be disregarded as failing to appreciate actualities.
Trudy Govier (2002) urges us never to give up on a human being, but she relates concrete
examples of particular South African participants in the TRC process who resisted the sense that
forgiveness was a requirement, deferring often to “South African voices” (72).
My concern is not that advocates of idealized forgiveness like the above authors ignore all
actualities. Scholars of forgiveness who disagree with each other are all appreciative of suffer-
ing. My concern is the approach to the topic that directs scholars’ attentions to that suffering.
Advocates of forgiveness tend to take, as their starting point of inquiry, an idealized picture of
what forgiveness ought to look like, and then consider whether or not the reports of victims of
evils line up with the picture. This is demonstrated by Charles Griswold’s (2007) argument for a
paradigm of forgiveness, “the model case” of “forgiveness at its best,” which does not have the
“special problems” that arise from what he considers legitimate, morally important, yet non-
paradigmatic examples of forgiveness (such as self-forgiveness or third-party forgiveness) (38).
Pettigrove (2012) similarly advocates a view of forgiveness that reflects the “higher manifesta-
tion,” the forgiveness that we hope for (18), complete with absolute emotional transformation
and benevolent commitment to another, although he grants the need for a minimal “lowest
common denominator” view of forgiveness (19). Clear cases and central features are appealing,
allowing us to feel we have arrived at some consensus about the nature of forgiveness. But, in
concrete contexts, it is possible that the most we hope for is something other than that which is
maximally manifested in all possible ways by a hypothetical agent. I would go so far as to say that
it is even preferable to hope for less than maximal forgiveness when it is reflective of situations to
which we should be sensitive.
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Kathryn J. Norlock
Who benefits? Prioritizing the victims of evils

Given the predominance of Kantian and retributivist models in the literature on forgiveness, it
is not surprising that many philosophers attach suspicion of authenticity to the prioritization of
the good consequences of forgiving. Consequentialist arguments are more often reflected in the
attention of psychologists to beneficial outcomes of forgiveness processes, which resonate with
lay understandings of the uses of forgiveness as part of a healing or recovery process. Indeed,
the affirmative reactions of survey subjects, when asked about forgiveness as primarily for the
purposes of feeling good or maintaining relationships, is a striking contrast to the cautionary
approaches of philosophers.
Psychologists have repeatedly demonstrated, and advocated, the benefits of forgiving to
personal health, relationships, and communities. I appreciate that resentment of calls for for-
giveness can likewise be detrimental to victims and communities. However, it is remark-
able to review philosophers’ arguments against feeling better alongside psychologists’ reports
that victims’ own well-being is the most often-cited reason to begin the pursuit of forgive-
ness (Belicki, Rourke, & McCarthy, 2008). Joram Haber and Jeffrie Murphy argue forcefully
against accounts of outcomes like the health of oneself or community as instructive of the
moral appropriateness of forgiveness. Murphy (2002) cautions against feeling better about
oneself or one’s situation if one’s assessments of one’s own improved well-being are inac-
curate: “In my view slavery, oppression, and victimization are made worse, not better, when
people are rendered content in their victimization” (46). Haber (1991) goes further, saying the
beneficial results to forgivers “are largely irrelevant from a moral point of view” (108). Rather
than argue that positive results do not occur (although he suggests that they sometimes don’t),
Haber objects that “consequentialist reasons . . . are essentially practical, rather than moral”
(108); like Murphy, Haber appeals to the priorities of justice. For Haber, forgiveness rests on
the repentance of the wrongdoer; therapeutic concerns that don’t address the repentance of
the wrongdoer are then morally and philosophically uninteresting and such “consequentialist
reasons ought not to be countenanced” (108).
What a contrast is then provided by the responses of those victims who actually participate
in forgiveness research. Therapeutic considerations are not nearly so irrelevant to the men and,
more often, women so integrally involved in providing the testimonies that generate the data.
Subjects in repeated studies exhibit interest in such outcomes as a thriving life, improved close
relationships, and improved adjustment to changed circumstances. The interests of participants
in improved well-being for all affected offers a noticeable departure from scholarly conceptions
of forgiveness; as one research team wrote:
Scholars have been very clear on the notion that forgiveness is not done just to feel
better, but this is exactly what so many of our participants said. In fact, some were
adamant about wanting to feel better as their main (and, for some, the only) reason
for forgiving.
(DeCourville et al. 2008: 10)
This is not to say that good consequences of forgiveness for relationships entail that forgive-
ness is to be recommended. Measurable outcomes are useful evidence to weigh in moral decision-
making between options, which may also include securing other personal and social goods,
including the physical safety that at times only distance can secure, or the motivation to act on
one’s own behalf or others’, which righteous anger may better inform. Although potential ben-
efits are only part of one’s deliberations, they certainly seem to have moral relevance to some.
290
Philosophers may reasonably respond that what one wants to feel is not necessarily con-
nected to what one ought to do, and could suggest we distinguish between genuine, that is,
moral forgiveness, and something else, such as prudential or practical forgiveness. Yet the same
respondents who assert the importance of the good outcomes of forgiveness also perceive the
same forgiveness as important to their moral lives. Here deontological-retributivists and their
critics may have to simply agree to disagree, but I wish to suggest that relational conceptions
of the self may better account for the moral significance of good outcomes of forgiveness. As
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela (2011) reminds us:
Philosophical questions such as the moral inappropriateness of forgiveness can and

should give way and be subsumed to human questions, for in the end we are a soci-
ety of people and not of ideas, a fragile web of interdependent human beings, not
of stances.
(545)
Conclusion
In The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil, Claudia Card (2002) offers the valuable insight
that philosophy is often written from the perspective of an administrator (35). When con-
ceptual analysis of forgiveness proceeds from the deontological-retributive moral vision, we
find a preference for holding wrongdoers responsible, rather than letting them off of hooks, a
well-intentioned concern for fairness yet one that demonstrates a widely held perspective of
executors of punishment (Card 2002: 49). Prioritizing retribution, however, is compatible with
forgiveness; as Arendt says, forgiveness is an alternative to punishment but “by no means its
opposite” ([1958] 1998: 241). Further, deontological arguments that genuine forgiveness con-
sists in rational, internal transformations centrally involving self-respect put an undue burden
of proof on victims of wrongdoing that their moral responses are authentic, and such argu-
ments have the odd, unintended consequence that the more isolated we are in the course of
this transformation, and the less chance that our thinking is potentially influenced by others,
the more morally worthy it is.
By taking a nonideal approach, philosophers may better guide attempts at definition of for-
giveness by crediting the importance and value of practical acts of forgiveness, as described by
the victims of evils who exercise their moral powers to respond. Attending to the wealth of
information that victims of varieties of harm provide, we find, not insincere or inauthentic
agents, but agents who forgive (or not) for multiple reasons, citing differing goals, priorities,
and understandings of the term. In the aftermath of evils, that information is provided more
often by women. It is no longer news, or should not be, that women are overrepresented in
forgiveness research, and far more likely to take part in studies and interviews.1 Their narratives
and self-reports provide a great deal of variety, and one can find transgression of every condi-
tion of genuine forgiveness, in narratives describing forgiving before elimination of all anger,
prioritizing family or group harmony over other considerations, and forgiving to end or avoid a
conflict, or to make oneself or others feel better. Taking the predominant approach of applying
preconceived definitions of genuine forgiveness to nonphilosophers’ narratives and self-reports,
one may conclude that most people, earnest as they seem, are not genuinely forgiving. There
is something disturbing in the mismatch between nonscholarly and philosophical understand-
ings of forgiveness, especially when it implies that women, in particular, are disproportionately
wrong. Feminist philosophers who argue for the moral importance of relationality and experi-
ence provide us with other ways to interpret the seemingly problematic results.
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Kathryn J. Norlock
Of course, accounts of persons as relational have been articulated by both feminists and
nonfeminists. Since women are disproportionately the sources of forgiveness testimonies, we
ought to rely on feminist accounts that prioritize the experiences of women in the course of
their conceptual analyses of relationality. Although feminists do not have a monopoly on the
insight that selves are relational and embodied, a feminist perspective on forgiveness motivates
attention to the ways our relationality is central to seeing whom we can forgive, and why;
centering attention on gender reminds us that all relationships are gendered. Relations are the
connections between embodied individuals whose experiences and positions of power inform
our understanding and our conduct.
At a minimum, the self-in-relation includes the idea that “relationships to others are intrinsic
to identity,” as Marilyn Friedman (1991) notes; “indeed, the social conception of the self tends to
blur the distinction between self and other” (165). Blurred distinctions are not typically integrated
into dyadic accounts of forgiveness. This is evident when philosophers refer to direct victims of
clearly identifiable wrongdoers. On such occasions, the interest so many of us share in being able
to write easily about clear cases of offense and recompense seems to dictate both an overvaluing of
the moral independence of the agents involved and a presumption of their ontological bounded-
ness that evils do not always permit. If we take seriously the experiences and narratives of others
as guides to the values and social functions of forgiveness for most people, while keeping rela-
tionality clearly in view, then transgressive accounts of forgiveness become not just graduates to
the class of the genuine but new paradigms of forgiveness that instruct our subsequent theorizing.
Note
1 Of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, Frederic Luskin says, “One interesting thing we learned . . . was that
more women than men sign up for forgiveness experiments. This gender difference has been corrobo-
rated by other forgiveness studies”; see Luskin (2002: 89). Worthington, more bluntly, says simply that
“women seem more likely to forgive and certainly are more likely to participate in forgiveness research”;
see Worthington et al. (2000: 241). Also see Malcolm et al. (2008).
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EVIL AND FREEDOM
This chapter will investigate the relevance of recent discussions of free will for the status of moral
evil. Moral evil presupposes the existence of free will, and if recent studies in especially psychol-
ogy and neuroscience demonstrate that our wills are not free – or that we do not even have
wills as we usually understand it – we also have to give up our belief in the existence of moral
evil. A world without freedom can contain an enormous amount of suffering, but no moral evil.
I argue that we have little reason to give up our belief in the existence of moral evil in light of
arguments for general determinism or recent findings in psychology and neuroscience.
Concepts of evil
We use the term “evil” in a number of ways. We can for instance say that we will “choose the
lesser of two evils” without thereby thinking that what we choose will really be an evil alterna-
tive. I will use the term in a narrower sense here, as referring to either acts of extreme wrongdo-
ing or natural events that cause great suffering.
Leibniz distinguishes between metaphysical, physical, and moral evil. Metaphysical evil is the
imperfection of the world, an imperfection that cannot be eliminated because all things created
must have a lower degree of perfection than God. Physical or natural evil is suffering, and moral
evil is our sins (Leibniz 1985: §21). Leibniz also calls moral evil malum culpae because it is related
to guilt. Moral evil can be ascribed only to creatures with a capacity for self-determination.
Natural evil is what it is, and it would make little sense to morally blame tectonic plates for
creating a tsunami. Similarly, it makes little sense to morally blame animals for wrongdoing.
That is not to say that we have not done so. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, for
instance, animal trials were often conducted (Evans 1906; Girgen 2003). A famous example is
the sow that was tried in 1457 in French Savigny for the allegedly premeditated murder of a
five-year-old child. Her six piglets also stood accused. The sow was sentenced to death, but the
defense attorney managed to win the six piglets an acquittal on the grounds of their youth and
their mother’s incontestably bad influence. We find such trials odd today because we do not see
animals as proper objects of moral blame, and we would be far more upset if a human being had
killed a child than if an animal had done so.
As Rousseau points out, when we are harmed, we look more for the intention than the
effect, and even though a tile that falls off a roof might cause more harm it will not be as hurtful
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as a rock thrown at us by someone who wants to harm us (Rousseau 2011: 87). That is not to
say that the amount of harm is not of great importance, but we draw a distinction between evils
caused by natural events and evils caused by moral agents. It is, of course, a great tragedy if a
mountainside collapses and crushes a village, but it is more upsetting if armed forces slaughter
everyone in the village.
We can say that a distinction between natural evil and moral evil is a part of our folk con-
ception of evil. Making that distinction with greater precision is not so straightforward. John
Hick suggests that we draw the distinction by claiming that moral evil is caused by humans and
natural evil by nonhuman causes (Hick 1978: 12). There are serious weaknesses with such an
approach because much that is done by humans, and certainly could be referred to as evils, can-
not adequately be described as moral evil because the agent did not act voluntarily and would
therefore not be regarded as a proper object of moral blame.
I would rather argue that the difference between natural and moral evil is that moral evil
is the sort of extreme wrongdoing that an agent can be held morally responsible for, whereas
nobody can be held responsible for natural evil. I will further argue that moral responsibility
requires free will. A world without freedom can still contain evil, but it will only be natural evil,
not moral evil. A world without freedom can contain enormous amount of suffering, but only
a being who could have acted otherwise can be held responsible for not having acted otherwise
and therefore be guilty of moral evil. We therefore see that the distinction between moral evil
and natural evil will collapse if we do not manage to defend the existence of human freedom.
Unless indicated otherwise, “evil” will be used in the sense of “moral evil” in the remainder
of this chapter. A central question in much recent philosophical literature on evil is devoted to
the question as to whether or not evil has an essence. Can evil be defined in terms of necessary
and sufficient criteria? Some features of the concept of moral evil are quite uncontroversial.
Hardly anyone would deny that wrongfulness is a necessary criterion for evil. However, this
does not get us very far because we see evil as an especially bad variety of wrongdoing, either
in terms of the quality or the quantity of the wrongdoing. There is extensive debate on these
matters (see Russell 2014). Two people, A and B, who are in complete agreement that a given
action, X, is morally wrong may disagree as to whether or not the action was evil. This might be
because (1) B rejects the concept of evil altogether whereas A accepts it, (2) B believes that, even
though X was very wrong, the term “evil” should be reserved for even more serious cases, or
(3) B believes that, even though X was very wrong, it lacked a certain characteristic that is nec-
essary for an action to qualify as evil. There is little A can do about (1) other than try to explain
what he means by evil and attempt to show why he believes that it is suitable for describing
certain actions and agents. B could argue that the concept of evil should be abandoned because
it lacks explanatory power and/or is dangerous (see Cole 2006). A could reply that it might
in fact be possible to establish a concept of evil that has explanatory power (see Russell 2014:
Chapter 10). Even if we were to conclude that we are not capable of explaining actions by
means of a concept of evil, this also holds for many other moral concepts, such as “good” and
“bad.” Yet, few people would argue that all such concepts should be dismissed solely because
they are not explanatorily useful. On the contrary, they have other uses, primarily that of describ-
ing and condemning or praising actions. As for (2), A will simply have to admit that there are large
gray areas between “serious wrongdoing” and “evil.” Perhaps (3) is the most challenging, as
that would ideally be answered by giving an account of necessary and sufficient conditions for
X being evil, and then investigating whether or not all those conditions are satisfied. However,
I doubt that any such definition is possible.
I believe that there is no specific quality – e.g., the agent having a specific feeling or
motivation – that sets all evil acts apart from nonevil acts. Evil acts and agents are as diverse
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as nonevil acts and agents. Some argue that an act is evil only if the agent takes pleasure in
causing harm. For instance, Colin McGinn defines an evil person as someone who takes
pleasure in the pain of others and who does evil for its own sake (McGinn 1997: 62–4, 82).
This account is far too narrow and would exclude most actions and agents that we intuitively
would describe as evil. Evil agents act for a great multitude of reasons that cannot be reduced
to a single, common denominator.
If evil is not be defined in terms of certain motivational traits, perhaps it will have to be
defined in terms of consequences, such that an action is evil only if it causes extreme harm.
Claudia Card takes such a position, and she argues that moral evil has two components:
(1) unacceptable harm that (2) is caused by a misdeed someone can be held responsible for
(Card 2002). It is the extent of the harm rather than the mental state of the perpetrator that is
essential to her account. I believe that this is clearly preferable to McGinn’s approach because
we intuitively describe certain acts as evil without having any clear understanding of the mental
state of the perpetrator. However, I am not convinced that an act needs to cause any real harm
at all in order to justifiably be described as evil. We can easily conceive of an agent who attempts
to commit an atrocious act – e.g., detonate a bomb in an orphanage – but who fails to produce
his desired result because of bad luck or incompetence. We would intuitively take this to be
evil even though no harm whatsoever was caused because placing the bomb was evil in itself. If
someone had managed to swap Anders Behring Breivik’s live ammunition with blanks before
he went to Utøya in Norway on July 22, 2011, with the intention of murdering as many teen-
agers as possible, we would judge Breivik’s action to be evil even if he did not harm anyone by
firing blanks at the kids there. Causing actual harm does not seem to be a necessary condition.
Having said that, I readily agree that most evil acts involve terrible harm to victims.
We can judge an act that causes less actual harm to be more evil than an act that causes
greater harm if it was performed with a nastier intention. That would seem to indicate that
motivation is what separates evil from nonevil acts. However, we can also justifiably judge
an act to be evil even if the perpetrator does not seem to have a very sinister motivation – he
might even be trying to do what he takes to be morally good – but where the consequences
are extremely bad. Most acts of terrorism that harm innocent bystanders appear to be motivated
by a conception of the act as fully morally justified. Our judgments about evil cannot usually
be reduced to judgments about motivation alone or amount of harm alone, but are typically
mixed, though in some cases one or the other is sufficient. Neither a specific mental state in
the agent nor a certain amount of harm, or a specific combination of the two, seems to be a
necessary condition for moral evil.
As I see it, “evil” is a concept we use to describe the outer limits of immorality. “Evil” sim-
ply designates the outer end of a spectrum of morality. We need the concept of evil in order to
capture this extreme aspect of our moral experience. The Holocaust was not simply “morally
wrong” or “very morally wrong,” as this fails to capture the gravity of the events. Likewise,
when Anders Behring Breivik slaughtered 69 people, most of them teenagers, at Utøya, after
killing eight people with a bomb in the center of Oslo, it will not do to say that he acted “badly”
or “very badly.” We need something stronger that captures the moral horror of these events.
We do evil for a number of different reasons – egoistic, altruistic and idealistic. In C. Fred
Alford’s investigation of folk conceptions of evil, many informants said that there should be
many different words for evil because there are many kinds of evil (Alford 1997: 32). Alford saw
this primarily as an excuse for oneself or others because one could then categorize something as
a lesser form of evil. I believe that Alford’s informants were correct in distinguishing between
different kinds of evil, and I further believe that these distinctions should be drawn according
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to the different kinds of motivations people have for doing evil, including good motivation.
However, all these varieties of evil would be varieties of moral evil, and such evil is inextricably
related to moral responsibility.
Evil and responsibility

Even if we do not manage to reach a consensus on what an evil action is and how it is to be
distinguished from nonevil action, there are at least two necessary conditions for evil agency:
(1) the act must be a case of serious wrongdoing and (2) the agent must be morally responsible
for the wrongdoing. It is to the second condition we now turn.
There seems to be common acceptance in the literature on evil that someone who performs
an act of evil is blameworthy and should be held responsible. Conversely, only those who can be
held responsible are capable of committing acts of evil. The existence of moral evil does not pre-
suppose that a specific sort of motivation can be found in all evil agents, but it does presuppose
that there are agents who can be held morally responsible, and this turn presupposes freedom.
An action can be morally evil only if the agent is morally responsible for what he or she does.
The agent will be responsible only if the action is voluntary. We take free will to be a necessary
condition for moral responsibility because it seems unreasonable to blame an agent for an act if
he did not have the relevant control of what he was doing. If there is no free will, evil is simply
the product of a multitude of causes – physical, psychological, and social – but this evil will then
exclusively be natural evil, and moral evil will have no place in our ontology.
Responsibility is traditionally ascribed to an agent if the agent causes an event, is in control of
his actions and is aware of what he is bringing about (Aristotle 1998: 1109b30). By “causing an
event” we here mean that the event would not have happened unless the agent had contributed
with an action or omission. The agent does not have to be the most influential cause in order
to be responsible.
Agents capable of moral responsibility must also have some understanding of basic moral
concepts and responses. This understanding does not need to be sophisticated, but without a
general grasp on these things one will not be able to orient oneself in a normative universe and,
accordingly, cannot be held responsible. Furthermore, agents must have a reasonable amount
of control over their actions. Everybody will grant that there are cases of agents who do not
act freely. Even the most uncompromising libertarian will admit that there are cases where an
agent should not be held responsible because what happened was beyond the agent’s control, for
instance if the agent was clearly psychotic and acting from delusions. There are difficult cases, for
instance if the agent has a neurological injury that increases the likelihood of violent behavior.
A person with damage to the brain’s frontal lobe can undergo changes in behavior and can
become more violent. We might think that the act in question was occasioned by the injury,
and that the requirements of voluntariness – and therefore of moral and legal responsibility –
have not been met. However, persons with such an injury are only three times more likely
to commit acts of violence, and almost 90 percent of the people in this group are nonviolent
(Gazzaniga 2011: 194). We cannot therefore argue that the fact that an individual has such an
injury is sufficient to absolve him of moral responsibility. The extent to which a person in this
group is morally and legally responsible for their actions must be decided on an individual basis.
The fact that such brain damage is present only gives us reason to investigate whether voluntari-
ness requirements, which we normally would accept as given, have been met.
The line between voluntary actions and involuntary behavior is not sharply drawn. In prin-
ciple, this idea can be extended to all actions. We can never be absolutely certain that an agent
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has in fact acted voluntarily, but for the most part we can readily identify who warrants a moral
and juridical response and who does not. Free agency and moral responsibility are possible not
because our actions are uncaused but because we have an ability to imagine and reflect upon dif-
ferent alternatives. We act according to our desires and preferences, but we can also choose how
to act, given these desires and preferences. Freedom does not mean the capacity to break with
natural laws but simply to be able to reflect on different alternatives and to choose which one
to bring about. The crucial question is whether or not an agent has a capacity for responsibility,
both in general and at the time of a given action.
The account of responsibility that has been presented so far is desert-based responsibility, and
such responsibility appears to be incompatible with determinism. I argued that only if an agent
could have chosen to act otherwise would that agent be a proper object of blame. However,
some philosophers believe that determinism does not undermine moral responsibility, even if
it may preclude free will. John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza argue that freedom entails an
ability to act otherwise, that several future options remain open, while responsibility does not
require this, and therefore responsibility is possible even if freedom is not (Fischer and Ravizza
1998). Their view, called “semi-compatibilism,” is that moral responsibility only requires that
an agent is “reason-responsive,” i.e., that the agent can understand and act upon moral reasons,
but that this does not presuppose free will. This view of responsibility is consequentialist and
forward-looking. The basic idea is that we hold people responsible in order to prevent similar
acts from them or others in the future. This differs from a desert-based view of responsibility,
where we hold people responsible because of what they have done and not simply in order to
prevent future wrongs. According to a hard determinist, all our actions are products of fac-
tors beyond our control, and we are therefore not responsible for those actions. Determinists
may argue that there are good, pragmatic reasons for holding people responsible, as that might
prevent future wrongdoing, but this differs from claiming that they are responsible, or, more
precisely: that they deserve to be held responsible. The forward-looking account provides criteria
for what it means to be held responsible, but not really for being responsible. The crucial notion
here is that of moral desert, and moral desert is essential to our idea of moral evil. Determinism is
incompatible with desert-based responsibility, and only agents capable of desert-based responsi-
bility are capable of moral evil.
The general problems of determinism and moral luck

It might be the case that determinism gives a correct description of the world. Our conscious-
ness of free will might not at all be a consciousness of something real, i.e., of a will that is in fact
free. As Spinoza puts it: “This, then, is that human freedom which all men boast of possessing
and which consists solely in this, that men are conscious of their desire and unaware of the causes
by which they are determined” (Spinoza 1982: 250). If we are determined in such a way, there
does not seem to be a compelling reason to burden anyone with normative demands. In such
universe, there is no distinction in terms of moral desert between a sadistic killer and his victim.
They are both living out their nature, end of discussion.
According to determinism, every event has sufficient causes that can explain the event com-
pletely. Most philosophers will grant that the truth or falsehood of determinism is a contingent
question: Determinism is neither necessarily true nor necessarily false. Its truth or falsehood can-
not be settled through philosophical analysis. However, no empirical investigation can answer
the question either. As Patrick Suppes puts it, the deterministic metaphysician can safely cling to
his viewpoint in the certainty that it can never be refuted empirically, but the same is also true
of the metaphysical indeterminist (Suppes 1993: 254). It is undecided as to whether determinism
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or indeterminism provides a true description of the world. This means that the extent to which
human beings are or are not determined is an open question. We can call this a metaphysical
stalemate, and I see little reason to believe that truly compelling arguments will be forthcoming.
If the general problem of determinism is as open as I argue, I suggest that our common prac-
tice of holding people responsible because we believe that they deserve to be blamed or praised
makes determinism an unattractive position. We praise, condemn, reward, and punish people
for their actions, and these social practices rest on the belief that people are responsible for
their actions. The question then becomes whether the determinist’s arguments for his position
are so convincing that we would be willing to renounce such an essential component of our
worldview. These social practices certainly do not offer proof that determinism is false, but it is
reasonable to say that they do impose a burden of proof on the determinist. I believe that the
main questions regarding determinism are so undecided – and probably will remain so – that
our conceptions of moral responsibility are not in any grave danger.
However, there are other challenges, such as the problem of moral luck. There are many
kinds of moral luck, but what they all have in common is that they suggest that what you end
up doing – the actions you perform and the consequences of your actions – is only to a limited
extent, perhaps none at all, up to you. As Thomas Nagel puts it:
The area of genuine agency, and therefore of legitimate moral judgement, seems to
shrink under this scrutiny to an extensionsless point. Everything seems to result from
the combined influence of factors, antecedent and posterior to action, that are not
within the agent’s control. Since he cannot be responsible for them, he cannot be
responsible for their results.
(Nagel 1979: 35)
Agents should not be morally evaluated differently if the differences between them are due
to factors beyond their control, and proponents of moral luck theory will typically argue that
all such differences between agents are in fact due to factors beyond the agent’s control. Nagel
himself does not fully accept such a conclusion, and believes that moral luck does not under-
mine moral responsibility. However, Neil Levy has taken the stronger position, and argues
that no agent can be held morally responsible “because luck ensures that there are no desert-
entailing differences between moral agents” (Levy 2011: 10). According to Levy, the existence
of responsibility-undermining luck entails that no theory that affirms free will is credible. Every
single difference between agents will ultimately be a matter of luck, and therefore no agent is
more praise- or blameworthy than another.
Susan Wolf has formulated the example of Jojo, who was raised by his father, a sadistic dicta-
tor, to emulate him. (Wolf 1987: 53–4). Jojo feels great satisfaction when he commits atrocious
acts, and he fully identifies with this satisfaction because it is an expression of the sort of person
he wants to be. Jojo is a monster, but is he morally responsible for his actions? Wolf argues that
because of Jojo’s upbringing it is questionable that he should be held responsible for what he
does. Is there any real moral difference between Jojo and his victims? Is there anything more to
say than that Jojo’s bad luck made him into a sadistic killer and that his victims’ bad luck made
them suffer the acts of this sadistic killer? The proponent of the theory of hard moral luck might
accept that Jojo lives a bad life and his victim a good life, but none of them would deserve praise
or blame for their lives, as it was ultimately a question of luck that one of them ended up as bad
and the other as good.
This way of phrasing the problem of moral luck brings it close to Galen Strawson’s “basic
argument” (Strawson 1994). Strawson argues that only if you are responsible for the way that
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you are – at least when it comes to important mental aspects – can you be held morally account-
able. Since we cannot determine the way we are, moral responsibility is itself illusionary.
Strawson bases his claim on exceptional cases, like the fact that young children and some men-
tally ill persons are not responsible for their actions, but argues that these cases are not actually
exceptional: The pertinent lack of control, and therefore of moral responsibility, is a universal
human phenomenon. This implies that control entails the ability to determine what one is, and
that what one does follows from what one is. Control is understood to be purely causal in nature.
However, one logical objection is that our means of distinguishing between typical agents and
exceptional cases is not a purely causal principle. When we differentiate between small children
and adults in terms of responsibility, it is not because we believe that the causal sequence that lies
the root of the child’s self-formation is essentially different from the causal sequence that pre-
ceded the adult’s self-formation. The crucial distinction here is instead the ability to develop a
more or less adequate understanding of the world, of the self, of causal relations and of norma-
tive demands. The causal history underlying the child’s understanding does not exempt the child
from moral responsibility, but rather the fact that his understanding is inadequate. The same is
true of a person with a severe mental illness. Causal history alone does not absolve an agent of
responsibility for his actions. A causal history can give us reason to assume that an agent suffers
from certain defects, but it does not itself gainsay or lessen the agent’s responsibility. The agent’s
actual capacities decide the case. As for Susan Wolf’s case of Jojo, we will have to ask: can Jojo
differentiate between right and wrong and is he capable of making choices? That is the question,
not what sort of causal history Jojo has.
We wish to know if, when and why we can justifiably hold someone morally responsible.
Neither the general problem of determinism nor the problem of moral luck precludes a legiti-
mate practice of holding agents morally responsible and condemning them as morally evil. Can
we provide criteria for what it means to be responsible? If we accept that we can be mistaken in
morally blaming someone even if he did in fact do what we are blaming him for, we must also
accept that there must be a criterion that must be satisfied if an agent is to be genuinely blame-
worthy. I have suggested that this criterion is voluntariness, and neither the general considera-
tions regarding determinism nor the problem of moral luck has shown that voluntary action is
an impossibility.
The threat of shrinking agency

However, we can have reason to believe that there are more specific problems with regard to
voluntariness. It is conceivable that we live in a universe in which free agency is possible under
certain conditions, but where these conditions are never satisfied in human life, and where there
are therefore no free actions. Both compatibilists and libertarians describe agents as having cer-
tain capacities that are necessary for the execution of free agency. However, this does not answer
the question as to whether or not we actually have these capacities. All actions might on closer
inspection turn out to have causes that are incompatible with free agency. If that were the case,
there would be no moral evil in the world, only natural evil. We therefore have to address the
specific problem of whether agents in fact possess the sort of freedom that is required for moral
responsibility and therefore for moral evil.
An argument for human freedom, and also for the possibility of moral responsibility and
moral evil, must do more than simply show that a universal determinism is unwarranted or that
it is compatible with freedom. One must also give an account of how free agency differs from
events involving other natural objects. Such an account will typically involve intentions, rea-
sons, and a capacity for choice. The account will presuppose that certain condition must be met
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if we are to be warranted in holding something to be an instance of free agency. The problem

is that it is entirely conceivable that these conditions are in fact never satisfied.
We are faced by what Thomas Nadelhoffer has called “the threat of shrinking agency”
(Nadelhoffer 2011). This is distinct from general worries about determinism or moral luck.
There are many such challenges (see Nahmias 2014). Rather than arguing from a general deter-
minism, much recent literature has rather argued from more specific findings, especially in
psychology and neuroscience. The problem here is not whether or not human consciousness
is subject to deterministic laws, but whether our consciousness has the sort of power we have
usually taken for granted in our accounts of human agency. These accounts challenge our belief
in a will that initiates actions because these actions are allegedly already initiated prior to our
consciousness of them, and we lack access to our true motivational states (Caruso 2012). The
problem here is more with free will than with free will. As Nadelhoffer puts it, “The less con-
scious willing we are able to do, the less free will we are able to have” (Nadelhoffer 2011: 178).
John Bargh claims that much human agency that previously has been thought to be under
volitional control is in fact the result of automatic reactions to external stimuli occurring outside
of consciousness. He draws the conclusion that free will is an illusion (Bargh and Earp 2009:
13–15). However, it should be mentioned that Bargh’s research is controversial because it has
been very difficult to replicate his results in new studies. What is clearly plausible in Bargh’s
studies, and that also has been demonstrated in numerous other studies in social psychology, is
that our choices are influenced by situational factors of which we are not aware. Such studies
show us that we are not as self-determining as we usually like to think, but it certainly does not
show that we have no capacity for self-determination and free agency.
A perhaps more challenging theory is epiphenomenalism. An epiphenomenalist will admit
that it does indeed seem like consciousness is guiding our actions, but will maintain that con-
sciousness cannot in fact affect anything at all. There is a one-way causal relationship between
the brain and consciousness, where the brain gives rise to the phenomena of consciousness,
but consciousness cannot affect the brain (or anything else for that matter). We believe that we
experience our decisions affecting the physical world, that I decide to raise my arm, but this
experience cannot guarantee that my will is responsible for lifting the arm. Daniel M. Wegner
claims that “the real causes of human action are unconscious” (Wegner 2002: 97). The evidence
for this claim consists of cases where people experience that they cause bodily movement when
they in fact do not cause them and other cases when people do not have such an experience
when they perform bodily movement. Wegner argues that such studies are evidence to the fact
that we do not have conscious access to the real causes of our behavior. The real causes are sup-
posedly in the brain, and the brain not only causes the behavior – it also causes the illusion that
the behavior is caused by a conscious will.
If conscious willing is an epiphenomenon, then all theories in favor of free agency will be
false. These theories differ in detail, but they all presuppose that human agents evaluate alterna-
tives for action and chose how to act based on reasons. Wegner’s view appears to be fundamen-
tally incompatible with moral responsibility and therefore also with the existence of moral evil.
Moral evil presupposes the existence of free will, and free will can exist only if epiphenomenal-
ism is incorrect. If such an epiphenomenalistic account of consciousness is correct, it will be of
no consequence for free will if a universal determinism is true or not. The truth or falsity of epi-
phenomenalism is completely independent of the truth or falsity of determinism. Even though
most epiphenomenalists are probably determinists, they could just as well be indeterminists,
since epiphenomenalism does not presuppose determinism. An indeterministic epiphenomenal-
ism will be just as big a threat to moral responsibility as a deterministic epiphenomenalism. Both
the deterministic and the indeterministic versions deny that our consciousness has any causal
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power, so there would be no room for an effective, conscious will in our account of agency.
Without a conscious will, there can be no moral responsibility, at least desert-based moral
responsibility, and without moral responsibility there can be no moral evil.
There is no proof of such an epiphenomenalism, and it is hard to see what such a proof
could possibly be. At most, Wegner’s evidence demonstrates that our experience of conscious
willing cannot always be trusted. It does not give us reason to believe that all such experi-
ences are illusory. We know that changes in the brain accompany changes in consciousness,
but we understand very little about the relationship that exists between neural states and states
of consciousness. There is no reason to suppose that your consciousness is simply a byprod-
uct of your brain, even if we grant that consciousness presupposes the existence of certain
neurological structures.
However, other studies might seem to demonstrate the thesis that our own consciousness
of making decisions is nothing but mere afterthoughts produced by biochemical processes in
our brains. Benjamin Libet conducted a number of experiments in the 1980s that many have
taken as proof that free will is an illusion (Libet 1985; 2001; 2002; 2004). The most common
interpretation of these experiments is that they demonstrate that the human brain chooses to
act before we ourselves are conscious of that decision. The experiments proceeded with a
subject being asked to make a certain movement, like bending a wrist or a finger, whenever
he or she wished. At the same time, an EEG (electroencephalogram) was used to measure
the activity in the brain that would show that the subject had decided to make a movement.
This so-called “readiness potential” was then observed in a part of the brain that is especially
connected with voluntary action, and an increase in readiness potential could be observed
approximately half a second before one observed changes in the wrist or hand muscles. Not
only that: the increase in the readiness potential could be observed a third of a second before
the subject was conscious of deciding to act. Libet concluded that the brain itself determined
to act, or at the very least to commence the action, before the subject undertook any con-
scious decision. In short, the brain initiates actions before consciousness enters the picture.
A complicating factor here is that Libet also observed an increase in readiness potential with-
out any action resulting, and he could not therefore use increase in the readiness potential to
predict actions with much precision.
These experiments do not demonstrate that free will is an illusion. They give us reason
to think that unconscious processes in the brain pave the way for action, but they do not
enlighten us as to when or how we make a decision to act in one way or another. The low
predictive ability also weakens any deterministic implications one wishes to draw, since it
appears that consciousness has the capacity to make a choice other than what brain activity
might suggest. The most that Libet’s experiments demonstrate is that readiness potential is a
necessary but not sufficient condition for action, since an increase in readiness potential can be
observed without any action resulting from it. It should be mentioned here that Libet himself
considers a nondeterministic theory of human behavior to be scientifically more attractive
than a deterministic theory, and he argues that his experiments do not support a deterministic
viewpoint (Libet 2001: 63; 2002: 562–3; 2004: 154–6). He also concludes that there is better
evidence for the idea that conscious, mental processes can in fact control certain brain func-
tions than that they cannot.
New studies have followed Libet’s, where the use of fMRI (functional magnetic resonance
imaging) has yielded even more dramatic results (Soon et al. 2008; Haynes 2011). In these stud-
ies, the subjects were asked to relax while they watched a screen with letters streaming across
it. They were supposed to decide whether they would push a button with their left or right
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index finger and were asked to remember what letter was on the screen at that point in time.
Relevant parts of the brain showed activity five to seven seconds before the subjects were con-
scious of deciding to act, and, if one takes into account delays caused by the measuring appara-
tus, the number can be as high as ten seconds. The researchers could even predict, though with
relatively low precision – only 60 percent – whether the subjects would push the right or the
left button. This prediction could be made seven seconds before the subjects themselves were
conscious of deciding. This experiment might indicate that an agent is more disposed to push
button A rather than B at the time of measurement, but it certainly does not demonstrate that
the actual choice was made by the brain seven to ten seconds before the agent was conscious of
making it. Whatever is measured seven to ten seconds before an action, it has not been demon-
strated that conscious states much closer to the time of action are not causally effective. We also
know that we can react to stimuli and change our minds in much less than seven to ten seconds,
for instance when we are driving a car, doing sports, or simply grabbing one can of soda rather
another from the refrigerator.
One can also argue that these experiments do not provide an enlightening picture of
human choice as it normally happens. The kind of actions that the test subjects perform
are unusual because they consist in being asked to move a part of one’s body for no rea-
son (Sinnott-Armstrong 2011: 178). These studies investigate something that is somewhat
removed from what is normally addressed in discussions of free will, where it is taken for
granted that agents act for reasons. The freedom that endows us with responsibility for our
actions is also a freedom that entails being able to follow reasons. By eliminating reasons from
the process, one attempts to remove the very thing that makes an action differ from an event.
The test subjects were not confronted with a reasoned choice about how they should act,
but rather when they should act, and the relevance of this for understanding normal agency
is at best unclear.
These studies do not demonstrate that the brain makes decisions before people are conscious
of making them. They show certain patterns of neural activity that precede our consciousness of
decisions, but that is far from equivalent to observing unconscious decisions being made in the
brain. What is observed might simply be neural correlates of the conscious aim of preparing for
making a decision. Admitting that conscious decisions have neural antecedents does not in itself
present any problem for free will (Mele 2012). It will only be a problem if we assume that such
antecedents preclude conscious willing, but we have little reason to think so.
Conclusion
As I see it, these recent findings in psychology and neuroscience do not demonstrate that we
must give up our belief in free will, moral responsibility, and moral evil. Our practices of prais-
ing and blaming agents for their actions still appear to be justifiable.
Other philosophers have drawn different conclusions. Saul Smilansky advocates “free will
illusionism” (Smilansky 2000). He argues that only if there is free will can we legitimately hold
ourselves and others morally responsible for actions, but he also believes that free will is in fact
an illusion. The consequences of this insight are so serious for our relation to ourselves and oth-
ers that he believes that we must maintain the illusion of free will. Thomas Nadelhoffer (2011),
Derk Pereboom (2014), and Gregg Caruso (2012) rather argue for free will disillusionism, and
believe that we are in fact better off if we give up our belief in free will and moral responsibility.
I believe both the general problems of determinism and moral luck and the specific prob-
lems from psychology and neuroscience give us little reason to give up free will and moral
303
responsibility, and we can therefore still maintain that moral evil is possible. Considering the
vast implications for our view of ourselves and others as bearers of moral responsibility, so
firmly integrated both in our everyday lives and our social institutions, the arguments against
free agency are not convincing. They ask us to give up too much based on too little evidence.
Perhaps we have less free will than we are used to believe, but that is far from the same as
having no free will at all. The threat of shrinking agency is also a threat to moral evil. As the field
of agency shrinks, so will the field of moral evil. Ultimately, if the field of agency is reduced to
nothing, so will moral evil. I believe that something essential to our human identity would have
been lost in the process, as it is essential to this identity that we see ourselves as creatures who
are capable of taking charge of and shaping our lives.
We can justify the existence of moral evil, not just natural evil, even if we see humans as a
part of the natural world. Humans have a capacity for normative reasoning that no other animals
possess, but we do not have to posit any supranatural powers in order to give an account of this
normative capacity. We inhabit not just a physical universe but also a normative one, and in this
universe, we do not just relate to each other as physical objects, but also as moral subjects. One
can uphold a naturalistic worldview and still affirm the existence of moral evil.
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23
EVIL AND POWER
Simona Forti
“Absolute evil,” “unspeakable evil,” “diabolical evil,” “extreme evil”: these are only a few of the
locutions that twentieth-century culture has mobilized to name some kind of tragic excess that
happened in that century at the hands of political power, particularly in the Nazi extermina-
tion camps during World War II (Arendt 1976; Bernstein 2002; Levinas 1987; Neiman 2002;
Ricoeur 2007; Safranski 1997; Schürmann 2003). Auschwitz is not just the name of a place and
a historical event. It rises to the status of metonymy of the intertwinement between evil and
power: that overcoming of norms, values, and limits that would plunge Europe of the twen-
tieth century, together with its juridical institutions, into the nihilistic abysses of the “will to
nothing.” This is not the place to discuss of the uniqueness of the extermination genocide per-
petrated by the Nazis, or to establish whether the intensity of political horror properly pertains
exclusively to the twentieth century (Forti 2008). Certainly, over that lapse period of time many
norms collapsed, many values were overturned, and – especially – a sense of moral boundaries
was shattered.
Yet I believe that what contributed to this absolute and nihilistic and demoniacal horrors
of the last century were not just the previously unheard violence and atrocities. The herme-
neutic horizon within which political thought and philosophy understood the vicissitudes of
totalitarian regimes was saturated – and in many ways still is – by a specific way of understand-
ing evil and especially political evil. It is a way of understanding evil that has its own history,
its own genealogy, which has to do with theoretical and philosophical categories that affirm
themselves at the expense of others, determining what is put into words and how it deposits
itself in our common sense.
Before I define the interpretation that oriented and which still orients many of the contem-
porary readings, it is necessary to broadly reconstruct the philosophical and conceptual history
of the relationship between evil and power. Only in this way can we clarify the implication of
what this hermeneutic horizon has become. We standardly conceptualize the notion of political
evil in the twentieth century through a hegemonic paradigm. We need to ask ourselves: What
have been the conceptual assumptions upon which this paradigm was built? Which ideas have
been contrasted in order for the set of concepts to be intelligible and influential? And, even
more relevant for us today, to what extent has the paradigm become obsolete and unable to face
up to the contemporary pathologies of power relationships?
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The primacy of the whole: privatio boni and theodicies

While it is true that evil “has been said” in many ways, there is no doubt that its meaning has
swung back and forth between two recurring alternatives that cut across the different historical
periods of thought (Ricoeur 2007). Either evil does not exist – it is our ignorance of the whole
that leads us to believe in it – or if evil has the status of reality it always risks being transformed
into an independent substance. Either evil is an error of perception, dismantled as soon as it is
observed from the perspective of the whole, from the Platonic One (See Chapter 1 in this vol-
ume) to the Deleuzian “Multiple-One,” or it is a principle at war with being, from the radicali-
zation of the Christian idea of sin in ancient Gnosticism to the “theo-conservatism” of our day.
This ontological alternative has often taken on an unfortunate form in political thought.
Either the evil of power is the sign of a destructive and nihilistic principle, (metaphysical or
anthropological, depending on the historical age) or the evil caused by power is viewed not as
a reality in itself but as the necessary contribution to the success of the final political “project.”
Within these patterns there are, of course, significant variations. One of the legacies of Greek
philosophy to the West is, as I said, the conception of evil as simple error. Plato puts in Socrates’
mouth the conviction that no one can willingly do evil, because evil has no ontological sub-
stance. Man naturally tends to the good, and if he commits evil he does so only accidentally,
because evil appears to him under the guise of the good. If evil is an error, then the remedy to
evil requires that we have correct adequate knowledge. Therefore, in the Greek world the evil
inherent to power is essentially power’s distance from the truth, a distance that brings injustice
with it and, at the limit, tyranny. For this reason, in Plato, only the class of the philosophers,
those who can perceive the truth, can bring power to converge with the good. This legacy will
be modified and transfigured, but its core remains, and traverses the different epochs. Moreover,
in some ways it returns in the logic underlying all theodicies – theological and rationalistic. We
still hear its echo in one of the most elaborate and enduring attempts devised by the modern
world to translate in rational terms the defense of the good of totality, against the error of the
partiality of historical singularities (Bernstein 2002; Forti 2015).
If I may brutally simplify, Hegel’s dialectic can be interpreted as a grandiose attempt to
downplay the reality of evil and render it an error in the perception of truth, although in
this case it is no longer tied to the ignorance of the single subject but to the lack of historical
awareness and of the spirit (Geist) of the whole. The reproach that Hegel directs at previ-
ous philosophical thought, and in particular at Kant’s, is that it was fixated on the opposition
between the finite and the infinite, and on the distinction between being and nothingness,
thus compromising our understanding of the reality of power and evil. In Hegel’s view, this
mistake prevented Kant from seeing beyond this antithesis. In point of fact, the negative in
history – in whose wide embrace the radical nature of evil seems to gather and dissolve –
ensures the dynamism of the process of the spirit, forcing every moment, every “figure,” to
flip over into its opposite. To separate evil from good, as the simple intellect does, is thus
impossible, for they are inextricably intertwined. When the spirit is able to go beyond the
false antithesis between finite and infinite, evil itself is nevertheless transformed. Of course,
suffering, pain, and destruction are everywhere in history, but reconciliation always wins out
over laceration: “The wounds of the Spirit heal and leave no scars behind” (Hegel 1977: 407).
There is no doubt that Hegel’s philosophy of history is primarily a radical rejection of any kind
of dualism, even one that separates humanity from God.
Whether Hegel’s perspective is atheistic or religious, what interests us here is that his great
indictment against the condemnation of power and violence as the “reality in itself ” of evil can
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be considered an escape into the most sophisticated of theodicies, governed by an even more
effective “cunning of reason” than that offered by Leibniz (see Chapter 6 in this volume). In
the general introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel presents his thought
as a theodicy, a justification of the ways of God to help us understand all the ills of the world,
including the existence of evil. Only in this way can the thinking mind be reconciled with
“the fact of the existence of evil. Indeed, nowhere is such a harmonizing view more pressingly
demanded than in Universal History.” For Hegel, this reconciliation “can be attained only by
recognizing the positive existence, in which that negative element is a subordinate, and van-
quished nullity” (Hegel 1902: 60).
A paradoxical theodicy effect is present also in Marx’s own work and in variations of Marxism.
To state this in blunt terms, political evil certainly inhabits history, but, unlike an obtuse moral
point of view, it is neither an eternal principle nor the sum of the evil actions of those who hold
power. Evil is indeed born in the historical world of men. It is evil because it alienates man from
himself. When economic exploitation will be abolished, in that last phase of history in which
the exploitation of man by man will be extinguished, all forms of alienation will disappear and
with them all political evil. Differently from Hegelian dialectic, Marx’s idea of the evil of power
has its own historical reality, so that one could say that, in societies where human beings are
separated from the product of their labor, the political power exercised here is evil. Nonetheless,
Marxian dialectic materialism shares a Hegelian faith in the redemptive capacity of the historical
process. In the communist society, where class domination has been eliminated, together with
economic inequality, even the power of man over man will disappear together with political
evil. In other words, what Hegel and Marx share is the grand and grandiose perspective on his-
tory that makes evil disappear as it takes up its dynamic role in the overarching dialectic.
Freedom as absolute transgression

If the idea of privatio boni, the idea of evil as a privation of being, somehow relativizes/deactivates
the potential for evil implicit in the dimension of power, the situation for the Christian tradition
(or other traditions) revolving around the notion of original sin appears more complicated. The
only power truthful and good is the power emanating from God. This power manifests itself
positively in the act of creation, locating creatures and their environment in Eden, that is to say,
in a condition blissfully unaware of the negative. The only request that God makes of man for
such blissful situation is that he must not wonder about good and evil.
We know from Genesis 3:1–24 how evil got into human beings, and through them into the
world. Immediately after the story of the divine creation, we come to the narrative of the first
human acts. Adam’s actions shattered the state of perfection and innocence, without time and
without history, in which the relationship between God and his creatures was immediate and
harmonious. The first time man acted through his own will; he committed a transgression, an
act of opposition. The act broke the only order that God had issued: do not feed yourself from
“the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” As the serpent insinuates, knowledge of good
and evil signifies striving to make oneself similar to God. Compared to other cosmogonies and
theogonies, from Gilgamesh to the many Nordic sagas, the original sin in Genesis 3 takes the
form of guilt attributable to freedom (Ricoeur 1967) – a freedom that will be also thought, by
a number of Christian thinkers, as inseparable from disobedience, and the resulting guilt can-
not be redeemed by human forces alone. Human beings can be saved only by divine action,
because the evil introduced by the disobedience of the first parents remains as an indelible
wound reminiscent of man’s separation from God.
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Despite the manifold interpretations of this primary scene, there is no question that disobedi-
ence is and remains identified with the original, radical evil – the root, the source of all evil on
earth. The propensity for evil is inscribed in the first creature and this propensity is transmitted
to every other human being. From that action, the rebellion against God – the first, original sin –
there arises a universal condition. The disobedience of the first human being, which transmits
the original blemish to all the others, leads to the spiritual death from which, as St. Paul tells us,
we can be saved only by the sacrifice of Christ. However, the evil of sin, even if redeemed by
the Son of God, remains as a stain on humanity, which thus remains marked by evil.
Even though from Augustine onward, many Christian authors will try to complicate and
question the scope of this original breach, attempting to provide an essentially moral reading of
the evil of the original sin, the assumption of an ontologically corrupt human nature remains
as a result of the moral transgression of the will. The inherent ambiguity that structures the
idea of original sin was never resolved. The original act of transgression will be transmitted as
the human inclination to rebellion. The will to power inherent in the human instinct toward
transgression requires power that contrasts it and that saves human beings from eternal death.
Hence, the sealing of an unbreakable bond between human beings, evil, and death, on the one
hand, and the necessity of power, on the other. This is a crucial juncture for understanding the
Western conception of power. Though the contents vary, the structure of this scheme traverses
modernity, to acquire, as we will see, an “abyssal profundity” in the Kantian legacy of “radical
evil,” and eventually becoming the key for reading the tragedies of the twentieth century.
According to Genesis 3, the earthly condition, marked by corruption and ontological debt,
inheres the strict co-implication of evil and power. And here the nuances vary: from those
inclined to extreme political pessimism, characterizing both some currents within reformed reli-
gion and the reactionary and counterrevolutionary Catholicism of the early nineteenth century,
to the visions dictated by a more trusting anthropology in the human ability to redeem itself
through good government and well-exercised power. Yet, the intertwining of power and evil
remains. On the one hand, even when it does not coincide with evil, power is always exposed
to the danger of evil, given the human propensity to abuse freedom. On the other, precisely
because human nature is lapsa, man needs continuous correction at the hands of the law and
power. In this case, power participates in evil but its work is aimed at the good. In Paul, and
in general in the Pauline and Lutheran tradition, the legitimation of power as remedium peccati
is central. As he states in Galatians 3, Paul believes that the Mosaic law, which is also political,
is dictated by the necessity to bridle from the outside the evil that lives in man and which only
Christ can save. Even when observed from the best of angles, power remains constitutively tied
to evil, justified in its exercise by the need to contain a human nature unable to govern itself. It
is extremely difficult in the Western tradition to do away with this imprint of Christianity and
monotheism more generally.
It is clear that Christianity presented what became one of the most effective discourses of
legitimation of earthly powers. The power of human beings over other human beings is cer-
tainly “libido dominandi,” a lust for power and a manifestation of sin – in a word, evil. But,
when properly directed and used to guide people toward obedience, it is also the sign of God’s
love: He who can no longer be simply a Creator but must also become a ruler to govern over
human beings, because by sinning they have become in need of a guide in the world. To lead
people toward salvation from eternal death, it is necessary to use a power that is not only a
desire to dominate but also a desire to take care. The exercise of power as care – in the anal-
ogy with shepherding and domestic power – means not only to command but also “imperare
potentia rationis,” to rule by the power of reason. If those who exercise the power of command
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put themselves at the service of God, they do not impart orders out of a passion for power but
rather in order to direct those who must obey the good.
Earthly obedience thus appears to perform a dual function. On the one hand, it is undoubt-
edly the scar of a wound, the reminder of guilt. If the initial disobedience out of pride had not
taken place, there would be no power requiring obedience to the orders that it imparts. On the
other hand, obedience can now lead back to “humilitas”; it is the path along which we can estab-
lish a worldly relationship that in some way disables the root of pride. The model of power is
thus drawn from the relationship between shepherds and their flocks, which also sets an example
for the relationship between a man and his companion, and for the relationship between a father
and his children. In short, political power as care, as pastoral power, implies obedience as an
indispensable antidote against evil – the evil that entered into the human condition as a result of
the sin of pride caused by Adam’s disobedience. This is why the human need for final salvation
is equaled by the human need for a master and a sovereign during their earthly sojourn, which
leads to a life of relations structured inevitably by men’s power over other men and by the need
for law (Augustine 1958: XIII, 14).
Out of this framework, power without care is nothing but will to power, ambition, and
force of self-affirmation, which bring with it prevarication, injustice, and suffering; in one word
evil – both moral and political.
Modern power and secularization of evil

Modernity, in contrast to previous times, took the direction of strongly weakening the theo-
logical and metaphysical interpretation of the bond between evil and power. A good example of
this is found in the work of Thomas Hobbes. He offers one of the best examples of a desire for
change expressed by the process of secularization. The original freedom we can glimpse in the
hypothesis of the state of nature is a war of all against all. Hobbesian radicalism will be tempered
in the later natural law and liberal traditions, where the severity of the evils supposedly afflicting
the subject in the state of nature admits of nuances: from the “meek” nature of Locke’s approach
until the natural goodness of Rousseau, for whom it is society, not the state of nature, where
the evil of conflict dwells.
What remains constant, with few exceptions such as Rousseau’s ideas and then those of
anarchists, is the conviction that there exists a starting point in which the irrational power of
the individual or the individual groups must be overcome. Going back to the paradigmatic
and clear framework offered by Hobbes, the natural power of all against all is not morally nor
ontologically good or bad. It nonetheless exposes the subject to the fear of violent death and
to the possibility of such death. In this sense, for the life of the individual, evil remains even
though it does not necessarily have to do with an original guilt to be repaid with punishment or
atonement. Evil is therefore not defined by an objective morality or by an ontological condi-
tion. It is tied to the anthropological constitution of the human being, to subjectivity, to the
subject performing it or enduring it, to the pleasure or displeasure deriving to the subject from
his reason or his passions. As Hobbes points out, “whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite
or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth good; and the object of his hate and aversion,
evil” (Hobbes 1981: 6).
Yet, evil persists even though no longer ontologically objective but simply relative to the
individual and his affections. It remains in the destructive quality of the state of nature, an
evil that nonetheless can be resolved by way of human rationality. In the Hobbesian case, the
solution lies in the limitation of liberty at the hands of rational sovereign power, supported
by the reason of all individuals, and functioning according to the reason of the sovereign law.
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The power of the state lies in its ability to guarantee the good, safe life. No longer a good that
refers to a transcendent order but to that greatest good that has become life itself. It no longer
is salvation in the afterlife, something to be earned in this world, but salvation of our earthly
life, which one obtains thanks to order, peace, security, and political unity. In some of the
philosophies that will develop the Hobbesian idea of the social contract in the direction of the
Enlightenment, power will slowly acquire value, so to speak. Power is good, not only because
it guarantees survival. It is good also because it realizes the good of reason, which transforms
selfish persons into those who are capable of willing the universal good.
It seems clear that, in this phase of modernity, power loses its transcendent functions. It is
now aimed at freeing and saving us from the evils of this world, in the sense that it makes us
immune to them by monopolizing them and administering them to us in controlled dosage
so that politics and political power will once again be defined as a necessary evil. The evil of
power is no longer aimed at correcting the rebellious nature of the person who sins, but rather
at obtaining a limitation of individual freedom, so as to obtain the safety and well-being of
individuals and the collectivity.
Escalating radicality
Although strictly from the point of view of political theory, Kant can be considered a modern
contract theorist. The ideas which he develops in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (Kant
1960) inaugurates a path that brings us, in contemporary times, to that hegemonic paradigm from
which we left off (Badiou 2001). On the one hand, the Kantian concept brings to completion
the foundations for modern and postmetaphysical thought on the question of evil. The notion of
malum metaphysicum, as well as the idea of privatio boni, negates, in Kant’s mind, personal responsi-
bility. And for him the doctrine of original sin also constrains the exploration of the link between
freedom and evil. The doctrine of original sin – it is obvious that Kant particularly had in mind
the Lutheran version of sin, which grants the possibility of good deeds only to grace and, hence,
denies free will – assumes not only that human nature is evil but also that human efforts alone
cannot redeem actions or gain the upper hand over inclinations arising from original evil.
On the other hand, Kant recedes from those Enlightenment positions that neutralized
the question of evil by considering it a pure sociohistorical accident, which could be done
away with simply once the power of reason and power according to reason finally established
themselves. Kant strongly affirms the existence of evil. It is in the hearts of all human beings.
Evil is not something beyond reason, and at the same time is not simply the negation of
reason. It is rather that which – within reason – corrupts the upright faculty of moral judg-
ment. Judgment does in fact welcome the moral law in its maxims along with “self-love,”
but it performs a “reversal of incentives” (Kant 1960: 31–2). The incentive of self-love and
the inclinations stemming from it are assumed as “the condition of obedience to the moral
law” (Kant 1960: 32). This implies that there is a subjective principle concealed under the
universal form of the law; and that the moral law-the supreme condition, the force of upright
conduct – is subordinated to that subjective principle.
Without engaging in the hermeneutics of the text, we must stress that for Kant’s purposes it
is essential to pursue the conceivability of evil as an act of freedom, as an action that expresses
the “original use of [man’s free] will.” Evil is not a substance, a principle acting behind human
faculties, but still it is something deeply seated in human nature. It is tightly linked to an act
of human freedom.
On the one hand, then, Kant admits the innate propensity for evil of the entire human race,
yet on the other hand he tries not to undermine the fundamental assumption of freedom which
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underlies his practical philosophy. He states that this evil propensity cannot derive merely from
the weakness of a nature limited by sensible experience. Yet it cannot be deduced a priori. It is
this impasse that stops Kant from revealing the ultimate grounds for the “root of evil.” By his
own admission the origin remains “inscrutable” (unherforschbar). But it also leads him to deny the
existence of human beings who can act intentionally to violate the moral law. Human beings
may have “perversity of the heart,” which can pervert the order of the incentives of their will,
but they cannot desire evil as such; they cannot will evil knowing that it is evil; they cannot
rebel for the sake of rebellion. For Kant, the very definition of a diabolical reason is one that
posits transgression of the law as an end in itself. To elevate evil to the intentional aim of an
action, evil desired for its own sake, contradicts the very idea of humanity. An act that inten-
tionally seeks evil as its end is, then, impossible (Kant says unrepresentable).
Giving expression to this “impossibility” was precisely what later philosophers believed they
could achieve. For many interpreters, Schelling successfully met the first stage of the challenge:
to identify the true origin of radical evil. According to some interpreters, he did so in his famous
Freiheitschrift of 1809 (Schelling 2006), which introduced a new definition of freedom as “the
capacity for good and evil.” Schelling is seen as the thinker who forcefully undermined some
traditional philosophical prohibitions on the question of evil, making it possible for philosophers
like Nietzsche and Heidegger to think about evil and freedom in an “abysmal” fashion.
From Schelling (Schelling 2006) to Heidegger (Heidegger 1986; 2000; 2010; 2012), from
Nietzsche (Nietzsche 1966; 1967; 1968) to Bataille (Bataille 1985; 1991), from Freud (Freud
1991a; 1991b; 1991c) to Lacan (Lacan 1992) – to name only the main figures -- we can trace a
path that radicalizes Kant’s discovery to the point of overturning it, until transgressing the law,
whether divine law, natural law, or the imperative of reason, becomes identified as the main
objective of evil. Evil, thought of as a disease of the will (Nietzsche 1967) or as an instinctual
drive (Freud 1991b), as the delirium of reason (Heidegger 2010) or as a passion for the absolute
(Bataille 1985), in any case always involves the forces of transgression and disorder: in a phrase,
the power of death.
I’m convinced that an exemplary synthesis of this constellation of concepts, and the way
in which they reinstated the notion of power, appears in what I have called elsewhere the
“Dostoevsky paradigm” (Forti 2015). This does not mean that we find in the pages of the great
Russian the literary equivalent of a specific post-Kantian idea of evil, but that Dostoevsky’s
protagonists – particularly in Demons (Dostoevsky 1995) and The Brothers Karamazov
(Dostoevsky 1976) – powerfully flesh out the radicalization of radical evil. Each of the characters
in his novels misuses their free will in a different way. But for Dostoevsky the various demons,
who correspond to the various ways in which evil makes itself visible, share the same absolute
desire: to take the place of God and his infinite freedom. However, as finite creatures, since
they are not capable of creating, they can only destroy.
This is how evil comes into the world for Dostoevsky and for the many who follow in his
tracks. Evil enters the world as a diabolical disease of power, a power that, because it exceeds all
limits, can only be the pure energy of oppression and domination. Nihilism, evil, and power:
these form a conceptual triangle within which, in a secularization of the theological assump-
tions, many of the philosophers of the twentieth century inscribed the tragedies of history. In
the same way, a close constellation of concepts – will, omnipotence, and nothingness – will be
reworked, also in a secularized key, by later philosophers who continue to think of evil as a
result of the perversion of the will, as the result of a sovereign subject who, by raising itself up
to the All, creates Nothingness.
This paradigm can be traced back gathering some themes from authors like Nietzsche with
his connection between will to power and nihilism, Freud with his “discovery” of death-drive,
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Heidegger with the idea of “devastation” or “malice of being,” Lacan with the idea of jouissance,
Levinas (Levinas 1987) with the thought of transcendence of evil, and many others. Although
a careful look at their works may provoke the view that they do not belong to this paradigm,
it remains true that, by reworking the insights provided by Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger,
the philosophy of the twentieth century elevated the political domination of totalitarian regimes
to the category of absolute evil, to the apex of human destructiveness, to the ground zero of
Western culture. And what took place in the death camps seems to have been the metaphor
of a shattered world, totally devoid of moral and political certainties, the metaphor of the final
unveiling of the identity between evil and power.
Subsuming evil under the hegemony of the “Dostoevsky paradigm” entangled the conceiv-
ability of Auschwitz in the intertwining of transcendence, the absolute, excess, the nihilistic
drift, the death instinct, the destiny of nothingness, and history. As I have insisted, there is
no doubt that this interpretive scheme, rooted in a theoretical context that long preceded the
attempt to exterminate the Jews and millions of others, has enriched and extended its herme-
neutic power to the point of including the key experiences of the twentieth century within its
nihilistic hypothesis: war that becomes total, global exploitation that ravages the planet, and
genocides. These especially are the new phenomenal modes through which evil manifests itself
in history, and for which there seems to be no better explanation than “a pure unleashing of the
will to death,” now transformed into a crushing power. In short, the “radical evil” of power
of the twentieth century became conceptually pronounceable partly thanks to the unilaterally
interpreted “discoveries” of Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger. It is thanks, then, to the idea of a
will to power that “would rather will nothingness than not will”; thanks to the disruptive force
that the death instinct made conceivable; and thanks to a history of being that deciphered the
will/necessity to annihilation in the devastation wrought by technology.
Normality of evil
This idea of evil goes hand in hand with a specific way of thinking about power: a “simple,”
unidirectional vision that remains faithful to the model of sovereign and subject geometry,
illustrated in its extreme malignant phenomenology in the relationship between victim and per-
petrator (Forti 2015). On the one hand stands an omnipotent subject, the bearer of death, and
on the other stands a subject reduced to a mere object, because he or she has been made totally
passive by the other’s violence. The same polarized view extends to the collective dimension:
a cynical leader who exploits the weaknesses of others, and the weak masses who are utterly
incapable of resistance. This is the topological schema that has been applied to key experiences
of the twentieth century: total war, destructive technology, genocides, and above all Auschwitz
(and perhaps today we could add Islamic terrorism).
This way of thinking about evil and power, as well as about their relationship, is likely to
stiffen our understanding of reality into unilateral categories. In the end the emphasis is always
given to the dark, transgressive face of a Self that is avid for destruction. Inevitably, this leads
to a return of the dualistic scheme, which obscures the complex phenomenology of the evil of
power. Political philosophy and political thought never completely rid themselves of a concep-
tion of power as domination linked to this idea of destruction. Political tragedies have been ana-
lyzed according to this topology: wicked demons on the one side and absolute victims on the other.
Our epoch, especially our late democracies, no longer allow the exclusive representation of a
simple binary relation between a subject that monopolizes all the power and impotent individu-
als. Evil is not only created by absolute negativity; it can in fact thrive in the accumulation of
unnecessary suffering brought about by normal actions and actors. The way in which Michel
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Foucault rethinks relations of power opened a way to go beyond the dualistic vision of domina-
tion (Foucault 2003; 2004). He allows us to deconstruct this too easy partitioning of the political
field into just two distinct main characters, one with all the power – and, for this reason, guilty –
and the other an absolute victim – and, for this reason, totally innocent.
This change of perspective can draw a significant boost from Hannah Arendt’s thought as
well, and from several interesting discussions that have emerged from the reappraisal of Arendt’s
and Foucault’s legacy weaved together (Arendt 2001; 2003; Foucault 2010; 2011). For exam-
ple, from historical studies on genocides to research on the theory of race, works on biopower
have contributed greatly to redirect our attention. Mass production of death has been fostered
not only by “fascination with death and nihilism” but also by making life the undisputed value
(Agamben 1998; 1999). For example, Foucault’s now widely cited reflections on biopolitics
(namely the politics of life) and its ever possible slippage into thanatopolitics (a politics of death)
reveal that the evil of domination does not only come from a will to destruction and death,
as the classics imply, but also from a will to maximize the value of life itself. It’s important to
remark that Hannah Arendt has been one of the first to grasp the complexity of a system of evil,
to understand that it does not arise only out of evil intentions. In Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt
2001) she no longer speaks of radical evil but of the banality of evil. With this theoretical shift,
Arendt makes available a new constellation of concepts, even though she did not arrange them
into a fully developed philosophical reflection.
Rethinking evil and power does not imply denying the existence of the tragic final dualist
scene: the omnipotent perpetrators and the defenseless victims. It does not mean claiming that
perpetrators are innocent and that the victims are guilty. It means to ask political philosophy to
respect the complexity of the phenomenon of evil and the conditions of its possibility. It means
demanding from political thought that it understands the conditions prior to the existence of
extreme situations in which victims no longer have recourse to any power or resistance. In
theoretical terms, it means to break down rigid dichotomies and transform them into an analysis
of the field of forces and tensions in which the antinomies lose their substantial identity.
If we do so, a different genealogy of the relationship between evil and power can be brought
to light, one that finally puts into question the hegemony of the recurrent link between trans-
gression, power, and death. In order to understand political evil, denouncing the will to power
of absolute subjectivity certainly has a pivotal critical role. Today it is important to ask how
power and subjectivity constitute each other and are mutually reinforcing. It is crucial to ques-
tion not only why we become malevolent subjects but rather, above all, how we become com-
pliant subjects. We need to understand what sort of delirium inspires our omnipotence, but we
also need even more to try and explain what desire motivates our anxiety to conform. I think
that today what needs to be questioned is the desire for conformity and recognition that cements
our lives in irresponsibility and indifference.
Inspired here by the powerful and unsettling work of Primo Levi (Levi 1959; 1989), we
need to think about evil and power in terms of a so-called “gray zone.” It means assuming
that, before we reach a stage of domination polarized between victims and perpetrators,
there is a “not-well-defined-area” (Levi 1989) of strategies of power and counterpower,
conformism and resistance, co-option, and disobedience. This calls on us to address many
challenging ethical and moral complexities, which defy absolutist positions. In this new
play/scene, the characters are more than two (malevolent demons on one side and absolute
victims on the other) precisely because the plot of political evil does not center only on
death and the will to power, but also on the unquestioned priority of “life” and the danger-
ous ways in which it can be conceived. Out of this analysis emerge mediocre demons and
their desire for normality and positivity.
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Evil and power
Evil is a system, in the sense of a tangle of subjectivities, a network of relations, whose threads
knit together thanks to the perfect complementarity between wicked actors and originators
(a few), zealous, committed agents (also a few), and acquiescent, not simply indifferent spectators
(many). But why do these cogs and wheels fit together so well? (Forti 2015) Thinking within
the paradigm of “mediocre demons” means primarily putting into question the exclusive role of
the will to and desire for death, and instead viewing the scenes of evil as powerfully inhabited
by the will to life, as the result of an attempt to maximize life itself. It also means focusing less on
the “guilt” of transgression and more on the devious normativity of nonjudgment, celebrated
by a morality that sees judging as a sign of pride: the shadow of that first sin committed by our
first parents, the sin of disobedience. In other words, to fail to have the courage to judge and
to remain thoughtless, as Arendt would have said, is the real and new danger. We should then
celebrate, instead of being ashamed of, our fundamental faculty of disobedience.
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24
EVIL AND CHILDHOOD
Gideon Calder
Introduction
Children are much less likely to commit terrible acts than adults. When they do, the reaction
often involves a special kind of shock and anger. Among killers or torturers, child perpetrators
will be especially notorious. In public commentary on what they have done, and especially in
media coverage, the word evil will often soon be reached for. Is this fitting? Coherent? Fair?
Here, full-on philosophical answers are found rather less readily than their “folk” counterparts.
Theories of evil, even the fullest and finest-grained in terms of their conceptual graft, tend not
to give those questions their own space. This reflects a wider tendency. For the most part, phi-
losophers have neglected children, and preferred to talk about adults. It is the adult who is taken
as emblematic of the individual, the subject, the reasoner, the agent, and the human condition
in general. Philosophical treatments of evil fit this pattern. So, even through the recent revival
of evil as a focal point in philosophy, mentions of childhood are relatively sparse. We are often
left to infer how children fit in, or whether references to people in general apply in the same
way to them. They are there, but only in the shadows.
This is curious for several reasons – perhaps most salient among them, that childhood is a
phase through which all adults have passed. Who counts as a child, and what it means to be one,
is subject to historical and cultural variation. But that childhood has a formative role in rela-
tion to adulthood is universal. So the focus of interest in the nature of evil might be expected
to include the earlier stages of the life course. And, more specifically: childhood raises specific
questions about evil which seem to demand attention in their own right, as well as casting light
more widely on the resolution of these questions elsewhere. Can children be, or do evil? Are the
worst human actions worse – or anyway morally different – when perpetrated by a child, rather
than an adult? Does the invoking of a concept of evil help explain some children’s actions? Does
such an approach offer something unique, which would not be available via other modes of
explanation or evidence? Is a propensity for evil something with which children (some, or all)
might be born? Sometimes, these questions might appear as narrower, more targeted versions of
generalized themes in philosophical debates on evil. But they may also point us toward factors
and insights that do not emerge elsewhere, or not in the same ways. It is plausible to say that
any account of evil – whether for or against its utility as a term, and of whatever model – will
be incomplete without taking on board the particularity of childhood, amid its wider scheme.
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This chapter works on that assumption. It aims to show why childhood should matter to an
account of evil, to identify some of the key questions posed when we turn our attention that
way, and to explore some ways in which such questions might be answered. Some of the ques-
tions we have seen already. What they have in common is that they address the issue of child as
perpetrator, rather than as victim. For our purposes here, questions around whether the worst
human actions are worse when done to children, rather than adults, will be put aside. This is
not to downplay their importance as questions. If we assess evil in terms of the degree of harm
done by actions, then there will be a clear case for saying that the worst things done to children
are especially wrong: they may be more susceptible to suffering, and, because they are early in the
life course, the effects of harms inflicted are likely to be longer-term, as well as deeper. But the
really distinctive matters arising when we consider how childhood fits into discussions of evil
are to do with children as agents: with whether, and on what terms, children can be said to do evil.
In what follows, we group those matters under two main headings. One is to do with
character: what it would mean to say that a child “is” evil. The other is to do with action:
the terms on which it might justifiably be said that a child has “done” evil. Before we reach
either of those, though, it is important to consider what the term childhood itself refers to,
and why that matters.
What is a child?
The definition of “child” is not a given, but shifts around in different ways, of which some are
particularly significant here. First, children may be identified either in simple chronological
terms – for example, human beings under the age of 18 – or by virtue of a particular capacity
or characteristic, such as innocence (Rousseau 1921), lack of knowledge (Locke 1960), a lack of
autonomy (Schapiro 1999), or a particular kind of vulnerability (Benporath 2003). Both kinds
of designation are familiar enough. Thus, when societies treat children differently from adults,
this will be formalized through age-based restrictions – on the purchase of goods, marriage, the
right to own property, and so on. For these purposes, a child is simply someone under the age
in question, irrespective of their attributes or biographical circumstances. Yet the capacity-based
definition is equally routine in public discourse. We find it, for instance, in debates about where
those age restrictions should fall – on the voting age, or the age of sexual consent – and also in
the discussion of criminal cases, such as those where an adult offender is described as having the
mental age of a child. And we find it more widely in the cultural connotations of childhood – its
association with features such as innocence, vulnerability, or immaturity. Here, what matters is
what being a child is like, and what children can, may, or should be required to do. The asso-
ciation of childhood with evil may work differently according to which kind of categorization
applies. Clearly, any answer to the question “can children do evil?” will hang importantly on
where the chronological bar is set. And, equally, if there are particular questions arising from the
relationship of evil to childhood, these will center on the kind of being a child is: the character-
istics and capacities typical of childhood. But just as familiar are the complexities on the border
between the two kinds of definition. Those who are under 18 and those who lack autonomy
will represent two different demographic categories. So whether – for example – children can
do evil depends importantly on how those lines are drawn. Rather than choosing either defi-
nition over the other, for the purposes of this chapter we will hold both in tension with each
other. This is important: those tensions, as we will see later, are crucial.
Another broad sense in which definitions of childhood move around is historical. This point
can be made in a general way. Who counts as a child, and what it means to be one, will vary
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Evil and childhood
substantially from one historical context to another, and indeed between contemporary socie-
ties. Thus the age restrictions referred to above are each historical phenomena, coming into
existence at different times in different places and being adjusted according to this or that kind
of social, political, or moral pressure. Whole patterns of social organization – around the family,
education, work – are tied up with these designations, and we learn a good deal about socie-
ties from the specific ways in which they handle them. These variations arise more or less as
soon as we think about anthropology; their existence is uncontentious. But, when it comes to
focused treatments of the historical significance of childhood, we find stickier debates. Some
have argued that there is no constant “thing” called childhood at all. In an oft-cited study, the
French historian Philippe Ariès argued that “in medieval society the idea of childhood did not
exist,” in the particular sense which “distinguishes the child from the adult” (Ariès 1962: 125).
There were children, in the sense of young humans, but not childhood, in the loaded sense set
apart from adulthood as a separate category, signifying a different kind of existence, subject to
its own, distinct moral and cultural parameters. Ariès’s stance is contested, as are all such analyses
(see e.g., Pollock 1983; Archard 2015). A range of similar theses are now available, each stress-
ing the extent to which childhood can be seen as a contingency, arriving (and perhaps fading)
through history’s movements, rather than as some fixed ontological condition (see e.g., Postman
1995; Cunningham 2006). The development of the field of childhood studies has tended to
reinforce a social constructionist understanding of childhood, in contrast to more or less linear
(and putatively universal) models of biological or psychological development (see James and
James 2004). In constructionist terms, the reality of childhood depends crucially on dominant
social discourses; it varies as they vary, across time and place.
Such historicizations of childhood will often be vitally illuminating, but need to be handled
with care. It is one thing to argue that the way in which childhood is experienced and perceived
will differ according to dominant social norms and practices. It is another to suggest that child-
hood is constructed wholesale – that there is nothing to it, except what is imbued by this or
that social context. There may be close proximity between the second kind of claim and a form
of forthright relativism that would place a bar, upfront, on any discussion of the relationship
between childhood and evil. If both of those are viewed as wholesale products of discourse or
contingent social practices, there seems little to do other than to compare dominant “takes” on
that relationship within different cultural formations, accept that each will likely be coherent
and superior on their own terms, and position any generalized or “ultimate” questions of the
kind with which we began beyond the limits of what we can sensibly address.
Even so, an appreciation of social and historical context will play a vital role in addressing the
relationship between childhood and evil. As with the questions of definition we raised earlier, it
is helpful to hold in the balance the extent to which that relationship is historically constituted.
That childhood is open to different definitions, associated with a range of characteristics, and is
experienced and perceived differently through time are vital aspects of any interrogation of its
relationship to evil. Reactions to children doing extreme wrong often reflect a sense that they
have violated the kind of thing a child is – that there is something more extreme or grotesque
about their actions because they were committed not only by a human being but by a child. To
weigh the tenability of this assumption, we need to hold open those questions of definition.
Rather than our answers to those questions closing matters down, it is on their basis that key
lines of inquiry are opened up.
In the following two sections, we look at two such lines of inquiry. The first concerns
whether, and on what terms, children might possess evil characters. The second is related, but
separate: it concerns whether or when it is warranted to say that children’s actions are evil.
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Being evil in childhood

By most measures, in so far as they are in a process of development, children’s characters are in
an intermediary stage. This is not necessarily to say that it is worse to be a child than an adult,
or that childhood is defined by lack or incompleteness. There are important disputes among
philosophers of childhood over whether childhood itself is a distinctly valuable phase of being,
so that there are distinct goods of childhood, unavailable at later stages of life (see e.g., Brennan
2014; Gheaus 2015) or, conversely, a kind of predicament, characterized by distinct bads from
which adulthood effectively delivers us (see e.g., Schapiro 1999; Hannan 2018). These questions
have a bearing on childhood’s relationship to evil, as we will see. But whether characteristics
and capacities develop through childhood, and full-grown adults tend to occupy a different kind
of moral space to infants, are not often seriously in dispute. Whether childhood and adulthood
are different in kind or by degree, we can accept that significant changes in a human’s attributes
happen as one leads to the other – and that these changes are morally significant. This is a major
part of why childhood seems worthy of attention in its own right in a full analysis of evil.
Might some children simply be evil, by disposition? Are evil actions best viewed as a kind of
emergent property, dependent on a certain prior configuration of character – so that every evil-
doer is an evil person? Might an infant, for example, already embody evil characteristics before
she is in a position to carry out actions which might be designated as evil – and might the iden-
tification of such a disposition be a necessary condition of classifying those actions in that way?
Addressing this, it is helpful to separate out three contrasting conceptions of evil character on
the basis of which such assessments might be made. There are others available; these are chosen
because they contrast. They broadly follow those delineated by Luke Russell (2006: 95–101),
who reconstructs them in terms of how they are invoked in “lay” evil talk and political rhetoric,
as well as in finessed theoretical positions. How the claim looks, and how it holds up, will vary
depending on which of these lines of approach is taken.
1 Demonicness: evil character consists in defying laws of morality of which one is fully aware –
the deliberate doing of extreme wrong.
2 Fixity: evil character consists in the possession of a fixed disposition to carry out extremely
wrong actions.
3 Unpersuadability: evil character consists in carrying out extremely wrong actions and being
impervious to rational persuasion to do otherwise.
Straight off, we will expect (1) and (3) to apply differently to children than (2), in so far as they
require a certain threshold of cognitive development to have been passed, in order to apply.
Thus (1) requires what in everyday talk is called “knowing right from wrong,” or the kinds of
capacity that the law invokes in setting an age of criminal responsibility. That age will vary from
state to state, and will always, of course, amount to a generalization, reflecting a wider texture
of debates about the nature and conditions of moral agency and responsibility (see e.g., Frankel
2012; Archard 2015). But at any rate it evokes a developmental milestone, falling somewhere
between infancy and adulthood: babies, unlike adults, are not presumed to know right from
wrong (in legal or everyday terms).
And (3) also requires the reaching of a developmental stage, at which it is reasonable to
assume sufficient autonomy on the part of the perpetrator of extremely wrong actions which
would allow them the leverage in principle to reflect on their actions and decide to do other-
wise. An infant may be unpersuadable, but not in this specific sense, where the presumption is
that in general, the individual in question should be rationally persuadable. Being unpersuadable
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Evil and childhood
in the relevant sense seems also to require a capacity to express one’s will which on prominent
philosophical accounts of childhood is definitive of what young children lack (see e.g., Schapiro
1999 and, for a comparative discussion, Grill 2018). To be unpersuadable may require a kind
of positive resistance to countervailing reasons. Eve Garrard (1998: 51–4) defines the evil agent
in terms of a capacity to “silence” considerations such as the suffering of victims, so that these
are not heard as reasons not to inflict that suffering, and thus play no role in the construction of
reasons for action. This is an active move, as opposed to the obliviousness to the force of argu-
ments characteristic of one not yet cognitively equipped to understand them.
At any rate both (1) and (3) hold in common that younger children are not yet candidates for
evil personhood. Some, arguably, may already have a propensity in that direction, on the terms
of those conceptions. But there are no grounds on which to categorize anyone as demonic or
unpersuadable until they have gone some way down the road toward the conventional picture
of a fully fledged moral agent.
Conception (2) sits differently. It requires no such conditions: no grasp of the laws of moral-
ity and no particular degree of rationality. For some, this may be one of its strengths: it allows
for exemptions from the category of “evil personhood” those who commit terrible acts because
of a drastic situation for which they are not responsible, but who otherwise show no such ten-
dencies. In the context of children, this frees up the “fixed” conception of evil to be applied at
an earlier stage. So it may be this conception of evil that is doing the work when we find public
denunciations of the acts of children – such as those who kill – who seem to defy conventional
understandings of what children are like, or capable of. As Russell himself observes:
People who think child killers are a clear example of evil might argue that, in the
absence of circumstantial causes, and given the deliberate nature of the crimes, we
should assume that the children had fixed characters directed at extremely wrong
actions. Indeed, the fact that the murders were committed by children so young sug-
gests that the murderers were born evil.
(Russell 2006: 98)
Russell is referring here to two cases. One is that of Alex and Derek King, Florida broth-
ers convicted of beating their father to death with a baseball bat in 2002, aged 12 and 13,
respectively. The other is the abduction, abuse, and killing of the two-year-old James Bulger in
Liverpool in 1993 by Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, both then aged ten.
Because of its extremity and the relatively young age of the perpetrators, the Bulger case
shows how complex and uneasy the assessment of child killers can be. Bulger was violently
attacked with bricks, stones, and pieces of metal before his dead body was left on a railway line
to be cut in two by a train. The climate of public reaction to Thompson and Venables – from the
point of their arrest, during their trial, in the aftermath of their conviction for murder, and since –
has itself been extreme: an “orgy of retributive rage,” as Adam Morton has put it, (2004: 77).
Evil featured prominently in press coverage, in ways which resonate with the “fixed” concep-
tion: the boys were “freaks of nature,” “products of the devil,” not like “ordinary boys” (quotes
compiled in Cole 2006: 126). Police and solicitors involved in the case used the term in their
own reflections, with the leader of the police investigation stating that “I truly believe they are
just evil, and there is nothing to provide any excuse for them” (quoted in Morrison 1997: 231).
But it is not at all clear that the case for strong retribution is well served by an appeal to fixed-
ness or immutability of character. The fact that conception (2) makes no assumptions about the
development of capacities places it in a complex relationship to blame and desert.
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This complexity is starkly embodied in the verdict of presiding judge Sir Michael Morland,
before sentencing Thompson and Venables, at the end of a process in which (in a way not
possible in most Western countries) they had been tried as adults despite being ten at the time
of the offense. But the verdict itself points us back toward conceptions (1) and (3). Morland
described the killing as “an act of unparalleled evil and barbarity,” the boys’ conduct “both
cunning and very wicked.” After sentencing them, the judge continued, in their absence:
“How it came about that two mentally normal boys aged 10 of average intelligence committed
this terrible crime is very hard to comprehend.” And then: “It is not for me to pass judgement
on their upbringing, but I suspect that exposure to violent films may in part be an explanation”
(House of Lords 1997).
This movement between categorical certainty and bafflement, the emphatic and the cau-
tious, is significant. To use the term unparalleled evil is remarkable in itself, at the culmination of
a century featuring atrocities on a scale never previously witnessed or imaginable (Glover 2012).
We can take it that the sense in which the act is unparalleled lies in the age of the perpetra-
tors and the forms of cruelty involved. So the suggestion is that it is more evil because of those:
the crime is more severe than if it had been committed by adults. The reference to the boys as
“mentally normal” pulls away from the “fixed” conception of evil connoted by the press and
police depictions of the boys as exceptionally monstrous and “other.” The reference is not acci-
dental, of course: within the frameworks of criminal law, the mental competence of the accused
carries high stakes in the attribution of responsibility for their actions. But, in the second pas-
sage, Morland circumscribes his own confidence in diagnosing what has gone on. If we cannot
ultimately explain how it came about, then it seems that the “unparalleled evil” to which he has
referred has not been offered as an explanation. If there might be formative influences at work in
rendering the perpetrators capable of what they did – exposure to violent films, or otherwise –
then there is a concession to the idea that their characters are themselves shaped by circum-
stance, and that to this extent, they may themselves have been wronged by their upbringing.
Cole argues that, far from it being beyond our comprehension, there is indeed an explanation
of Thompson and Venables’ behavior to be found in evidence from research identifying “factors
to do with psychological, cultural and social damage that contribute to putting children at risk
of committing extremely violent acts” (Cole 2006: 131). For Cole, the idea that their behavior
was inherently monstrous or inexplicable will be undermined precisely to the extent that we
may gain such understanding. So, while so much of the public reaction to this crime had been
entirely confident in explaining it as an act of evil carried out by “fixed” monsters, the judge’s
verdict is more equivocal, if not aporetic.
This process – where loud attributions of evil in respect of child killers run alongside the
less charged, harder, more piecemeal attempt to explain how they might have come to do this –
is familiar enough. Gitta Sereny’s book on Mary Bell, who at the age of ten to 11 killed two
young boys in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1968, does similar work, moving from her “fixed”
categorization as a “little fiend,” a “monster,” or “bad seed” in court and in the press, to a
complex portrayal of the “profoundly disturbing experiences” – particularly, to do with Mary’s
emotionally abusive relationship with her seriously disturbed mother – which made her actions
possible. Of course, it is possible for “children to be sufficiently hurt to be damaged for life,”
and thus to remain a danger to society (Sereny 1995: x). But, to the extent that we find evi-
dence for long, complex chains of environmental causes, the attribution of evil does not so
much nail down an explanation in terms of character but mark something itself to be explained –
an explanation that will need to account for the reasons behind it (see Calder 2018). Thus,
as Gary Watson says in connection with another case, the fact that we know the full story of
someone’s coming to be in the state to commit an extremely wrong action – in the case he
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mentions, Robert Alton Harris sustained neglect and regular harsh beatings during childhood –
does not itself rule out that the perpetrator is evil; it may be taken rather as explanation of his
being so (Watson 1987: 137). Much of the time, in seeking to explain the character of a perpe-
trator, we are seeking for ways in which, early in life, they may themselves have been a victim.
This is not to suggest that, because the figure of the evil child can so readily be undermined as
a flimsier construction than it seems, it is simply a construction, or that there is no such thing as
evil among children in any kind of generalizable way.
A final point. If evil is fixed from the start – embedded, incorrigible – then this has implica-
tions for the “predicament view” of childhood we mentioned earlier. Specifically, it may add a
dimension to the “bads” of childhood. For anyone “fixed” this way, the predicament itself may
consist in dealing with the effects of a fixed disposition before a child has developed the charac-
teristics or capacities which might equip her to deal with it effectively: the degree of autonomy
which would allow her to steer her actions away from what the disposition tends her toward,
or the resilience to overcome her vulnerability to it. This is another sense in which the appeal
to fixity serves to undermine the intuitive relationship between evil and blameworthiness: the
most clearly evil child may be, by definition, the one most likely to have been subjected to
exacerbated bads of childhood.
Thus the attempt to include children in any account of evil personhood means tackling a
range of different obstacles. Some concern whether or when children fit the criteria of person-
hood per se, and so have a character sufficiently developed to be legitimately described as evil.
Some concern the authority with which any child can be classified as already having a “fixed”
character or disposition – and how we might know this. And some concern the complexity of
cause and effect, in children’s behavior – all the more pronounced when such behavior includes
extremely wrong actions.
Doing evil in childhood

It is to such actions themselves that we now turn. Setting aside questions about whether children
can be evil people, can they nonetheless – independently of all that – carry out evil actions?
The appeal of this kind of answer has been prefigured here by the kinds of complexity into
which character-based accounts of evil in childhood run. Regardless of where we stand on
the attribution of evil to children’s actions, fully understanding the extremely wrong actions of
children necessarily involves addressing the reasons why their personalities have developed as they
have. To the extent that they are not the authors of their own circumstances, any role for evil
character as a necessary explanation, or even as a link in a longer explanatory chain, becomes
obstructed. If we know that what made them capable of extremely wrong actions was their own
exposure to harm, then it seems those harms form a necessary part of any ultimate accounting
for their behavior, whereas evil character itself does not: it may seem something like a fifth
wheel, ancillary at best, but more likely redundant.
In principle, the actions of children may be evil even if opening up questions of evil charac-
ter leads into this kind of backwards spiral. Indeed, this is one way of interpreting Sir Michael
Morland’s words in sentencing Thompson and Venables. Rather than undermined by the ten-
sions between them, his different points might be taken as separating out what we are, and are
not, warranted to say when confronted by such cases. So: (1) the act itself is categorically evil;
(2) it is difficult to comprehend how these boys came to be capable of it. Statement (1) is
descriptive and evaluative, while statement (2) concerns explanation. These two statements are
in tension only if we require explanation to precede description – or, specifically, regard cer-
tainty about the character of an agent to be required before we may designate their actions as evil.
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If this is not required, then the question of personality sits apart from that of the wrongness of
the action. By dwelling on the gap between what he regards as the “normality” of the two boys
and the “barbarity” of their actions, Morland allows for the condemnation of the latter while
remaining agnostic about questions of character.
All of this depends on whether, indeed, we accept that there are separate questions here:
whether an action can be evil and the separate issue of whether the person doing it is evil.
Some, like Daniel Haybron, seek to defend the claim that evil persons exist (rare, hard to iden-
tify, effectively “moral write-offs,” but nonetheless “a genuine and interesting class of moral
characters”), while suggesting too that the connections between evil character and evildoing
are only loose. Thus: “Most of those we call evil probably are not; and worse, we have failed
to recognize the level of depravity that can reside even in seemingly respectable individuals”
(Haybron 2012: 278). This position lowers the stakes in one respect: it means that the discus-
sion about evildoing need not depend on first having reliably identified “purely” evil charac-
ters. But it raises them on the other side: evil actions will be far more commonplace than the
uncommonly other “monster” figure favored in much of public coverage of extreme wrongs –
and so proportionately more demanding to track. We will find them more often in the flow
of everyday life, than in the sensational outlier case. The deflationary quality of this account
echoes Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the banality of evil, and her analysis of Adolf Eichmann
as a committer of monstrous deeds whose character was far from demonic or sadistic (Arendt
1965). Luke Russell distinguishes between psychologically thick accounts, for which “an action
is evil if and only if it is a culpable wrong that is appropriately connected to an undeserved
extreme harm and also meets some specified combination of psychological conditions,” and
their psychologically thin counterparts, for which “an action is evil if and only if it is a culpable
wrong that is appropriately connected to an undeserved extreme harm” (Russell 2010: 232).
Todd Calder drives a wedge between acting on what he calls an “e-desire set” – a combination
of vicious motivations he treats as a necessary condition of doing evil – and on the other hand
possessing an evil character. While persistent e-desire sets are definitive of evil character, not all
those who possess them will carry out evil actions, and not all those who carry out evil actions
will have a consistent propensity for e-desire sets. All of us may be susceptible to acting on an
e-desire set on occasion; this does not make all of us evil characters.
Each such discrimination sheds helpful light – and again may help explain how confidence
in designating an act as evil can sit alongside incomprehension or agnosticism with regard to its
causes. How do these translate into discussion of children’s actions? Compared to our discus-
sion of evil character in childhood, the task here might seem simpler, just because it is only
the actions themselves that are on the table, rather than the whole web of biographical factors
leading up to them.
What do we need to designate an action as evil? Some elements of an answer will focus on
the consequences of that action: the scale of the harm caused. Others will concern what has led
up to the action: the immediate motivation behind it (as opposed to its longer-term biographical
or environmental antecedents); the degree of responsibility borne by the doer. In each case, of
course, there follow refinements and rejoinders: if a certain scale of harm is necessary, then are
thwarted attempts to cause harm thereby never evil? If certain forms of motivation are required,
then what of those cases (Eichmann may be one) where the harms caused by actions are drastic,
yet the degree of malice aforethought on the part of their perpetrators is much smaller, or even
absent altogether? If the doer must be morally responsible for their behavior, for evil to be done,
then some of the very worst-looking actions in the first two respects may then be removed
from the category of evil by dint of the lack of capacity on the part of the doer to appreciate the
nature of their action. Thus one paradox of treatments of the monstrous evildoer familiar from
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the popular media is that the more such a figure is painted as a monster, definitively “other,”
perhaps psychopathic or gripped by demonic forces, the less clear it becomes that they should
be subject to the kinds of retributive punishment applied to the psychologically competent and
normal that such treatments usually, at the same time, demand.
At a simple level, these factors apply unevenly to child perpetrators. When it comes to
consequences, it is not clear that cases involving children warrant handling in a separate way
from those involving adults. Significant harm can most certainly be caused by a child, as our
discussion has shown. Focusing solely on the effects of children’s actions is not itself sufficient
to qualify them as evil. News reporting of a baby shooting dead his mother by fiddling with
the pistol in her handbag while at a supermarket checkout will characterize this not as an act
of evil, but as a tragedy. But this point is not exclusive to young children, by any means: a tsu-
nami is not evil by dint of the scale of the harm it causes. Meanwhile, there is a case for saying
that some evils are definitively small-scale in nature – causing little harm themselves, and not
requiring punishment, but stemming from intentions that themselves are firmly malicious (de
Wijze 2018). So, by any measure, the harm caused by a child’s actions is not the only factor at
stake. And as a child of sufficient physical and cognitive development may in principle have the
wherewithal to cause as much harm as an adult, it is not clear that the cashing-out of the scale
of the harm at stake happens in a definitively different way when considering the putatively evil
actions of a child. (It is not obvious that there is anything worse, or indeed less bad, about being
the victim of abuse or murder at the hands of a child, than of an adult.)
Questions of motivation apply differently to children in some respects, but not all. On the
one hand, there are clearly some kinds of motivation that children are less likely to possess.
The idea to cause immediate harm to another proximate being is one thing; the desire to help
eliminate an entire category of beings (via genocide) is at the opposite end of a scale where we
seem to have passed into the province of adulthood. Some aspects of our orientation to the
world, or a set of horizons, which extends with the acquisition of knowledge and experience,
so that it is psychologically beyond a child of limited age to hold malevolent ambitions on the
largest scale. But this only gets us so far. Again: even granting this, it may be that smaller-scale
evil motivations are available to children of a certain stage of development, and perhaps indeed
that they are particularly single-minded in carrying them out. This understanding of evil action
may align with an understanding of evil as constituted by the absence of certain kinds of knowl-
edge or sensibility, rather than the presence of malign motives as such (see Morton 2004; Calder
2005; Cole 2006). Such a stance is borne out in Sereny’s study of Mary Bell, which after patient,
attentive probing finds certain kinds of lack of sensibility to be emblematic of Bell’s criminal
profile, in place of a presence of the monstrous (Sereny 1995). In these terms, children may be
uninhibited by barriers of which adults are more conscious. In any case, it is not clear that there
is anything essential to childhood which exempts children from the likelihood of experiencing
a muting of the moral restraints that would usually rule out certain kinds of behavior. Arendt
writes that “most evil is done by people who never made up their mind to be either good or
bad” (Arendt 1971: 438) – a kind of absence of motivation that in principle seems applicable as
much to children as to adults, and perhaps more so.
If the ascription of moral responsibility is necessary for the identification of an action as evil,
then here the terms of the adult/child comparison are by now quite familiar. Diminished moral
responsibility is taken to be definitive of childhood. If babies lack motivation to do wrong, they
certainly also, a fortiori, lack responsibility for their actions however drastic the harms which
may ensue. As children age, develop more refined motivations, and become more capable of
causing significant harm, the extent of their moral responsibility for their actions will usually be
expected to grow alongside. Again, it is characteristic of the public’s vituperative public reaction
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Gideon Calder
to child killers that they can somehow infer the degree of their responsibility from the barbarity
of the acts. So, if we find cruelty of an extreme kind, we must have found a calculating, psycho-
logically competent villain. The instability of this inference has already been explored. Because
retribution requires evidence of responsibility, there may be a backwards projection of com-
petence onto children who might otherwise be (and are sometimes simultaneously) depicted
as psychologically damaged outliers. But neither harms caused nor malign motivations (if such
there are) are proof of moral responsibility.
Here, we find ourselves back on the complex terrain which opened up when considering
the relationship between evil and character in childhood. The questions around children’s moral
responsibility for their actions ultimately stand or fall on those same complexities. We may say
that if we could clearly establish moral responsibility on the part of a child vis-à-vis an action
causing significant harm conducted with malevolent intentions, then this action may to this
extent be judged on equivalent terms to that of an adult. (Whether we should respond to it in
the same way, for example through the criminal justice process, would be another matter.) But
that is, as they say, a very big if. The most shocking cases of putative evildoing by children are
by no means those where the attribution of moral responsibility is most straightforwardly done.
Conclusion
It is one thing to weigh up, as we have been doing, how questions of evil relate to questions
of childhood. It is another to work through their implications. A longer treatment with wider
scope would push harder at the question, raised toward the end of the previous section, of what
is to be done in response to putative evildoing by children. As it is, we have been looking at
how general themes in the philosophical treatment of childhood and evil hook up with each
other, and at demanding questions that arise at the intersection of those two circles. Sometimes
those questions mirror or channel philosophical debates on the grand stage: the conditions of
free will and moral responsibility, or the foundations of right and wrong. Sometimes the chal-
lenges posed are more local to this specific part of the landscape, such as whether we should start
with whether children commit evil actions and work from there to questions of evil character,
or vice versa, or neither. The aim here has been not to offer an argument about how best to plot
a course through that landscape, so much as to map it. An aim, nonetheless, has been to dem-
onstrate in so doing that questions about the relationship between evil and humanity should be
taken as seriously, and treated as carefully, in connection with childhood as they are elsewhere.1
Note
1 I am very grateful to Stephen de Wijze and Thomas Nys for highly helpful comments on an earlier draft
of this chapter.
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25
EVIL’S DIACHRONIC
CHARACTERISTICS1
Zachary J. Goldberg
Endeavoring to distinguish acts of evil from acts of mundane wrongdoing, many philosophers
have identified a particular kind or degree of harm as definitive of evil (Card 2002; Russell
2007, 2012, 2014; French 2011; Calder 2003, 2013, 2015).2 These accounts purport to explain
why acts like genocide are evil while acts like theft are simply wrong. My principal aim in this
essay is not to critique the details of the arguments found in these theories of evil; in general, I
find that each account contains important truths about the nature of evil and the kind or degree
of harm that typifies it. Rather, I argue that an analysis and description of evil harm alone does
not provide a complete understanding of evil action. While definitions of evil as harm focus
mainly on synchronic, or current time-slice, features of evil action, I argue that evil action is
a phenomenon whose history is often significant to understanding it as evil. Correspondingly,
a diachronic approach reveals two critical attributes of evil. First, we discern conditions that
facilitate evil’s distinctive harm. Evil action develops out of a normative relation that obtains
between the victims and perpetrators of evil; it is an asymmetrical relation of power based on
fundamental vulnerabilities and their exploitation.3 This relation is frequently enduring over
time. When it is, and the exploitation of fundamental vulnerabilities occurs, then evil obtains.
Second, the moral history of the victim of a putative evil act is often relevant to whether the
act is in fact evil. To support this latter claim, I examine three different approaches for assess-
ing the relevance of the past evildoing of a former perpetrator-turned-victim. Again, my aim
is not to supplant, but rather to complement, many current harm-based accounts of evil action
by drawing our attention to the diachronic features of evil action that are significant to our
understanding the nature of evil.
I begin with a brief qualification of the preceding claims. None of the above mentioned
theories claim that evil harm alone is necessary and sufficient for evil action. Instead, there
is a widely held consensus that the certain kind or degree of harm that defines evil must
be coupled with a culpable intention or negligence that brings about the relevant kind
of harm. The inclusion of such a “perpetrator element” into a theory serves several
purposes. First, it excludes from the definition harm not caused by human agents, for
example grave harm brought about by a natural disaster, which is not evil in the secular
moral sense. Additionally, the perpetrator element has the goal of excluding tragic mis-
takes in which the relevant harm could not have been foreseen by the agent, for example
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Evil’s diachronic characteristics
accidentally or mistakenly giving someone something to eat to which she has a deadly
allergy (Card 2002: 20; Russell 2014: 44).
Despite the inclusion of this perpetrator element in their definitions, these theories empha-
size that it is really the harm element that is the distinguishing hallmark of evil action.4 The
perpetrator element serves mainly to exclude certain tangential considerations, while the crucial
feature of evil action is a distinctive kind or amount of harm. For example: Claudia Card defines
evil as reasonably foreseeable intolerable harms produced by culpable wrongdoing (Card 2002:
16). She adds that “the nature and severity of the harms, rather than the perpetrator’s psycholog-
ical states, distinguish evils from ordinary wrongs” (Card 2002: 3). Peter French defines evil as
“a human action that jeopardizes another person’s (or group’s) aspirations to live a worthwhile
life (or lives) by the wilful infliction of undeserved harm on that person(s)” (2011: 61, 95). Then
he further explains: “Evil, regardless of the complexity of analyses of its perpetrators’ mental
states, is primarily about victims. Victimization is the “identifying characteristic of evil” (French
2011: 62). Luke Russell also offers a harm-based account of evil and defines it as “extreme cul-
pable wrongdoing” where the extremity refers to the potential or actual harm the action causes
(Russell 2014: 46, 59–68). Todd Calder claims that evil has two properties: significant harm and
an inexcusable intention to bring about, allow, or witness significant harm for an unworthy goal
(Calder 2013: 188; 2015: 119).5 Each theorist rightly observes that some element in a perpetra-
tor’s psychological economy is necessary for a thorough definition of evil. However, since these
perpetrator elements are not exclusive to evil action and they could also belong to mundanely
wrong or bad acts as well, it is the unique kind or degree of harm that distinguishes evil action
from mundane wrongdoing.
While these harm-based accounts may seem correct, they are incomplete. Certainly, when
we think of paradigms of evil such as genocide, torture, or slavery, there is no doubt that
intolerable, extreme, or significant harm lies at the forefront of these acts. Moreover, these
kinds of harm seemingly distinguish atrocious acts in kind from acts of mundane wrongdoing
such as theft or lying. Nevertheless, harm-based definitions focus only on a single time-slice
of evil action, namely the moment after the act has already occurred. Examining evil harm
synchronically ignores conditions that facilitate this kind of harm, and are likewise critical to
an act being evil.
To see why this claim is true, we need to establish that evil is a phenomenon whose history
is often significant to understanding it as evil. To this end, it will be helpful to understand in
general what an essentially historical concept is. Although evil is not essentially historical, it is
frequently so, as the subsequent description illuminates.
We can distinguish conceptually between historical and nonhistorical phenomena.6
“Phenomena” is understood quite broadly in the present discussion to include actions, objects,
properties, or concepts. Nonhistorical phenomena do not depend in any interesting way on
their causal history. More specifically, this means that the current properties of the phenomena
do not change in a relevant way even if there are changes to their causal history. Many aesthetic
properties of objects such as hard, smooth, porous, or colorful fall under this description.7 For
example, kitchen counters are hard and smooth. Facts about the past are fully irrelevant to
the current state of these properties or the fact that the kitchen counter has these properties.
The location of where the kitchen counter was manufactured, or whether it was sold by one
particular store rather than another, make no relevant difference to the current smoothness
or hardness of the counter. To see this point more clearly, imagine that we were to discover
that an American-made kitchen counter had been actually manufactured in Germany. This
alteration in the object’s causal history has no effect on its current aesthetic properties – the
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hardness and smoothness. In general, when examining nonhistorical phenomena we can know
everything interesting about them by taking a synchronic snapshot of its “current time-slice”
properties. As John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza state:
A nonhistorical (or “current time-slice”) phenomenon is dependent solely upon

“snapshot” properties and not facts about history. . . . A current time-slice phenom-
enon is resilient with respect to changes in its history; that is, holding fixed the
relevant snapshot properties, alterations in history would not affect the phenomenon
(in a certain way).
(1998: 171)
The snapshot properties of objects like the kitchen counter can be fully understood without
any reference to the object’s history. And changes to the object’s history do not change our
understanding of the object.
In contrast, changes in the history of some objects, actions, or properties entail alterations in
the phenomena themselves. These kinds of phenomena are essentially historical precisely for this
reason. Most clearly, those phenomena whose origin is relevant to their current state fall into
this category. For example, works of art are valuable only when they are genuine, that is, when a
particular artist produced them. For example, in 2011 a portrait thought to have been painted by
the sixteenth-century Dutch artist Franz Hals was discovered to be a forgery. As a result, the $10
million sum the buyer had originally paid for the portrait was returned. The current properties
of the portrait depended essentially on its past. Once the past had been altered, or, rather, once
our knowledge of the object’s past aligned with the facts, the current properties of the object
were altered as well. For essentially historical phenomena, alterations in certain features of the
past entail alterations in the phenomena or in our understanding of them.
Why is this distinction between nonhistorical and historical phenomena relevant for under-
standing evil? The theories of evil discussed above arguably perceive evil action as nonhistorical.
They claim to identify the defining feature of evil – its kind or degree of harm – but they do
so by looking synchronically at the current time-slice properties of an evil action. Specifically,
they argue that, if a particular action displays certain properties at a given time, namely if it is
characterized by a distinct kind or degree of harm culpably or inexcusably inflicted, then the
action is evil. It is noteworthy that this description only identifies features of the act that obtain
after the act has transpired. It leaves out the conditions (other than intentions and motives)
that took place prior to the grave consequences and that made the consequences possible. To
fill this explanatory gap, I will describe evil’s facilitating conditions and then demonstrate why
these conditions are critical for understanding the nature of evil, thereby revealing evil to be a
phenomenon whose history is often significant to it being evil.
First, it is helpful to include a qualification and to address a potential objection. Although
I am using the term “facilitating conditions,” I do not intend to identify all of the conditions
that enable every single act of evil. Many acts of evil are far too complex for such a descrip-
tion. Let’s take acts of mass violence as an example. Acts of mass violence are collective and
intricately complex acts that involve various levels and kinds of perpetration. The sociologist
Abram de Swaan demonstrates that four levels of analysis are useful in understanding acts of mass
violence: the macrosociological (long-term, large-scale, social), the mesosociological (mostly
institutional), the microsociological (small-group), and the psychosociological (the perpetrators)
(de Swaan 2015: 12–13). Even on the small-group level, there are different kinds of perpetra-
tors, ranging from powerful political leaders to soldiers and others on the ground who perform
acts of direct assault to the so-called “desk perpetrators” who support the bureaucracy of mass
330
violence to bystanders who passively support the mass violence by refraining from interfering or
by providing emotional or social support to other perpetrators. And on the psychosociological
level there are a multitude of intentions and motives that can be relevant to the perpetration of
mass violence (Smeulers 2008). Although the present analysis does not take all of these condi-
tions into consideration, it does identify common precursors to the harm that is distinctive of
evil acts, thereby making these conditions significant to our understanding of evil.
Now the potential objection: One might think that the inclusion of the “perpetrator ele-
ment” in the above theories, that is, the condition that intolerable, extreme, or significant harm
must be reasonably foreseeable or culpably inflicted or done with an inexcusable intention, takes
the history of evil action into due consideration. After all, the authors are careful to explain
that the culpable infliction of the harm is a necessary condition of the harm being evil, and the
culpability has much to do with the intentions, motives, or other elements in the perpetrator’s
psychological economy (Card 2002: 20, Russell 2014: 44; Calder 2015: 120). If the history of
the harm is such that it does not include these specific psychological attributes, this absence
exculpates the agent who inflicted the harm, and the act is not evil. For example, recall Card’s
definition of evil as reasonably foreseeable intolerable harms produced by culpable wrongdoing.
She includes “reasonably foreseeable” in her definition to exclude instances of intolerable harm
accidentally brought about, even accidentally brought about by an act of wrongdoing (Card
2002: 20). Foreseeing a consequence must by definition take place prior to the act, otherwise
one could not be said to foresee it. Seemingly, Card is taking appropriate consideration of the
action’s history and qualifying her definition accordingly. However, I shall first argue that the
perpetrator’s intentions and motives are not the only features prior to the occurrence of the act
that are relevant to its being evil. There are additional diachronic features that facilitate the kind
or degree of harm typifying evil action.
Evil action is essentially an interaction. The interaction, of course, is that between perpe-
trator and victim. The two parties interact with one another out of radically unequal posi-
tions of power.8 These positions of power are constituted by the weaker party’s fundamental
needs and its dependency on the stronger party either to satisfy those needs or not to interfere
with the weaker party’s own satisfaction of them.9 When the stronger party exploits this direct
dependency for fundamental needs to achieve its own goals, the intolerable, extreme, or sig-
nificant harm that is arguably characteristic of evil action emerges as a consequence.10 Thus, the
facilitating conditions of evil consist in a weaker party’s vulnerability to the exploitation of its
fundamental needs by the very party it depends on to satisfy or not to interfere with the satisfac-
tion of those fundamental needs. To see why this is so, we need to explore different kinds of
vulnerability, and how they are essentially connected to fundamental needs and dependency.11
The most obvious way that we are vulnerable is due to our corporeality, and this vulner-
ability manifests itself in two different ways. First, our bodies are vulnerable to physical harm.
Second, we are vulnerable to our basic needs such as food, shelter, and access to medicine going
unsatisfied, or vulnerable to others interfering with our ability to satisfy them. Philosophers have
often referred to this kind of vulnerability as “ontological vulnerability” because it is an intrin-
sic element of our embodied humanity (Gilson 2014: 37; Mackenzie 2014: 38; Butler 2004;
Nussbaum 2006; Turner 2006; Schildrick 2002; MacIntyre 1999).12
We are also vulnerable in virtue of certain noncorporeal capacities as well, namely those
corresponding to our moral personhood. Although not an exhaustive list, our capacities for
autonomy, self-consciousness, hope, and care are arguably partially constitutive of moral per-
sonhood. Being autonomous makes us vulnerable to violations of, or lack of support for, the
development and exercise of our autonomy. Because we are self-conscious we are vulner-
able to feeling humiliated, embarrassed, or disgraced. Owing to our capacity to hope, we are
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vulnerable to feeling despair (Rachels 2004: 166–71). Our capacity to care deeply about other
persons or our ideals makes us vulnerable to whether what we care about is “diminished or
enhanced” (Frankfurt 1998: 83). As beings who require certain natural and social primary
goods to promote our essential and shared human interests, we are vulnerable to such goods
being unequally distributed or kept out of our reach (Rawls 1971: 62). I refer to this kind of
vulnerability as “personal vulnerability” because it is directly related to those aspects that are
relevant to being a moral person.
We possess these capacities and corresponding vulnerabilities as humans and as moral persons.
Additionally, there are individual, or idiosyncratic, capacities that produce fundamental vulner-
abilities. A person may have specific interests that are essential to live out a life as a particular
individual (Reader 2007: 64). If this is right, then individuals are vulnerable to being made
incapable of pursuing their essential interests. For example, consider the case of Niko Kollias,
who aspired to become a professional football player. In 2015 at the University of Rochester he
was abducted and brutally tortured for approximately 40 hours. Among the other permanent
injuries he sustained, his femur was shattered by a bullet. This injury ended any possibility of
becoming a professional athlete. There is no question that the physical harm he endured was
gravely serious. As we said, this sort of harm is due to a person’s ontological vulnerability. But
this is not the only kind of harm the perpetrators inflicted on him. Additionally, Kollias was
harmed as a particular individual since he could no longer pursue his essential interest in becom-
ing a professional football player. This sort of harm can also characterize evil action. Let’s call the
vulnerability that makes this harm possible “characteristic vulnerability” because it corresponds
to characteristics that are distinctive to being a particular individual.13
To be sure, evil is not characterized simply by the presence of one of these fundamental
vulnerabilities; rather, another agent must exploit the vulnerability of another. Evil action is
characterized by the exploitation of ontological, personal, or characteristic vulnerability, when
these kinds of vulnerabilities are both constituted by and engender fundamental needs, and
give rise to direct dependencies on others to satisfy or to refrain from interfering with the
satisfaction of fundamental needs.
Of course, exploitation is not necessarily evil, nor is it even necessarily wrong. In general,
when an exploitative interaction occurs, one party inhabits an especially strong position relative
to the other and uses this position of strength to target the vulnerabilities of the weaker party
for its advantage, its pleasure, or otherwise to achieve its aims (Goodin 1985; Wertheimer 1996;
Sample 2003). The stronger party capitalizes on a state of vulnerability of the weaker party to
achieve one of its ends. Not only is this definition insufficient to account for evil action; it is
insufficient to explain even mundane wrongdoing. Exploiting another’s weakness does not need
to carry any moral import whatsoever. For example, in almost any sport or game, one player tar-
gets and exploits weaknesses in the opponent’s game plan or strategy in order to win. Therefore,
there must some additional normative element to the interaction for it to constitute an evil act.
The taxonomy of fundamental vulnerabilities accounts for this normative element. In situa-
tions in which evil action obtains, one party has power over goods or resources that are fundamental
to another party, and this latter party is vulnerable precisely insofar as it depends directly on the
stronger party either to supply these essential goods or resources or not to interfere with their
own procurement of them. The vulnerabilities are fundamental and can be exploited with evil
results because they correspond to needs essential to our humanity (ontological), moral person-
hood (personal), and individuality (characteristic). And we are directly dependent on others
either to help us satisfy these fundamental needs or to refrain from interfering in our own
satisfaction of them. For these reasons, their unambiguous exploitation by the more powerful
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agent on whom the vulnerable directly depend is characteristic of evil action, not only mun-
dane wrongdoing. These facilitating conditions make possible harm that damages someone as a
human, as a moral person, or as an individual because these kinds of vulnerability arise out of the
essential features of humanity, moral personhood, and individuality, respectively.
It is my contention that the intolerable, extreme, or significant harm that figures prominently
in plausible theories of evil is attributable to the exploitation of a fundamental vulnerability, and
that an asymmetrical power relation makes this exploitation possible. These facilitating condi-
tions of evil harm bolster our understanding of what evil is and how it develops. Intolerable,
extreme, and significant harm are often the consequence of an interaction between two parties
that possess unequal power relative to certain vulnerabilities and their exploitation.
Now, how is this relational account of evil also diachronic? The answer is that vulnerability
and the power to exploit cannot always be fully understood synchronically. The facilitating
conditions commonly have a history and this history is frequently relevant to whether the
ensuing act is evil.
If the relevant relation is synchronic only, then sometimes it results in evil, but sometimes
it does not. We can imagine a sadist who without prior planning kidnaps and murders a child.
Certainly, the killer exploited the child’s fundamental vulnerabilities, but their relation to one
another is only diachronic in a trivial sense.14 That is, we can understand the perpetrator/victim
relation in this case synchronically without any loss of insight. Additionally, there are scenarios
in which a perpetrator’s vulnerability is exploited by the victim in order for the victim to put an
end to the exploitation of her own vulnerability. Such acts are rarely evil. Imagine that a bat-
tered wife kills her abusive husband while he is sleeping. Here we have a scenario that exhibits
many of the facilitating conditions of evil described above, and inflicts foreseeable intolerable,
extreme, or significant harm, and, yet, the act is not evil.15 The first example demonstrates that
not every relation constituted by the exploitation of fundamental vulnerabilities must be endur-
ing over time. The second example shows that not every instance of exploiting a fundamental
vulnerability is evil. However, when the exploitation of a fundamental vulnerability is the result
of a relation enduring over time, then the action is evil.
The power that perpetrators of evil have to exploit the fundamental vulnerabilities of their
victims is a power that is frequently maintained and exercised over time. However, when that
relation is synchronic, evil still might obtain, as in the child-killer case, but it might not, as in the
abused wife case. But, when it is diachronic, then the result is evil. Paradigmatically evil acts like
genocide or other mass atrocities exhibit this enduring relation. This is one of the reasons the
diachronic approach is crucial to our understanding of evil. Although it does not identify neces-
sary conditions of evil action, it does identify conditions under which evil almost always obtains.
As we said above, when alterations in the causal history of phenomena elicit changes in our
view of the phenomena, then the phenomena are essentially, or at least significantly historical.
The history of the normative relation between victim and perpetrator makes a critical differ-
ence to understanding the nature of the act. Whether the action is evil or not often depends on
its past. By focusing only on an action’s current time-slice properties, we might miss essential
aspects of an action’s evil-making properties or conclude that an act is evil when it is not. We
have seen that, when we first begin to define evil, a distinctive kind of intolerable, extreme,
or significant harm stands at the forefront of evil acts. However, when we widen our view to
include this harm’s facilitating conditions it becomes clear that this sort of harm is first made pos-
sible by an asymmetrical power relation characterized by victims’ fundamental vulnerability and
its exploitation by perpetrators. When we further extend the scope of our inquiry, we see that
the power relation is often enduring over time, and when it is (and a fundamental vulnerability
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Zachary J. Goldberg
is exploited), then evil obtains. Because evil is a phenomenon whose history is often significant
to understanding it as evil, a diachronic approach identifies many of its crucial elements.
This brings us to the second critical attribute of evil action illuminated by a diachronic
approach. If we continue to explore the different ways that evil has diachronic elements, we will
see that the moral history of the victim of a putative evil act is often relevant to whether the act
is evil at all. From this insight it follows that intolerable, extreme, or significant harm isolated
from the moral biography of the victim may not always be characteristic of evil; that is, the mere
presence of one of these distinct kinds of harm does not necessarily make an action evil.
Let’s compare two examples of culpably inflicted intolerable, extreme, or significant harm.
By maintaining across the two examples both a similar kind of harm and its culpable infliction,
and by altering only the moral history of the victims in the two scenarios, we will be able to
discern whether these distinctive kinds of harm (culpably inflicted) are sufficient for an act to be
evil, or if the moral history of the victims of a putative evil act is relevant to this categorization.
The juxtaposition of the following two examples highlights three distinct approaches to assess-
ing the relevance or nonrelevance of a victim’s moral history to the evilness of an act: the moral
worth approach, the moral merit approach, and the middle ground approach.
The first example is a fairly uncontroversial example of evil: the actions of the Gestapo dur-
ing the Nazi regime. As these acts are fairly well known the details do not call for a thorough
retelling. It suffices to recall that the Gestapo’s main goal was to eliminate perceived enemies of
the state. They were responsible for rounding up, imprisoning, torturing, and executing many
of the victims of the Holocaust.
Let’s now compare these well known events with a less familiar example of people being
hunted down and executed. Owing to its presumed modest familiarity, its retelling calls for greater
detail. Although the Nuremburg Trials were a seminal landmark in the development of inter-
national criminal law and the eventual establishment of the International Criminal Court and its
prosecution of war crimes, most of the perpetrators involved in the Holocaust were not prose-
cuted and did not face criminal punishment. The trials at Nuremberg heard 24 indictments against
high-ranking Nazis. But in the years following the Nuremberg Trials the Allies identified 13.2
million men in western Germany eligible for automatic arrest because of their actions under the
Nazi regime. Of those 13.2 million, fewer than 3.5 million were charged, and out of that group
2.5 million were released without trial. Among those remaining one million people, most were
sentenced with a fine, the confiscation of property they had looted, or a ban on seeking public
office. Approximately 300 of these individuals faced a serious legal sentence (Freedland 2008).16
Not ready to see so many former perpetrators go free, a group of Jewish soldiers who had
served in the British Eighth Army formed “revenge squads” to travel through Germany and
Austria with the aim of finding and killing former high-ranking Nazis. One of the squad’s mem-
bers, Israel Carmi, explains how they dealt with their selected targets:
When we arrived at the home of our suspect we would put on [British] Military Police
helmets with the white band and police armlets. Then we would enter the home and
take the suspect with us, saying that we wanted him for interrogation. Usually they
came without a struggle. Once in the car we told the prisoner who we were and why
we took him. Some admitted guilt. Others kept silent. We did the job.
(Kossoff 1998)
The job done was extrajudicial execution. Most victims were strangled or hanged. Other
former Nazis were found dead in roadside ditches. Another former revenge squad member
tells the story of one former Gestapo officer who was waiting in a local hospital for a minor
334
operation when kerosene “somehow” got into his bloodstream (Freedman 2008). Although
the exact number of executions is unknown, it is estimated that with several dozen revenge
squads in operation they were responsible for up to 1,500 deaths (Kossoff 1998). Many of the
former squad members are reported saying that, not only do they not regret killing former
Nazis, they wish they could have brought even more suffering to the ones they killed, and
killed many more than they had.
In this example we confront the fact that the revenge squads intentionally hunted down and
killed people. (Their victims were some of the perpetrators in the first example.) Their methods
of killing were oftentimes brutal. Further, the members described their desire to kill their vic-
tims as unrelenting, perhaps even insatiable. Are the actions of the revenge squads evil?
In many ways their actions are similar to those of the Gestapo. Both the Gestapo and the
revenge squads inflicted intolerable, extreme, or significant harm. And they both inflicted it
intentionally, hence their actions can be imputed to them. Thus, if the actions of the Gestapo
are evil, then either the revenge squad’s actions are also evil or there is a relevant difference
between the two acts despite the fact that intolerable, extreme, or significant harm was inflicted
and that the acts are imputable to their actors.
To conclude that both the actions of the Gestapo and the revenge squads are evil, one would
have to argue that the intentional infliction of intolerable, extreme, or significant harm is always
evil regardless of the reasons behind the agent’s intention to inflict harm. That is, the fact that
the Gestapo hunted down and executed people to eliminate perceived state enemies or for rea-
sons of anti-Semitism, and the fact that the revenge squads hunted down and executed people
to get revenge for previous evil deeds is considered irrelevant. This difference in their reasons
for acting has no moral pertinence; anyone who intentionally inflicts intolerable, extreme, or
significant harm has performed an evil act. This conclusion is based in large part on the nature
of the harm. The moral gravity of intolerable, extreme, or significant harm – a moral gravity
clearly indicated by the respective adjectives – overrides the potential significance of differences
belonging to the formation of the intention to do harm.
This is the moral worth approach. Moral worth is attached to the kind of being one is. And
no being with moral worth ought to suffer intolerable, extreme, or significant harm. Indeed it is
moral worth that makes evil harm intolerable, extreme, or significant. Most philosophers have
agreed that entities with certain cognitive, affective, or volitional capacities (namely, those that I
demonstrated give rise to fundamental vulnerabilities in the first half of the chapter) have moral
worth. We are egalitarians about moral worth because it attaches to the kind of being one is and
not to what one does. Although philosophers have discussed at great length which beings have
moral worth and whether all being have equal moral worth, we can say with relative certainty
that all humans have equal moral worth.
On the other hand, one might assess the two scenarios from the perspective of the individu-
als’ moral merit. Moral merit is based on what an individual has done rather than on what kind
of being one is. Although it can be debated whether a system of legal punishment is or ought
to be consequentialist, expressivist, or retributivist, it is fairly uncontroversial that our moral
responses are (at least minimally) retributivist. This claim is meant in a fairly straightforward
and nonmetaphysical way. It refers to the simple fact that people earn responses from others
in the moral community by virtue of their actions or character. If our actions or character are
good or morally neutral, then we deserve either good will or a lack of ill will from others.
And if our actions or character are evil, then we deserve a hostile response (see, e.g., Strawson
1993). Indeed, John Kekes notes that morality aims at human well-being precisely insofar as it
maintains conventions meant to reward individual merit and punish demerit in an indifferent
universe (2009: 504). Peter French succinctly states the principal view of moral retributivism:
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Zachary J. Goldberg
“the idea that evil, wrongdoing, requires a hostile response is the fundamental principle of
morality” (French 2001: 187).
When a former perpetrator of evil is harmed, one might feel that this harm rectifies the
imbalance of desert his earlier acts had caused, and resets a kind of moral balance (Berns 1995;
French 2001; Murphy 2003). Based on this approach, one might conclude that, given the
Gestapo officers’ history of evildoing, they deserved to be executed and that, therefore, the
actions of the revenge squads were not only not evil; they were morally justified and perhaps
even good. In an amoral universe without any cosmic justice, one might laud the actions of the
revenge squads because only by their hand did the Gestapo receive their comeuppance.
If this is right, then the actions of the revenge squads are not evil because the intolerable,
extreme, and significant harm is not culpably inflicted. Recall that evil is defined as: reasonably
foreseeable intolerable harms produced by culpable wrongdoing (Card 2002: 16), “extreme
culpable moral wrongs” (Russell 2014: 2), or significant harm and an inexcusable intention to
bring about, allow, or witness significant harm for an unworthy goal (Calder 2013: 188; 2015:
119). Clearly, the kind of harm experienced by the revenge squads’ victims satisfies the harm
element in these definitions; torture and execution are instances of intolerable, extreme, or sig-
nificant harm. But defenders of the moral merit position would argue that the infliction of the
harm by the revenge squads was not performed culpably or with an inexcusable intention; the
past evildoing of the victims gives rise to the nonculpable motivation of righteous vengeance
based on the moral merit of the victims.
However, the strength of each of these approaches gives way to their weaknesses. The
moral worth approach rightfully identifies all humans’ equal moral worth. However, it also
ignores the relevance of the reasons behind the Gestapo’s executions and the revenge squads’
executions. That is, in claiming that any culpable infliction of intolerable, extreme, or sig-
nificant harm is a violation of an individual’s moral worth, it glosses over the significance of
the different reasons each party had for forming the intention to inflict harm. On the other
hand, the moral merit approach rightfully identifies the importance of our retributive moral
responses. However, to conclude that the victims of the revenge squads deserved to be secretly
abducted and executed is to claim that their moral worth is dependent on their moral merit,
thereby allowing their moral worth to be degraded by their negative moral merit (Kekes 1990:
106–23; French 2001: 188–93). In so doing, it clearly denies former perpetrators’ claims to
equal rights like the right to a fair trial, it could lead to excesses of vengeance, and it could be
motivated by petty or base vindictiveness.
There is a third position that carves out a middle ground between these two perspectives.
Like the moral merit position, the middle ground perspective acknowledges that it is a natu-
ral human trait to respond with anger, resentment, indignation, and hostility to wrongdoing
whether suffered by ourselves or others, and such hostile responses to wrongdoing are based
on, and are central to, our ordinary naturalistic moral practices. Moral transgressors deserve our
resentment and animosity for what they have done. And, like the moral worth position, the
middle ground perspective acknowledges that no one, even perpetrators of evil, deserves to suf-
fer intolerable, extreme, or significant harm.17 Indeed, we morally and legally condemn those
who inflict these kinds of harm on former perpetrators.
The middle ground position takes a more nuanced view of the distinction between moral
worth and moral merit rather than emphasizing the importance of one at the expense of the
other. This approach recognizes that responding with hostility toward a moral transgressor is
not an affront to his or her moral worth. On the contrary, reacting with moral anger toward an
individual who has transgressed a moral principle recognizes both the transgressor as an equal
moral agent and affirms the moral equality of all rational beings. By reacting with hostility
336
toward moral transgressions, we demand to know why the transgressor believed herself to be
unfettered by moral constraints that apply equally to everyone. We ask: “Why did she believe
herself to be better than her victim, free to violate the victim’s dignity while her own remains
unimpugned?” This question arises out of the belief that all persons are moral equals, deserve
fair treatment corresponding to their moral equality, and, further, that the perpetrator had the
capacity to act in accordance with this shared moral equality. The capacity to recognize the
moral equality of others is evidence of the individual’s equal status as a moral agent. That is, by
condemning the perpetrator for not recognizing the dignity of her victims, we simultaneously
acknowledge the perpetrator’s capacity to recognize the dignity in others, which affirms the
perpetrator’s own dignity. In this way, by reacting with moral hostility to the moral past of the
evildoer, we offer a response that corresponds and is appropriate to her status as an equal rational
agent. This reaction is a commitment to moral principles and the equality of rational beings,
including the perpetrator.
In general, hostile responses are proportionate to the wrongness of the action; the worse
the transgression, the less moral merit the transgressor has, and the more hostility we feel she
deserves. Therefore, the perpetrator of evil deserves our strongest moral condemnation.18 At
the same time, if all people have moral worth independent of their moral merit, then certain
acts, even certain penalties, are prohibited as affronts to their moral worth. Any moral or legal
reckoning incurred must recognize the humanity of the person punished or morally rebuked.
Using this middle ground perspective to assess whether the actions of the revenge squads
were evil, one can argue that, although the revenge squads’ victims indeed deserved a severe
hostile response due to their moral merit, owing to their moral worth it was not morally justifi-
able to execute them. Since a severe hostile response in the aftermath of evildoing is appropriate
and perhaps even morally obligatory (to affirm the moral equality of all including the perpetra-
tor), but the actual response pursued by the revenge squads was excessive, one might conclude
that their actions were morally wrong, but not evil.19 That is, like most acts of wrongdoing, the
reasons of the revenge squad were understandable even if they pursued their ends in a morally
objectionable way. In contrast, evil acts are always unjustifiable if not incomprehensible (Russell
2012). This conclusion can only be reached by taking the moral history of the victims of the
putative evil act into account.
In the attempt to make sense of the actions of individuals and groups like the revenge
squads, we are often compelled to take the moral history of the victims of the putative evil act
into consideration. The moral quality of their acts cannot be explained solely by the motiva-
tional structure, culpability, or vindictiveness of the agent who inflicts the suffering; rather the
moral history of the perpetrator-turned-victim is relevant to understanding the act as evil. Two
of the three approaches available to assess the revenge squads’ actions show the importance of
a diachronic approach to evil. The moral merit approach, which claims that the actions of the
revenge squads were morally praiseworthy, is based on the claim that past evildoing justifies
righteous vengeance since an individual’s moral merit can degrade his or her moral worth.
The middle ground approach, which claims that the actions of the revenge squads are morally
wrong but not evil, is based on the conceptual independence of moral worth and moral merit
and the insight that hostile moral responses to wrongdoing are appropriate reflections of the
equal moral worth of all agents. Only the moral worth approach takes a synchronic view of
evil and holds the position that all intolerable, extreme, and significant harm culpably inflicted
is evil regardless of one’s moral merit. The moral merit approach and the middle ground
approach both reflect the belief that the contours of harm are complex, and they challenge
the view that harm isolated from the context in which it occurs, that is, abstracted from the
moral history of victims can be appropriately characterized. As a consequence, we must take
337
Zachary J. Goldberg
such diachronic elements into consideration when defining evil and classifying events and acts
under its moral heading.
There are two scenarios that pose potential objections to the claim that the moral history of
victims is significant to understanding an act as evil. Imagine a person who joins the revenge
squads and is somehow ignorant of the history of his future victims. He hears that the squad is
preparing to abduct and execute certain individuals, but he is unaware that the victims are for-
mer Nazis. He signs up for the task because he is a sadist and wants to participate in the killing.20
Or imagine that a former Nazi joins the revenge squad. He thinks that killing others who have
perpetrated evil deeds will cleanse his moral record, so he participates in the executions not for
righteous vengeance but for egotistical reasons. Can the moral history of the victims still reduce
the moral gravity of these individuals’ acts from evil to merely wrong? That seems doubtful.
However, even in these scenarios we see that to assess whether the act is evil we must confront
the moral history of the victims and weigh their past evildoing against the potential justifiability
or unjustifiability of the perpetrators’ motives. That the moral history of victims is often relevant
to understanding an act as evil does not entail that it always is or that other nondiachronic ele-
ments lose their significance.
Conclusion
In this chapter I demonstrated that evil has diachronic elements. As a result, understanding the
nature of evil calls for a diachronic approach. The problem with treating evil as a synchronic
notion is that we end up with distorted views of its essence that focus only on a distinct kind or
degree of harm that obtains only after the act has transpired. Reorienting the discussion to see
evil action as a phenomenon whose history is often significant to understanding it as evil allows
us to identify two additional critical attributes of evil action: an asymmetrical relation of power
constituted by fundamental vulnerabilities and their exploitation, whose often enduring char-
acter facilitates evil’s distinctive harm, and the frequent relevance of the victim’s moral history.
A diachronic approach to evil action reveals evil’s temporal structure and relational elements.
It situates evil action as a dynamic interaction between perpetrator and victim and eschews a
synchronic approach that identifies only a current time-slice of harm as constitutive of it.
Notes
1 For critical comments on an earlier version of this chapter I would like to thank the editors, Stephen de
Wijze and Thomas Nys. I am also grateful to Stephen de Wijze, Luke Russell, Herlinde Pauer-Studer,
Ana Honnacker, Eike Brock, and the participants at the 2018 Conference on Moral Evil in Munich for
their questions, suggestions, and criticisms.
2 There are additional philosophical works exploring the nature of evil character, motives, or intentions.
For example, see Garrard 1998, 2002; Haybron 2002; Steiner 2002; Morton 2004; Singer 2004; Barry
2013. The focus of my present discussion is evil action.
3 I use the term “relation” rather than “relationship” to characterize the facilitating conditions of evil
because it is the metaphysics of this relation that makes possible any subsequent harmful relationship.
See also Goldberg 2018.
4 Luke Russell refers to these perpetrator elements as “psychologically thin,” meaning that these accounts
claim that some aspect of a perpetrator’s psychology is relevant to defining evil, but they do not identify
a particular motivation or intention as necessary (Russell 2014: 74–8). Further, in contrast to the vast
majority of harm-based accounts that argue that a certain significant or extreme kind of harm is defini-
tive of an evil act, Stephen de Wijze argues that harm serves as an intensifier rather than identifier of
evil. See de Wijze (2017).
5 John Kekes defines evil first as “undeserved harm” (Kekes 1990: 3), and later as “serious, excessive,
malevolent, and inexcusable harm” emanating from different motives (Kekes 2005: 117). Nevertheless,
338
Kekes delves into a detailed analysis of the kinds of character and psychological motives that give
rise to acts of evil. Paul Formosa offers what he labels a “combination conception of evil” (Formosa
2008: 230) that combines three essential properties: an act caused by a human agent, the culpability of
the act, and a certain kind of harm. He calls the essential kind of harm “life-wrecking” harm, where
“life-wrecking harms interfere with a person’s ability to live a full and complete life” (Formosa 2008:
229). Although harm is clearly central to this definition, Formosa explicitly calls for any theory of evil
to include the relevance of the perpetrator’s intention, motive, situation, and circumstances. For these
reasons, it does not seem accurate to say these authors emphasize evil harm over other evil-making
features of an act.
6 In their discussion of the ways in which the concept of moral responsibility is historical, John Martin
Fischer and Mark Ravizza helpfully explain the difference between historical and nonhistorical phe-
nomena (1998: 170–206).
7 But not all aesthetic properties are nonhistorical. As Fischer and Ravizza point out, “being beautiful”
might be seem to be nonhistorical. However, if we were to discover that an apparently beautiful lamp
were actually made from human skin, our view of its current beauty would change (1998: 172).
8 I do not mean political or structural power, but, as will be made clear, the power to exploit fundamental
vulnerabilities resulting in evil harm.
9 Stephen de Wijze also includes the powerlessness of victims as an important feature of one of his suf-
ficient conditions of evil (2002: 218).
10 Parts of this discussion of vulnerability and exploitation as they relate to evil action draw on Goldberg
2018.
11 Kekes also discusses fundamental needs and their connection to evil (1990: 50–55).
12 Bagnoli refers to the same concept as “constitutive vulnerability” (2017: 15). Hampshire refers to these
vulnerabilities as requiring protection from “the great evils” (1989: 90–91, 106).
13 A final source of vulnerability emerges out of an agent’s context or specific situation and often includes
the intermingling of the other categories of vulnerability that can aggravate one other. Several phi-
losophers refer to this category as “situational vulnerability” (Gilson 2014: 37; Mackenzie, Rogers,
and Dodds 2014: 7–9). These circumstances may be natural, political, social, or economic. For exam-
ple, a person who does not receive an education (social) may be more susceptible to economic loss
(economic) and more dependent on aid from other individuals and the government (social/political)
(Mackenzie, Rogers, and Dodds 2014: 8). I do not include this category of vulnerability in the main
text because it is unclear if its exploitation alone, that is, apart from the exploitation of the other three
categories, can lead to evil. However, I include mention of it here since I remain unsure that it cannot
lead to evil.
14 Thanks to Stephen de Wijze for this example.
15 Of course, the woman does not have an evil intention or motive as does the child-killer. However, since
harm-based accounts of evil are psychologically thin, almost any intention or motive could be involved
in an act of evil. For this reason, I want to make clear that such situations, although they fulfill the harm
criterion and exhibit the facilitating conditions would not count as evil under my description.
16 See also, Beckman (1999); Cohen (2001)
17 Even philosophers and criminologists who argue in support of capital punishment do not endorse
the simplistic thesis that an eye for an eye is morally or legally justifiable. To torture a torturer or to
rape a rapist as criminal punishment offends our moral scruples. Rather than responding to acts of
evil by inflicting on the perpetrator the same suffering he inflicted on his victims, systems of criminal
punishment tend to sanction acts of evil with their “nearest equivalent in the society’s table of morally
acceptable punishments” (Reiman 1995: 184).
18 Since there may be no punishment or moral response that is proportionate to an act of evil, we demand
the strictest punishment or moral response possible.
19 One might resist claim that this difference indicates that the act that brought about this kind of suf-
fering is not evil by arguing it is less evil compared to the suffering of an individual without a history
of perpetrating evil, but still evil. But we cannot conclude that evils can be greater or lesser than other
evils without subscribing to the notion that the evil-making properties of evil acts can be quantified in
some way. I reject a quantitative account of evil in favor of identifying a qualitative distinction between
evil and mundane wrongdoing. For more on this issue, see: Steiner (2002), who argues that evil can be
divided in into greater or lesser, and Neiman (2002: 286) and Singer (2004: 196), who both argue that
it cannot. See also Russell (2014: 64–8) for a summary of the debate.
20 Thanks to Luke Russell for this example.
339
Zachary J. Goldberg
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26
EVIL, GENOCIDE, AND
MASS ATROCITIES
Introduction
“Genocide,” writes Arne Johan Vetlesen, “provides us with the most severe and challenging
instance of large-scale evil.”1 If the purposeful annihilation of men, women, and children num-
bering in the hundreds of thousands or millions is not evil, then what else is? Unsurprisingly,
many scholars who have been active in calling for renewed philosophical attention to evil
invoke major genocides and mass atrocities – the Holocaust in particular – to argue that evil is
an important part of our human experience and moral vocabulary.2 In parallel, numerous social
scientists who specialize in research on genocides and atrocities have applied the label “evil” to
the phenomena and cases they study.3
In this chapter, I connect these two literatures together – bringing research on genocides and
mass atrocities into more detailed conversation with philosophical work on evil. Despite the
overlapping interest of such scholars in the language of evil, the two literatures remain rather
disconnected. Philosophical theorists of evil have consulted historical studies of genocides and
mass atrocities and are generally familiar with relevant social-psychological work by scholars like
Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo. But research on genocide and mass atrocities has moved
on considerably in recent years, and few philosophers have mined the contemporary literature in
depth.4 Conversely, scholars of genocide and mass atrocities typically avoid detailed engagement
with philosophical discussions of evil,5 and have often explicitly downplayed the philosophical
implications of their research. Such scholars have, for example, frequently sought to reassure
their readers – and themselves – that efforts to explain atrocities do not affect how we norma-
tively evaluate atrocities. I wish to unsettle this claim. I agree with the common refrain that “to
explain is not to forgive.”6 But empirical findings on why and how mass violence occurs do
carry significant normative implications for the evaluation and interpretation of such violence.7
If the motives and mindsets of those who perpetrate violence that we readily call evil are found
to be largely the same as those who perpetrate violence that we refuse to call evil, for example,
this creates problems for any theory of evil that places emphasis on distinctive psychological
attitudes. More obviously, our moral assessments of genocidal perpetrators are clearly going to
be affected by whether they killed out of willful love of the suffering of their victims or fearful
coercion and terror at the consequences of disobedience for them and their families – even if this
does not change the fundamental wrongness of their actions. A causal account of atrocities does
342
Evil, genocide, and mass atrocities
not eliminate the moral responsibility of perpetrators or the evilness of the violence, but it does
have a bearing on broader philosophical debates about evil and its assessment. This deserves to
be acknowledged and interrogated rather than swept awkwardly under the carpet.
The bulk of this chapter seeks to present some key conclusions from recent research on
genocides and mass atrocities, focusing in particular on (1) the ordinariness of perpetrators, (2) the
role of beliefs and understandings in explaining perpetration, and (3) the role of situational social
pressures in explaining perpetration. In presenting these conclusion, I seek to highlight a fun-
damental emphasis of leading current theories of genocide and mass atrocities: that these are
complex phenomena involving heterogenous perpetrators. Though earlier accounts of geno-
cides and mass atrocities hardly presented them as “simple,” many emphasized certain overriding
causal factors or psychological processes (such as mass ideological belief, totalitarian or dictatorial
regimes, dehumanization, or unreflective bureaucratic rationalization), which identified “the”
fundamental human capacity to perpetrate extreme violence.8 Recent scholarship, by contrast,
places more stress on mixed and overlapping motives, the uneven and evolving rather than care-
fully preplanned trajectory to genocide and mass atrocity, and the often divergent dynamics that
drive different parts of the apparatus of violence.9 Having outlined such research, I then proceed,
in the third section of this chapter, to consider some implications of the complex processes of col-
lective action that produce genocide and mass atrocities for thinking about evil. I stress three par-
ticular points: (1) the implausibility of identifying any particular psychological hallmark of evil,
(2) the essential roots of large-scale evil in collective social environments, and (3) the complex
relationship between evil action and harm. I conclude by emphasizing the likely value of deeper
engagement with research on genocide and mass atrocities in future scholarly debates over evil.
Research on genocide and mass atrocities

It is common to think that the perpetrators of evil are highly unusual. In fiction, especially in the
children’s stories that provide some of our earliest socialization into the concept of evil, villains
are often, to use Luke Russell’s terminology, morally defiant. They know that what they do is
immoral, but do it either because it is immoral or because they are unconcerned by the fact that it
is immoral.10 Some philosophers have also espoused this view. John Rawls, for example, suggests
that “what moves the evil man is love of injustice.”11 Alternatively, evildoers are frequently char-
acterized as “sick,” “insane,” “sadistic,” or “deranged” – their actions rooted in a psychological
pathology.12 We typically, therefore, expect a substantial gulf to exist between evildoers and the
rest of us, and between truly evil actions and our more everyday moral shortcomings. This image
of evil is not without foundation. Many of the classic cases of famously brutal criminals – Ian
Brady and Myra Hindley, Joseph Fritzl, Harold Shipman – may fit such a portrayal.
One of the central problems raised by research on genocides and mass atrocities, however, is
that very few of perpetrators of these immense crimes appear to be characterized by moral defi-
ance, sadism or psychopathy. On the contrary, as the psychologist James Waller writes:
Except for a small number of the architects of the extermination process and a few
sadists who enjoyed taking part in it . . . most of the perpetrators of the Holocaust and
other cases of mass killing and genocide were extraordinary only by what they did, not
by who they were. They could not be identified, a priori, as having the personalities
of killers. Most were not mentally impaired. . . . In short, the majority of perpetrators
of extraordinary evil were not distinguished by background, personality, or previous
political affiliation or behaviour as having been men or women unusually likely or fit
to be genocidal executioners.13
343
Though most famously associated with Christopher Browning’s hugely influential study of
a German police battalion involved in mass killings of Jews in Poland, Ordinary Men, this
conclusion is a point of almost unanimous agreement among genocide scholars. Indeed, even
victims of genocide and mass atrocities frequently testify to such ordinariness – as Tzvetan
Todorov reports: “Camp survivors seem to agree on the following point: only a small minor-
ity of [death camp] guards, on the order of five or ten percent, could legitimately be called
sadists (and thus abnormal).”14 Primo Levi’s famous personal account of life in the Nazi death
camps stated of camp guards:
They were made of the same cloth as we, they were average human beings, averagely
intelligent, averagely wicked: save the exceptions, they were not monsters, they had
our faces.15
Such characterizations are consistent with studies of perpetrators in many other cases.16 Indeed,
perpetrating organizations, from the Nazi Einsatzgruppen to terrorist organizations to military
forces ordered to kill civilians, often go to considerable effort to weed out sadists, psychopaths and
the otherwise abnormal from their membership.17
Scholars of genocide and mass atrocities have typically offered two major explanations to
explain how such ordinary people can nevertheless come to perpetrate extraordinary forms of
violence. The first focuses on the beliefs and subjective understandings of perpetrators. It is now
clear that, far from consciously seeking to do evil, most perpetrators of genocides and mass
atrocities perceive their actions as legitimate and justified. As Alex Alvarez writes:
To marginalize, disenfranchise, and persecute a group of people requires many citizens

to accept the necessity and morality of policies of destruction . . . those who con-
tribute to the destructive process are generally normal individuals who have come to
accept an ideological framework that demands and justifies the elimination of a popu-
lation. They are ordinary people engaged in extraordinary behaviour that is made pos-
sible because they have come to believe in the rightness and necessity of the killing.18
Such claims should not be conflated with a presentation of perpetrators as ideological fanatics – a
portrayal now largely discredited by empirical research. But the influence of beliefs and ideolo-
gies is not limited to fanatics: nonfanatical perpetrators can still selectively internalize certain
frames, assumptions, ideological justifications, or cultural narratives that make violence look
legitimate. While such claims may sometimes function as post hoc rationalizations, evidence
from cases of mass killing suggests that many perpetrators do sincerely accept them.19
It has been my experience that, while some find this claim highly plausible, others react
with stunned incomprehension. How could any sane human being, they ask, possibly come to
perceive the mass murder of civilians in their thousands as morally acceptable? They must be
morally defiant – they cannot possibly fail to understand the wrongness of what they do and so
must consciously choose to perpetrate evil. This attitude is understandable, since the contention
that perpetrators of even the evilest crimes genuinely believe that they act correctly threatens a
belief that many people cherish: that evil acts are self-evidently morally abhorrent. Any sane indi-
vidual should recognize their wrongness – so either perpetrators cannot be sane or must know
that what they do is wrong.
Though this line of thinking is beguiling, it is ultimately an article of faith rather than a view
grounded in empirical evidence, and tells us more about the bewilderment of onlookers in the
face of evil than it does about the actual character of perpetrators. It is simply not the case that
344
individuals can unerringly recognize evil when they see it or are commanded to participate in
it. Vast numbers of people across history have very sincerely believed that genocide, mass exter-
mination, slavery, oppression, torture, and a host of other evils are entirely justified. To assume
that the wrongness of mass atrocities is evident even to those who carry them out involves a
gross failure to appreciate how far people’s moral assessments and behavior depend, in practice,
on their broader beliefs and understandings about the violence in question. For sure, few per-
petrators of genocide and mass atrocities will deny that large-scale killing is generally prohibited.
But, pacifists aside, most people nevertheless think that violence – including very large-scale
violence – can be legitimate in certain circumstances, such as national emergencies in which the
safety or very existence of the community is in peril. Consequently, whether a certain campaign
of violence seems legitimate or monstrous depends on one’s assumptions about the context in which
that violence is deployed and about those whom it targets. If one accepts that violence targets innocent
civilians in the name of ethically obscene political objectives, one will obviously condemn it.
But most perpetrators of genocides and mass atrocities do not see the violence they commit in
such terms. Instead they understand the violence as necessary self-defense, as righteous punish-
ment of dangerous criminals, as dutiful obedience to legitimate state authorities, and so forth.
Those committed to a moral defiance interpretation of evil might, however, object that such
justificatory beliefs – that civilian victims are dangerous or guilty, that violence against them is
necessary, that those who order it are legitimate authorities – are, themselves, so absurd that no
person could hold them. But, again, this vastly overestimates the reliability with which human
beings arrive at accurate factual and moral judgments by sheer force of their own intelligence
and conscience. The vast majority of the time, the vast majority of ordinary people do not form
their beliefs through careful reflection or deep examination of available evidence.20 Indeed,
human beings cannot do this – we lack both the time and expertise necessary to carefully form
and verify all our beliefs in this way. Consequently, as Michael Baurmann explains:
Almost all of our knowledge is acquired, not by our own autonomous explora-
tion, but by relying on information from others . . . the quality of our beliefs is not
dependent on the quality of our individual insight but on the quality of collective
knowledge acquisition.21
Such processes are reinforced by a range of psychological biases – for self-exculpation, trust in
the in-group, a desire for relatively simple and comprehensible explanations of the world, or
beliefs that promote self-esteem. In short, ordinary processes of belief formation are highly fallible,
and the accuracy of the beliefs individuals will adopt depends considerably on the ideological
and cultural environment they live in.22 Individuals will therefore often adopt beliefs that have
no evidence behind them, are wildly inaccurate, and are ultimately supportive of hugely harm-
ful policies, if those beliefs appear broadly endorsed by those around them, are repeated in high
quantities, are espoused by authorities the individuals treat as (adequately) trustworthy, or are
satisfying for a range of emotional needs.23 Circumstantial factors – such as the physical or tem-
poral distance between the perpetrators’ personal acts and the eventual harm they cause – may
also facilitate highly inaccurate beliefs or discourage the empathic responses to reality that would
encourage critical moral reflection.24
To illustrate, consider recent violence against the Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar’s Rakhine
region, which provoked the mass flight of almost three quarters of a million people and civilian
deaths numbering in the thousands. Outside of Myanmar, this was widely condemned as the
indiscriminate ethnic cleansing of an unarmed civilian population long discriminated against by
the government of Myanmar. But supporters of the violence from within Myanmar – including
345
prominent Buddhist religious leaders – operate inside an entirely different picture of reality.25
The Rohingya – who are typically referred to simply as “Muslims” or “Bengalis” – “stole our
land, our food and our water,” stated one Buddhist abbot. A member of Myanmar’s parliament
asserted that “all the Bengalis learn in their religious schools is to brutally kill and attack,” while
a local administrator of a “Muslim-free” village explained that Muslims “are not welcome here
because they are violent and they multiply like crazy.”26 A mother working for Myanmar’s Ma
Ba Tha (“Patriotic Association of Myanmar”) movement, similarly argued that:
[Muslims] are swallowing our religion. . . . Their religion is terrorism. . . . They

have been taught this since they were children, so it’s very terrifying. We say, “don’t
kill.” . . . They say, “kill, if you kill you will be blessed.” . . . Now, in the news, we
see about their Jihad in other countries, cutting off peoples’ heads. . . . I don’t want to
see our Buddhists suffer like that.27
Most individuals expressing such sentiments have little if any direct familiarity with actual
Rohingya. But this understanding of Rohingya nevertheless looks plausible to them after
years of rumor, storytelling, and, increasingly, fake news on social media. The aforementioned
administrator acknowledged that he had never met a Muslim, but observed that “I have to thank
Facebook because it is giving me the true information in Myanmar.”28 Another interviewee
commented that: “According to [what I hear from] other people, I am worried that ISIS will
affect us, and in our country we have many Muslims.” Asked when she started feeling scared of
Muslims, she answered: “It happened after seeing that news and the Rakhine problem. Since
then the news always pops up about it.”29
Consequently, the capacity to see even the most appalling violence as legitimate is not con-
fined to some small, deranged or antimoralist subset of humanity. Nor is it limited to authori-
tarian and unfree societies. In 1944 researchers surveyed over 4,000 American infantrymen
involved in ongoing combat actions against the Japanese in the Pacific theater in World War II.
Asked: “What would you like to see happen to the Japanese after the war?” 42 percent of the
respondents answered, “Wipe out whole Japanese nation.”30 Counterintuitively, when the same
surveys were conducted with American infantrymen fighting in Europe and training in the
United States, the proportion in favor of the genocide of the Japanese nation rose to 61 percent
and 67 percent, respectively.31 It is not plausible to suggest that such proportions of American
soldiers were insane or monstrously evil in their underlying psychological dispositions. While
such survey responses do not necessarily indicate that the American soldiers in question would
engage in genocidal violence in practice, it emphasizes how certain assumptions, frames, and
contexts can lead ordinary individuals to perceive genocidal violence as justified. In sum, empir-
ical evidence on mass atrocities generally confirms the proposition that, as Vetlesen writes,
“collectively enacted evil conceives of itself not as evil, but as good.”32 Ordinary people can
come to accept false images of reality, legitimating frames for the violence, and militarized or
brutalized moral values, that make even extreme violence look justified. It is frequently the case
that, as Daniel Chirot and Clark McCauley write, “the perpetrators believe that mass killing is
the right thing to do.”33
The second major set of explanations for the perpetration of genocides and mass atrocities
focuses on the power of social pressures – such as peer pressure, superior orders, or organiza-
tional and bureaucratic roles – found in the immediate situations in which extreme violence is
implemented. Such accounts often acknowledge the influence of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in
Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, with its picture of Adolf Eichmann as an essentially
unthinking bureaucrat blindly following orders,34 but they typically draw more heavily on a
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renowned body of research in social psychology.35 Solomon Asch’s group-conformity experi-

ments in the 1950s showed that individuals would agree with transparently false observations
(like a clearly incorrect claim about the relative length of two straight lines) if surrounded by
people who affirmed they were true.36 Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments on obedience
at Yale University, conducted in direct response to the Eichmann trial on which Arendt was
reporting, revealed how a majority of people would inflict (apparently) severe harm on other
human beings when ordered to do so by an authoritative scientist in a white lab coat.37 The
Stanford Prison experiment, conducted in 1971 by Philip Zimbardo, similarly demonstrated
that perfectly ordinary people could become deeply abusive once they entered a simulated
prison environment and adopted the situational roles of prison guards.38
Key studies of real-world cases of mass atrocity have often reinforced awareness of the power
of situational factors. Many philosophers of evil are familiar with Browning’s analysis of German
police battalions in the Holocaust – other key studies include David Chandler’s study of the
Khmer Rouge’s torture and killing facility, “S-21,”39 or Lee Ann Fujii’s and Omar McDoom’s
examination of the role of interpersonal ties and social influence in the Rwandan genocide.40
Such work has also been complemented by recent “microsociological” research: Randall Collins
and Stefan Klusemann, for example, have both identified the key role of intragroup emotions
that arise in the immediate situations of violent atrocities in shaping perpetrators’ behavior.41
Though there are important differences between the accounts of these various theorists, they
all suggest that the key drivers of killing are found in situational social pressures: to obey orders
from authorities, to conform to the behavior of one’s immediate group, or to share intense
emotions produced in tense confrontational situations. Even when individuals may not feel any
deep personal support for the violence, such factors can elicit their participation.
A major source of confusion in scholarship (on both genocides and mass atrocities and on
evil) concerns the relationship between these two main sorts of explanation, with many assum-
ing that there exists some fundamental tension or theoretical competition between the role of
social pressures on the one hand and beliefs, ideologies, and understandings on the other. A few
scholars, indeed, see the importance of one of these factors as entirely negating the relevance
of the other. In his famous but contentious argument that the sufficient motivational cause of
the Holocaust can be located in the German population’s widespread enthusiasm for “elimina-
tionist anti-Semitism,” for example, Daniel Goldhagen roundly castigates social-psychological
research on obedience and conformity as “pseudo-scientific” and “manifestly absurd.”42 But
Goldhagen’s attacks rest on an almost complete misrepresentation of what social psychologists
(and scholars of mass killing influenced by them) actually say.43 From the opposite direction,
Paul A. Roth (largely writing with Goldhagen in his sights), downplays the actual beliefs and
motives of perpetrators, on the grounds that research in social psychology “accounts in all essen-
tials for the number of perpetrators and their otherwise incomprehensible brutality”44 so that
“no need exists for positing ‘deeper’ reasons.”45 This is as misguided as Goldhagen’s opposite
view. Roth ignores the role of perpetrators’ underlying beliefs in shaping their interpretation
of the situations they find themselves in (see below), and displays little appreciation of the gap
between social-psychological laboratory experiments (none of which directly assess killing) and
real-world cases of mass atrocities.46
In reality, the role of beliefs/understandings and situational social pressures are deeply inter-
twined. As I have pointed out, most individuals’ sincere beliefs and normative stances are heav-
ily influenced by the apparent beliefs and social norms that are dominant in their principal
social groups. Simultaneously, beliefs and understandings are central in shaping how situational
pressures and social environments actually affect the individual. As leading situationist psycholo-
gists recognize, “it is the meaning that people assign to various components of the situation that
347
creates its social reality.”47 In Milgram’s discussion of individuals’ shift into what he terms an
“agentic state,” where they unreflectively obey the orders of authorities to inflict violence, he
explicitly emphasizes that:
The perception of a legitimate source of control within a defined social occasion is a

necessary prerequisite for a shift to the agentic state. But the legitimacy of the occasion
itself depends on its articulation to a justifying ideology. . . . Ideological justification
is vital in obtaining willing obedience, for it permits the person to see his behaviour as
serving a desirable end.48
Conformity to orders or group behavior is, after all, never automatic. An individual’s under-
standing of their situation determines, for example, whether social pressure is seen as emanating
from a legitimate authority or admired peer group, or from an upstart pretender or a distrusted
set of outsiders.
This discussion all relates in important ways to Arendt’s much-debated account of the banal-
ity of evil. While Arendt’s original portrayal of Adolf Eichmann has now been largely rejected
by historians,49 a certain interpretation of Arendt’s broader contention that much (though not all)
perpetration of evil is characterized by a certain kind of “thoughtlessness” remains sustain-
able. But this interpretation understands such thoughtlessness as an ethically substantive notion,
involving the failure to recognize the human suffering involved in one’s actions, rather than the
contention that the individual was entirely “unthinking” and therefore uninfluenced by belief
and ideology.50 Consider Waller’s discussion of Eichmann and Arendt’s analysis of him:
Contrary to expectations, Eichmann also was not a man without a conscience. As a

matter of fact, it was his “good” conscience (although certainly not one that valued
all of human life) that compelled him to follow what he felt to be his duty toward his
superiors. . . . He did his job simply, and thoughtlessly, because he was a person duty
bound to a social hierarchy committed to such extraordinary evil. . . . Arendt wrote,
“He would have had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been
ordered to do.”51
On the surface, there are tensions in this passage. As Waller says, Eichmann did have a con-
science, which “compelled him to follow what he felt to be his duty toward his superiors” –
and, as Arendt says, he would have felt bad about failing to do his “duty.” This is hardly the
image of the motivationally shallow actor acting “simply and thoughtlessly.” Eichmann’s com-
mitment to “duty” highlights how, rather than simply being morally “unthinking,” he operated
under a powerful but different conception of right behavior – an active “Nazi conscience,” in
Claudia Koonz’s words.52 Even when such beliefs do not generate active enthusiasm among
perpetrators for killing, they may shape those perpetrators’ perceptions of authorities as legiti-
mate, their desires to serve the national community, or their loss of psychological connection to
the real human suffering caused by their actions.
These key findings from scholarship on genocide and mass killing – on perpetrators’ relative
ordinariness and the interconnected role of beliefs and situational social pressures in explaining
how they perpetrate extraordinary evil – should not obscure two important points. First, there
is nothing in perpetrators’ ordinariness that implies that they are generally decent and unobjec-
tionable. All cases of mass atrocity are replete with examples of the full gamut of human vices,
including meanness, bullying, selfishness, pomposity, self-righteousness, busy-bodying, petty
vengefulness, cold-heartedness, and a willingness to exploit the vulnerable for personal gain.53
348
Genocides and mass atrocities have frequently been used to expropriate wealth and resources, to
brutally consolidate power and territorial control, to expand a bureaucracy’s influence, and to
further individuals’ careerist ambitions.54 Such motives and mindsets are often important parts
of the psychological architecture that allows individuals to engage in mass killing. They are also,
moreover, often linked to ideology, since pioneering work in political psychology highlights
the “elective affinity” between ideological beliefs and underlying personalities and psychologi-
cal needs. Ideological justifications of discrimination, repression, and violence are attractive to
many individuals because they resonate with certain psychological needs for control, superi-
ority, domination, and self-aggrandizement.55 Nevertheless, these are all – to borrow Judith
Shklar’s phrase – “ordinary vices” rather than extraordinary pathologies, and part of the flawed
psychological ensemble of ordinary people all over the world.56
Second, the ordinariness of perpetrators should also not obscure the fact that, in the actual
moment of violence itself, many perpetrators enter what Barbara Ehrenreich labels “altered
states.”57 Perpetrators of mass killing frequently make use of alcohol and other drugs,58 and less
frequently employ intense symbolic rituals – what the Jungian psychoanalyst James Hillman
calls “ceremonies of separation”59 – such as the use of masks, the application of face paint, and
so forth, all of which serve to ease the act of killing.60 An extensive literature also demonstrates
that killing itself clearly brutalizes perpetrators, facilitating further violence.61 Altered states can
engender profound feelings of otherworldliness, deindividuation, or emotional frenzy condu-
cive to participation in extreme violence.62 Consider the following testimony from a perpetrator
of the My Lai massacre – the infamous killing of 350 civilian inhabitants of a Vietnamese village
by US troops in 1968:
That day in My Lai, I was personally responsible for killing about 25 people. . . . I just
did it. I just went. My mind just went. And I was not the only one that did it. A lot
of other people did it. I just killed. Once I started the . . . training, the whole pro-
gramming part of killing, it just came out. . . . I had no feelings or no emotions or no
nothing. No directions. I just killed.63
Again, however, such processes are not associated with only some particular subset of human
beings, but characteristic of many ordinary people’s involvement in extreme violence.
Ultimately, then, scholars of genocides and mass atrocities now emphasize that perpetra-
tors cannot generally be subsumed under a single “profile,” “mindset,” or “model” – instead,
perpetrators are highly heterogeneous, and a broad range of distinct reasons and motives may
feed into their behavior.64 Classic stereotypes of the fanatical ideologue and the banal bureaucrat
are “at best extremes on a multidimensional spectrum of perpetrators.”65 In almost all cases, as
Thomas Kühne writes:
Carrying out mass murder meant integrating different individuals and social entities,
varying degrees of willingness to participate, different perpetrators, collaborators and
accomplices, sadists, fanatics, cold-blooded killers, occasional doubters, more serious
dissenters, and unwilling yet submissive collaborators.66
Such perpetrator heterogeneity injects a lot of complexity into the processes by which genocides
and mass atrocities are planned, organized and implemented. Commitment, vague belief, obedi-
ence, conformity, self-interest, and fear can all provide routes to participation in mass atrocities,
and do so in interaction with a wide array of societal and local social influences. Most perpetra-
tors are guided by varying amalgamations of such factors. In addition, motives often transform
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over the course of atrocity as the consequence of cumulative radicalization and brutalization.
Yet genocides and mass atrocities can occur on a large and organized scale because, when indi-
viduals and organizational structures are successfully mobilized in support of such violence, these
various motives can become mutually reinforcing. As Donald Bloxham writes of the Holocaust,
in this complex of ideological imperative, organizational flux, competition, and col-

laboration, delineating the roles played by ideological commitment, material interest,
and “just doing one’s job” is difficult – but there is no sign that any one contradicted
the others during the genocide.67
Theorizing collective evil

How should this research shape our broader thinking over the nature and meaning of evil?
While nothing automatically follows for philosophical arguments about evil from the empirical
findings I have presented thus far, I want to suggest that contemporary theories of genocide and
mass atrocities, which stress their complex and collective nature rooted in the intersection of
beliefs and social pressure, raise three points of particular relevance for discussions of evil.
First, such research challenges what Luke Russell labels “thick-psychological” accounts of
evil, which contend that “there is a psychological hallmark of evil action.”68 As Russell expli-
cates, various such hallmarks have been suggested in both folk and philosophical portrayals of
evil – such as sadism, knowing defiance of morality, or the silencing or disregarding of various
moral restrictions on harmful action.69 Yet, research on the perpetrators of genocide and mass
atrocities makes the exclusive association of evil with any specific psychological state rather
implausible. I do not simply mean the point – which several theorists of evil affirm – that the
perpetrators of evil acts may not all be evil persons, though research on genocide and mass
atrocities certainly adds some intuitive weight to that claim too.70 But thick-psychological
accounts take certain psychological hallmarks to be constitutive of evil acts, not just evil per-
sons. Yet, if such accounts are right, then at least a very large number of perpetrators of
genocide and mass atrocities do not appear to even commit evil acts, since there is very weak
support from empirical research for the notion that some specific mental state is a universal
precondition for perpetration of such extreme violence. If we are committed to the view that
the individual acts that make up genocide and mass atrocities are nevertheless evil, then we
may need to conclude that evil acts don’t rest on any particular motivational disposition, and
there is no psychological essence to evil.
Some might question this claim, since early and influential work on genocide and mass
atrocities often emphasized one or two extreme processes – such as the dehumanization, racist
denigration, or moral exclusion of victims – as key in explaining how perpetrators could come
to commit such horrific acts.71 A similar picture emerges from some psychological work, which
purports to identify “the” key mental process – such as the objectification of human beings and
loss of empathy toward them – behind extreme violence and evil.72
Yet contemporary research on genocides and mass atrocities generally rejects such accounts.
Some famous cases, such as the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide, rested on extensive ide-
ological and physical dehumanization and racist denigration of victims. Yet in many other
cases dehumanization and racism, while not absent, play a more peripheral role. In Stalinist
terror in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, or Argentinian state terror in the “Dirty War”
of 1975–1981, for example, victims were not fundamentally targeted because they were seen
as subhumans, nor were they cast as being entirely outside the moral universe of perpetra-
tors in any deep sense. They were, however, simply seen as probable criminals, traitors, and
350
dangerous threats, who should be legitimately targeted to protect the state and nation. Recent
psychological research suggests, moreover, that different psychological processes may under-
lie different perpetrator relationships to violence. Tage S. Rai, Piercalo Valdesolo, and Jesse
Graham present experimental evidence that in some forms of violence – when perpetrators feel
strong righteousness in punishing guilty victims – dehumanization plays little facilitative role.73
Indeed, dehumanization may even be counterproductive in such cases, since the violence rests on
the perception of victims as human agents deserving punishment. Other researchers, similarly,
emphasize important differences between the psychological dynamics of “dehumanized” and
“deindividuated” or “banal” and “sadistic” violence.74 In short, there is a lot of psychological
variation in the way that perpetrators of extreme violence relate to their actions. In social sci-
entific terminology, evil is characterized by psychological equifinality – there are many different
psychological pathways to evil action. The chances of finding a singular psychological hallmark
of evil that goes beyond intuitive appeal to actually fit with empirical research on the range of
real-world atrocities is therefore unlikely.
Second, research on genocides and mass atrocities reveals the extent to which an individual’s
moral performance – and likelihood of participating in evil – is dependent on the social envi-
ronment in which they operate. Genocides and mass atrocities highlight the fragility of human
morality and the relatively thin space that often separates good and evil. This is not because
people are unthinking automata, blindly following collective behavior. Indeed, there is much
diversity in how individuals respond to contexts of genocide, with some engaging in important
practices of resistance or evading participation.75 Perpetrators of genocides and mass atrocities
are thinking moral agents, but moral agency relies on beliefs, norms and cognitive frameworks
acquired through socialization, plus the specific information made available to us on particular
issues. Consequently, individuals are vulnerable to social influences that are, to borrow Jeff
Howard’s phrase, morally subversive: influences that impede our basic ability to effectively discern
moral right from wrong. Individuals may be endowed with certain basic intuitions, capacities,
or “moral resources” that are at the roots of our capacity to engage in self-restraint and moral
behavior.76 Yet these moral resources can be disrupted, and, even when they are present, their
implications for specific action are not always clear.
There is, in this respect, an important difference between the sort of collective and socially
sanctioned evil of genocides and mass atrocities, and the sorts of evil perpetrated by the Harold
Shipmans or Joseph Fritzls of the world.77 While the latter act in ways clearly prohibited by the
legal and moral norms of their groups and societies, perpetrators of genocides and mass atrocities
act in ways that their local authorities and groups appear to deem moral. Such external authori-
zation of violence, and the social norms and disseminated beliefs on which it rests, are immensely
powerful in pushing ordinary people to perpetrate evil and raising the obstacles to avoiding or
stopping it. I do not go so far as some, such as John Doris and Dominic Murphy, in suggesting
that such factors ultimately remove or largely erode personal responsibility for evil.78 Individuals
are not entirely stripped of agency by their dependence on social sources of beliefs and their ten-
dency to be influenced by social pressures and incentives. But the empirical finding that ordinary
people can become participants in evil through the same ordinary processes of belief formation
and adherence to social norms and pressures that, in a different social environment, sustain
ethically correct behavior, clearly matters. Milgram once claimed that, “if a system of death
camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would
be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town.”79
This understates some of the broader social changes and ideological mobilization necessary for
atrocities – nevertheless, the immense power of the social environment in shaping whether an
individual will become an evildoer brings us to the necessary conclusion that avoiding evil may be
351
highly demanding. To see through the dominant ideas and norms which facilitate evil may take
supreme levels of critical reflection, to resist the social pressures to become involved in evil may
take heroic levels of personal will and courage. A well-intentioned conscience is not enough.
Finally, I contend – perhaps counterintuitively – that these collective roots of genocide and
mass atrocities raise problems for dominant ways of thinking about the relationship between evil
acts and harm. Many theorists of evil see extreme harm as a central constitutive feature of evil.
For example, Russell presents evil actions as:
extreme culpable wrongs, where “extreme” means appropriately connected to an

actual or possible harm that is extreme for at least one victim, and “appropriately con-
nected” means that the action culpably produces or was intended to produce such a
harm, or (more contentiously) that the action foreseeably would have produced such
a harm if it was successful or if it had its typical effects, or (even more contentiously)
that the action is an appreciation of such harm.80
Russell acknowledges that the boundary of “extreme harm” that sits at the core of this under-
standing is appropriately vague.81 Even accepting this, however, genocides and mass atrocities
present some problems for this conception of evil, in two main ways.
First, Russell’s description of evil acts depicts circumstances of relatively simple causality – in
which an act has certain specific and identifiable actual or foreseeable effects. In complex col-
lective phenomena like genocides and mass atrocities, however, causality is rarely this simple.
Indeed, I suggest that the worst forms of evil are often emergent phenomena – outcomes not
reducible to the mere aggregation of individually evil acts.82 While many component parts of
genocides and mass atrocities – most obviously the acts of killing themselves – may be evil in
their own right, genocides and mass atrocities become possible through a much broader uni-
verse of action that produces the social environment in which such massive violence becomes
likely. This renders assessment of the causal impact of particular acts immensely difficult. For
example, many acts may be collectively necessary for evil but individually redundant, or they
may collectively produce immense harm, but the individual share of the harm is extremely small
or hard to quantify. Was, for example, voting for the Nazis evil? Was denouncing coworkers
in a Soviet factory evil? Was authoring the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences
and Arts, which provided intellectual support for the extreme Serbian nationalist claims that
would go on to be used to justify ethnic cleansing, evil? Such acts can all become part of the
central causal dynamics producing genocides and mass atrocities, yet they do so in light of their
interconnection with a much broader universe of actions committed with varying degrees of
intent, opportunism, obsequiousness and conformity. In short, the quite direct and simple pro-
duction of harms that characterizes Russell’s (and most other) accounts of the harm caused by
evil may be inadequate for capturing evil’s largest-scale manifestations. More awareness of evil
as an emergent property of collective action is necessary.
A second concern with this link between evil and extreme harm is that many acts in geno-
cides and mass atrocities do not themselves add that much harm and yet nevertheless seem
profoundly evil in terms of the utter contempt for human suffering they express. Eve Garrard
invokes, for example, the case of a tyrannical state that, having executed a young dissident by
firing squad, then charges the grieving relatives for the cost of the bullet. Alternatively, consider
the director of a mental asylum involved in Nazi “euthanasia” killings who, in response to letters
from the father of one victim pressing for an explanation, replied that such “annoying” letters
raised questions about the father’s own mental health that, if persisted, would lead to him being
called in for psychiatric examination.83 Such acts may be intensely hurtful but will not qualify
352
as an “extreme harm” in the grand scheme of things. Yet they seem – I assume not only to
Garrard and me – grotesquely evil. This seems equally true of many other forms of cruelty and
abuse beyond killing, bred in the warped normative environments characteristic of genocide
and atrocity. How to explain this without falling back into a “thick-psychological” account of
evil is, I suggest, an important challenge.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have sought to bring scholarship on genocides and mass killings more directly
into contemporary debates over the nature of evil. In summarizing some of the key conclu-
sions of such scholarship, I have stressed an account of genocides and mass atrocities as highly
complex, multifaceted phenomena perpetrated by a broad and heterogeneous mix of ordinary
people under the influence of varying ideational and social pressures. Contemporary research
on genocide and mass atrocities throws up a broad array of insights and implications for broader
thinking on evil, but I have chosen to focus on three in particular: the lack of a psychological
hallmark of evil among perpetrators, the heavy role of the social environment and chains of
collective action in determining individual complicity in evil, and the complex and ambiguous
relationship between potentially evil acts and concrete harms.
I do not claim that any of these presents an insuperable challenge to present thinking about
evil, and have suggested that deeper thinking about evil as an emergent property of collective
action might provide some leverage for dealing with them. Ultimately, my principal aim has
been to indicate that deeper engagement with the latest research on genocide and mass killing
has a lot to offer philosophers of evil. In particular, much recent research has been devoted to
opening up greater appreciation of cases other than the Holocaust – prominent studies cover
cases such as mass killings in Indonesia in 1965–1966,84 killings in Mao’s Cultural Revolution,85
genocidal killings in the civil war in Guatemala,86 or genocide against the Californian Indians by
the United States.87 While the Holocaust is clearly a – perhaps the – preeminent case of collec-
tive evil in human history, it excessively dominates philosophical discussions of collective evil,
much as it did, until recently, in genocide scholarship. Major reflection on genocides and mass
atrocities – the most ghastly and destructive forms of evil humanity has ever conceived – has
been a major part of the impulse for renewed philosophical attention to evil. Expanding the
range and depth of that engagement will be important to the success of our efforts to understand
and combat evil in the decades to come.
Notes
1 Vetlesen 2005, 147.
2 Garrard 1998, 43; Bernstein 2002, 1–2; de Wijze 2019.
3 For example: Staub 1989; Waller 2007; Zimbardo 2007. For definitions of genocide and other “atrocity
crimes,” see: United Nations 2014.
4 For some key recent comparative works, from a range of perspectives, see: Gerlach 2010; Bellamy 2012;
Owens et al. 2013; Straus 2015; Anderton and Brauer 2016.
5 This often results in inadequate conceptualizations of evil. In his otherwise excellent study of genocides
and mass killings, for example, James Waller simply defines evil as “the deliberate harming of humans by
other humans,” a conceptualization that would classify even morally justified or required harm as evil;
see: Waller 2007, 13.
6 Staub 1989, xii–xiv; Browning 1992/2001, xviii; Waller 2007, 17–19.
7 Psychological research also confirms that explanations do change how people evaluate behavior in
practice – see: Miller et al. 1999.
8 For some examples, see: Bauman 1989; Rummel 1994; Goldhagen 1996.
353
9 See: Bloxham 2008; Verdeja 2012; Owens et al. 2013, 73–80.

10 Russell 2014, 97–101.
11 Cited in: ibid., 87.
12 Orange 2011; BBC News 2011; Pantucci 2011, 37–8.
13 Waller 2007, 7–8.
14 Cited in: ibid. 75.
15 Levi 1989, 202, cited in: Waller 2007, 75.
16 See, for example: Straus 2006; Fujii 2009; Jensen and Szejnmann 2008; Williams and Neilsen 2016.
17 Waller 2007, 71;Valentino 2004, 42–4, 57–8; Baum 2008, 77; Dutton 2007, 136; Malešević 2013, 95–6.
18 Alvarez 2008, 217–18. See also: Mann 2000; Leader Maynard 2014.
19 See, among other studies: Hoffman 1993; Bartov 1994; Arch Getty and Naumov 1999; Weitz 2003.
20 See: Hardwig 1985; Nyhan and Reifler 2010.
21 Baurmann 2007, 151.
22 Stephen de Wijze’s emphasis of the way certain ideologies warp the “moral landscape” in atrocities
offers a similar account from within the philosophical literature on evil; see Wijze 2019.
23 Nyhan and Reifler 2010, 308.
24 Grossman 2009, Section III. See also: Zoller 2015.
25 Schissler et al. 2015, 10.
26 Beech 2017.
27 Schissler et al. 2015, 9–10.
28 Beech 2017.
29 Schissler et al. 2015, 12.
30 Cited in: Chirot and McCauley 2006, 216.
31 Ibid.
32 Vetlesen 2005, 176. See also: Card 2002, 9, 52, 77.
33 Chirot and McCauley 2006, 3.
34 Arendt 1963/2006. However, this picture of Eichmann has been challenged and revised by historians –
as I note below.
35 See also: Billig 1991, 73.
36 Asch 1956.
37 Milgram 2010.
38 See: Zimbardo 2007. See also: Kelman and Hamilton 1989.
39 Chandler 2000.
40 Fujii 2008; Fujii 2009; McDoom 2013.
41 Klusemann 2010; Collins 2013; Klusemann 2012.
42 Goldhagen 2010, 152–4.
43 See: Newman 2002. Contrary to Goldhagen’s portrayal, for example, Milgram never claims that people
“will feel duty bound, namely as an absolute moral necessity, to kill their neighbours . . . just because a
government says so” (see: Goldhagen 2010, 154). Milgram’s argument is about obedience to authori-
tative commands in intimate situations under close supervision. Whatever the flaws or merits of this
theory, it is not imperiled – contra Goldhagen – by the banal fact that people sometimes don’t do what
governments say, for example by not paying taxes. A citizen choosing to evade taxes is not under the
situational pressures Milgram analyses.
44 Roth 2005, 206.
45 Roth 2004, 237.
46 The Asch experiments and Stanford Prison experiments were not studying killing at all. Milgram’s
experiment did provide cues – notably an ‘XXX’ marker on the machine experimental subjects were
(purportedly) operating – that suggested potentially lethal violence, yet experimental subjects were also
told that their actions would not cause any lasting harm. This matters because killing is distinct from
other forms of abusive behavior. Research on real-world killing falsifies Roth’s bland assertion that
“people simply comply” when ordered to kill – on the contrary, remarkable numbers sometimes strug-
gle or refuse to kill under orders (ibid. 232). See: Blass 1999; Collins 2008; Milgram 2010; Mastroianni
2015. As Leonard Newman and Ralph Erber conclude: “the idea that all, most or even many of the acts
of cruelty perpetrated during the Holocaust were carried out by people who were grimly following
orders is remarkably easy to disprove” (Newman and Erber 2002, 335).
47 Zimbardo 2007, 221. See also: Newman 2002, 51, 60–62.
354
48 Milgram 2010, 143–4.

49 Lozowick 2000; Burleigh 2001, 634; Mann 2005, 244–5; Cesarani 2007.
50 See: Covington 2012.
51 Waller 2007, 102.
52 Koonz, 2003.
53 Many examples can be found in: Goldman 2011; Browning 1992/2001; Gerlach 2010, Chapter 3.
54 Allen 2002; Mitchell 2004; Kalyvas 2006; Aly 2008.
55 See: Sidanius and Pratto 1999; Jost et al. 2003; Jost et al. 2009a; Jost et al. 2009b.
56 Mann 2000, 357; Olusanya 2014, 73. See also: Shklar 1984.
57 Ehrenreich 1997, 12
58 Olusanya 2014, 97–8.
59 Hillman, cited in Slim 2007, 228.
60 Ibid. 228–33.
61 Waller 2007, 242–5; Dutton 2007, 116–17, 120–22.
62 Dutton 2007, 119–22.
63 Cited in: Smeulers 2004, 244.
64 Mann 2005; Smeulers 2008.
65 Browder 2003, 495.
66 Kühne 2012, 141.
67 Bloxham 2008, 207. See also, in general: Browder 2003; Kalyvas 2003.
68 Russell 2014, 78. Russell does not, himself, defend such an account.
69 Ibid. 78–92.
70 Ibid. 4–5, 32–4.
71 Arendt 1976; Kuper 1981, Chapter 5; Staub 1989.
72 Baron-Cohen 2011.
73 Rai et al. 2017.
74 Stein 2000; Reimann and Zimbardo 2011.
75 See, for example: Semelin 1993; Rochat and Modigliani 1995; Monroe 2011.
76 Jonathan Glover identifies two key categories of such “moral resources,” one bound up with human-
ity and the other with moral identity – Glover 1999, Chapters 4 and 5. See also: Covington 2017,
Chapters 1 and 4.
77 Kelman and Hamilton 1989;Vetlesen 2005.
78 Doris and Murphy 2007.
79 Blass 1999, 955–6.
80 Russell 2014, 62.
81 Ibid. 64–8.
82 Wijze 2019. On emergence, see: Goldstein 1999.
83 Doc.769 Noakes and Pridham 1988, 1047.
84 See the special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research,Volume 19, Issue 4 (2017) for several articles.
85 Su 2011.
86 Brett 2016.
87 Madley 2016.
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27
EVIL
A comparative overview
Michiel Leezenberg
Introduction
The rebirth or revival of academic philosophical interest in the problem of evil has a precise
date: September 11, 2001. The terrorist assaults of that day, notably the attacks against the World
Trade Center in New York, which claimed the lives of an estimated 3,000 civilians, have come
to trigger, or dominate, many a subsequent philosophical discussion of evil.1 In the Western
popular imagination, contemporary evil also has a face. In the early twenty-first century, Osama
bin Laden, the man generally seen as the mastermind behind the attacks, has become almost as
defining of evil as Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust were for an earlier generation.
Yet, Bin Laden clearly did not think of himself, the al-Qa’ida network, or the WTC
assaults as evil: although he stopped short of claiming responsibility for the assaults, he openly
praised the perpetrators. From his own statements, however, it does not become clear whether
he sees the attacks as primarily an act of self-defense against the Americans’ allegedly attacking
the umma, or Muslim community of the faithful; as an act of revenge for alleged American
atrocities against Muslim civilians; or as a symbolic act telling America, “the head of global
unbelief,” that it is living in falsehood and should embrace Islam. He likewise wavers between
characterizing America in religious terms of unbelief (kufr) and ignorance (jâhiliyya) or in
moral terms of evil: he appears to do the latter when he blames the US for the exploiting of
women, racial inequality, economic oppression, environmental pollution, drugs trafficking,
sex trade, and so on. Moreover, he holds not just the US administration responsible for these
evils: he goes on to claim that the American people, who have elected this government and
support its policies by paying taxes, are not innocent of these crimes; hence, he implies, they
are legitimate targets in this war.2
The horrors of the September 11 assaults invite philosophical reflection: they raise ques-
tions, not so much whether Bin Laden’s jejune justifications have any validity, but, for example,
whether such spectacular acts of mass violence are somehow qualitatively different from other,
less widely publicized forms of violence; whether violence by nonstate actors is essentially less
legitimate or more evil than state violence; and whether violence by non-Western actors against
Western civilian targets is qualitatively different from violence by Westerners against non-Western
civilians. The iconic status of these assaults, rather, than, for example, the 1994 genocide in
Rwanda or the horrors of the wars in former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria, also raises
360
Evil
questions of a more comparative character: did the assaults really reflect, or contribute to the
creation of, a “clash between civilizations”? If so, then exactly what does that clash consist in?
Is there anything in the Islamic value system that is qualitatively different from Western liberal
values? More generally, do non-Western traditions have fundamentally different notions of, and
views on, evil? If so, should we account for contemporary forms of mass violence in terms of
such fundamental differences, or should we seek explanations elsewhere? Or is it perhaps pos-
sible to formulate universally acceptable characterizations of, and injunctions against, evil?
Surprisingly, however, such comparative and intercultural philosophical questions have
received relatively little sustained attention from academic philosophers in the West. The pre-
sent chapter cannot pretend to fill this gap, or to address these vast questions; it merely attempts
to lay the groundwork for possible answers. Accordingly, it will give a bird’s eye view of the –
relatively scarce – existing literature on evil in non-Western traditions, without any claim to
covering new ground. Below, we will discuss some of the most influential views on evil in,
respectively, the Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and Judaic philosophical traditions.3 Given the vast
temporal and spatial dimensions of the field covered, this can obviously be no more than a cur-
sory, if not superficial overview, but if it persuades any reader to make further forays into any of
these directions it will have served its purpose.
Concepts and problems of evil

Some of the doctrines discussed below resonate with Western ideas, in particular with
Nietzsche’s claims about the ultimately arbitrary and contingent character of the (human) labels
good and evil, and several studies have been devoted to these similarities and convergences;4 but,
on the whole, the comparative and intercultural study of evil is still in its infancy. The first
question to address in such comparative studies is, of course, whether representatives of differ-
ent traditions are talking about the same thing. Do different traditions have a notion of evil, as
qualitatively different from the morally wrong, the ritually incorrect, the legally transgressive,
or even the merely practically unpleasant? Most if not all traditions speak of the inevitabilities
of human life (like pain, disease, and death) as bad or evil; but what about cataclysmic events,
like earthquakes, floods, and famines? Do such events merely occur as facts of nature or do they
have a moral significance as well? Likewise, some traditions have no qualms about labeling even
down-to-earth nuisances, like unpleasant odors, poisonous snakes and scorpions, and harmful
insects, as “evil.”
Not all of these manifestations, however, are seen as equally morally or philosophically rel-
evant. In Western philosophical discussions, one often encounters an (implicit or explicit) dis-
tinction between evil in a broad and generic sense of innocent suffering, that is, of bad things
happening to good people, which raises questions about whether the natural or cosmic order is
morally good, evil, or just indifferent; and evil in a narrower sense of specifically human actions
and human character. In many other traditions, one does in fact encounter broadly similar dis-
tinctions between “cosmic” or “metaphysical” and “moral” or “psychological” evil. Below, we
will discuss whether, in these traditions, natural forces and entities can be called evil, or whether
it is only humans, and possibly superhuman beings like angels and demons, which are capable of
morally evil actions. If it is humans who can be evil, or commit evil acts, exactly what is it that
enables them to do so? A free will? A moral consciousness?
Such questions already suggest that conceptions of good and evil do not function in isolation:
they form part of a broader network of conceptualizations and valuations. Hence, they may
well be incommensurable, i.e., impossible to judge by neutral or universally accepted standards.
361
Michiel Leezenberg
For example, concepts of evil acquire rather different contents in monotheistic, polytheistic,
and atheistic traditions. It has often been observed that the problem of evil poses an especially
serious challenge for monotheistic religions: if one believes that the world has been created,
and is governed, by a single omnipotent and benevolent divinity, the problem of theodicy, or
the existence and justification of evil in the world, becomes a major philosophical or theologi-
cal challenge. It is widely accepted that Buddhist, Confucianist, and Hindu traditions do not
have a notion of a single and omnipotent supreme creator deity; hence, they do not appear to
face a similarly serious challenge. One might even ask if, in these traditions, one can meaning-
fully formulate a question of theodicy at all. Likewise, the philosophical problem of radical evil
rests on an idea of man as free, autonomous, and responsible, an idea that seems unique to the
Western philosophical tradition since Kant. Yet, almost all religious and philosophical traditions
have some awareness that human suffering may be, or seems to be, undeserved. Hence, questions
of incommensurability will not detain us below, but it should be kept in mind that they have
nontrivial implications for intercultural (moral) encounters.
A related question that will have to await another occasion is whether moral traditions, or
civilizations, are essentially coherent and continuous over time, or instead may involve radical
ruptures or discontinuities. This question is of particular relevance for discussions of present-day
moral and political problems and conflicts; witness, for example, the various attempts to explain
the September 11 assaults as resulting from a generic “Islam” or from a monolithic “Islamic
tradition.” Can we understand, and should we judge, such and other acts only in terms of the
traditions from which they arise, or is there any common ground or neutral and/or universally
applicable moral standard from which we can proceed?
China: Confucianism and Daoism

Unlike Near Eastern monotheistic religions, like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the Indian
and Chinese traditions tend to see evil as a feature of human actions, characters, or conceptu-
alizations, rather than a part of the cosmic order or of cosmic processes. In discussing China, I
will limit myself to the currents or “schools” of Confucianism (usually labeled Ru in Chinese)
and Daoism, which emerged during the final years of the Zhou dynasty (c.1046–256 bce),
during the so-called Warring States period (475–221 bce).5 The breakdown of Zhou rule
was marked not only by the disappearance of social peace and relative prosperity but also by
the decline of the so-called “mandate of Heaven” (tian ming). This was not so much a cos-
mic moral principle valid for all humans but rather a Zhou rationalization or explanation of
successful worldly rule. Perkins argues that, in pre-Han China, the philosophical problem of
evil arose with the Zhou dynasty collapse, and was symbolized by prominent evil individuals
(like usurpers and war lords), rather than natural or manmade disasters (that is, events seen
in isolation from any possible actors), like the Lisbon earthquake or possibly the Holocaust.6
Thus, Chinese philosophers attach less moral significance to natural disasters than to the
ruler’s ability to cope with them.
This focus on human action rather than cosmic processes is already apparent in Confucius
(Kongzi, 551–479 bce). Not even in the Analects, however, do we find a substantial moral
notion of evil as distinct from the ethical notion of wickedness, from the ritual notion of incor-
rectness, and from the legal notion of crime. Underlying reasons for this absence may be, first,
the fact that Heaven (tian) plays no major moral role in Confucius’s thinking, which prevents
him from developing a notion or doctrine of cosmic evil; and, second, the fact that he hardly
if at all speaks of human nature (xing), which prevents him from developing a notion of human
evil. This is not necessarily to say that Confucius was an agnostic, let alone an atheist, in matters
362
Evil
religious. Rather, cosmological or eschatological considerations play no role in his practical

philosophy. Perkins (2014: 48–51) argues that Confucius does recognize a problem of evil, in
the generic sense of bad things happening to good people; but, as he himself already acknowl-
edges, the subordinate – and ambiguous – role of Heaven (tian) in the Analects makes even
such claims debatable. A substantial moral problem of human evil arises for Confucianists only
if one interprets the crucial concept of de as denoting moral virtue rather than as virtù in a more
Machiavellian sense, that is, as skill or efficacy in governing.
Put differently: even if Confucius has a concept of evil (which, as seen, may be doubted), this
need not imply that he also recognizes a substantial philosophical problem of evil. Famously,
Confucianists are concerned more with proper human conduct, in particular in governing oth-
ers, rather than with abstract and systematic metaphysical or cosmological speculation; hence,
one should beware of reading too much ontological or cosmological import into Confucian
terms like xing, “(human) nature,” or tian, “Heaven.” In the Analects, one finds little if any moral
concern with such cosmic entities. Likewise, given Confucius’s concentric view of loyalties,
starting with one’s family and only derivatively extending to the state, and given his relative
lack of interest in laws, one should perhaps not even expect any ethical doctrines with a claim
to universal validity here.
The Confucian views on evil substantially change with the work of Mencius (Mengzi,
372–289 bce), Confucius’s most influential pupil. Although for Mencius, as for Confucius, the
notion of Heaven remains inarticulate and play an at best a subordinate moral role, Mencius
pays much more attention to human nature (xing). He argues, famously, that human nature is
good, since all humans have a “heart of compassion,” which cannot bear to see others suffer.7
Even nowadays, he argues – in clear allusion to the general degradation of moral standards in
his own age – people still have this natural reflex. The innate feeling of compassion, he adds,
is identical to the principle of benevolence that is innate in all humans. It takes education and
development, however, to transform this principle into a virtue that actually informs our actions.
Mencius further argues, in particular against the Mohists, that, because human nature is good
rather than evil, morality and education ought to elaborate or realize this nature rather than do
violence to it (II.1.6). He also counters claims that human nature is morally indifferent, and
hence can be arbitrarily educated to do either good or evil (VI.1.2): although it is possible to
make men do what is not good, he argues, it is not according to their nature, just as we can force
water to move up, even though its natural inclination is to move down.
Mencius’s comments on government leave hardly more room for a serious problem of evil
than his doctrine of human nature. According to him, government should be benevolent; that
is, it should take care of the population’s need for food and security. The analogy between the
nature of man and the nature of water returns here: “the people turn towards a benevolent rule
as water flows downwards” (IV.1.9). Clearly, he thinks that his own age is far from ideal: “the
people have never suffered more under tyrannical government than today” (Lau 1970: 75). He
does not make clear, however, whether he thinks of violent or oppressive government as evil
in a moral sense, or merely bad – or illegitimate – in a practical or political sense. One reason to
infer the latter is the fact that he characterizes persons who act badly despite their education as
“not wise,” rather than as “bad” or “evil.” One other possible reason for the absence of a major
moral category of evil in Mencius is his optimistic belief that all men, even if their actions are
bad, can be taught the virtue of benevolence and other virtues, as a result of which their actions
will eventually become good. This faith in the benefits and efficacy of education leaves little if
any room for incurably evil human actions and characters, even if Mencius nowhere says that
education will necessarily or without exception correct the behavior of all humans, and make
all rulers benevolent.
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The later Confucianist Xunzi (d. 238 bce) is rather more pessimistic than Mencius. Human
nature, he argues, is bad or evil (è), and hence, natural human inclinations are a threat both to
fellow humans and to the states in which they live. These natural inclinations, he continues,
should be countered and suppressed by government, which functions primarily not through
laws but – and here the Confucianist in him shows – through rites or ceremonies instilled
by means of education. By nature, he claims, man is not simply amoral but positively evil:
he is born with aggression, envy, hatred, and a love for profit, and acting in accordance with
these drives or feelings causes violence and crime. Hence, humans need teachers and models
to become corrected, but this correction (zheng) is articulated in terms of ritual principles and
moral precepts invented by the sage kings of antiquity, rather than laws and punishments. More
generally, Confucianists seem to characterize good and evil, and other terms that to us seem
moral, in terms of ritual correctness, suggesting an approach to normativity that is relatively
unfamiliar to the Western tradition.
Xunzi’s pessimism leaves us with the more radical question of how any good actions can
arise, given that all humans are naturally evil. To this question, Xunzi presents two answers.
First, he argues, all things seek their opposite: thus, men desire to do good precisely because
they are evil in nature. Second, for Xunzi as for Confucius himself, sages play an indispensable
civilizing role. Sages, he seems to be saying, are unique among humans in that they are able
to change their own nature through self-cultivation; hence, societies should be governed by
ritual principles born of the acquired natures of sages (23.7). Among others, this notion of an
“acquired nature” seems to imply that the Confucian notion of xing is not quite identical to
the present-day concept of human nature as strictly natural and innate. On Xunzi’s account,
this transformation of an inborn trait into an acquired nature by ancient sages is precisely what
produces ritual and moral principles. It is not that sages have any unique talent or capacity for
being good, but merely that most humans are “petty men”: although they are able to become
well-educated “gentlemen,” they are simply not willing to do so (23.15).
Conspicuously absent in all this is a notion of cosmic evil. Xunzi considers tian (translated,
significantly, as “nature” rather than “Heaven” by Knoblock) as not in itself a cause of suffering
or evil for humans. The course of nature, he argues, is constant, and should be countered or
corrected with good government:
If you respond to the constancy of Nature’s course with good government, there will
be good fortune; if you respond to it with disorder, there will be misfortune. . . . If
you conform to the Way . . . then Nature cannot bring about calamity. Accordingly,
flood and drought cannot cause famine. . . . You can have no cause to curse Nature,
for these things are the consequences of the Way that you have followed.8
Thus, whatever calamities befall humans should be blamed on bad human actions, and more
specifically on poor government, rather than on Heaven, or nature, as a possibly evil force. This
would seem to amount to a strict denial of the existence of evil in the broad sense of undeserved
suffering, and to an exclusive focus on the morality, or even the efficacy, of human actions, and
in particular of government, but it leaves open the question of whether incompetent govern-
ment is also necessarily bad, or evil, in a moral sense.
One encounters completely different ideas on good and evil, and on the importance of
education, in Daoist thinkers like Laozi (d. c. 300 bce) and Zhuangzi (d. c. 286 bce). Unlike
the Confucianists, who talk of the Way (dao) as a principle for correct human conduct,
Laozi and Zhuangzi see dao as a generative cosmic principle that produces, and hence pre-
cedes or transcends, opposites like man–woman, living–dead, strong–weak, and good–bad.
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Implicitly or explicitly, both also distance themselves from the Confucianists, and from their
notion of de (“virtue” or virtù) as acquired through lengthy education.
It does not become clear whether Laozi thinks of dao as morally significant. On the one hand,
he appears to think that the world consists of opposites; all things, he says, will in time transform
into their opposite; whoever is now strong will at some point become weak, whoever is now
alive will at some point die, etc. This would seem to imply that the cosmic order is a transforma-
tive process in which each thing eventually and inevitably turns into its opposite, and is itself
beyond good and evil. Yet, on the other hand, Laozi clearly thinks of the cosmic principle of
the Way as in some sense good, witness comments like “the way of Heaven (tian dao) is on the
side of the good man.”9
Famously, Laozi also preaches wu wei, that is, effortless and noncoercive action, in particular
for rulers: successful government, he claims, consists in not interfering in the course of events.
With this idea of effortless action, Laozi also appears to reject the Confucian notion of de, “vir-
tue,” and with it the quintessentially Confucian virtue of humanity (ren). It is probably in this
context that we should read Laozi’s comment that “Heaven and Earth are not humane; they
take the myriad things as straw dogs.”10 According to Perkins, this suggests that Laozi rejects
the idea of cosmic evil, since Heaven is indifferent to human morality, but on a more plausible
reading this statement seems to amount to a rejection of anthropocentrism. Heaven and Earth
are not ‘human’ in that they do not involve human distinctions like that between good and
evil, and humans as such have no special status, that is, we should not see nature (or, rather,
the cosmic order) as somehow reflecting or following human feelings and intentions.11 Perkins
may be overstating the inhuman and metaphysical character of Laozi’s comment, however: he
downplays or overlooks the fact that immediately after this claim Laozi goes on to say that that
sages, too, are not humane. That is, Laozi appears to be rejecting the specifically Confucian
virtue of humanity (ren) as what governs, or should govern, humans, and his notion of de as a
spontaneous and effortless capacity for government is based on forgetting what one has learned,
rather than, as Confucians believe, on long years of instruction.
It is here that Laozi’s difference with the Confucianist view of governing and education in
terms of correction or rectification (zheng) becomes most apparent. For Laozi, governing in
accordance with the Way consists precisely in not correcting, or interfering with, the course of
things and events. This is not to say that the ruler does not act at all; rather, wu wei consists in
acting spontaneously and effortlessly, instead of trying to impose one’s will or intentions. Hence,
“when his [i.e., the ruler’s] work is done, the people all say, ‘It happened to us naturally’” (17).
For Laozi, therefore, the relevant moral – and political – opposition is not between good and
bad, or good and evil, but between intentional action and “nonaction” or wu wei. This would
imply that Laozi does not recognize a substantial philosophical problem of evil either in the
cosmic sense or in the moral sense.
We find a rather greater attention to evil in the sense of human suffering in that other classic
of Daoism, the Zhuangzi. The first seven chapters of this book, known as the “inner chapters,”
are conventionally seen as stating Zhuangzi’s own thoughts rather than those of his disciples.
They contain various examples, or rather stories, of seemingly undeserved suffering, as a result
of either natural disasters or human actions. Yet, like Laozi, Zhuangzi does not seem to rec-
ognize a problem of (cosmic) evil. In these chapters, he emphatically rejects the opposition
between right (shi) and wrong (fei), and between benefit (li) and harm (hai); what is beneficial to
one creature, he argues, is harmful to another. By extension, he would presumably also reject
any moral distinction between good and bad.
At first blush, this seems to amount to a relativist or skeptical rejection of all morality, but
perhaps this conclusion may not be warranted. Zhuangzi recommends acting in accordance
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with the Way, as it is effortless and successful; but he also seems to view it as normatively good.
Nonaction (wu wei), he claims, “can set right or wrong. The utmost joy, keeping the body alive –
only nonaction comes close to preserving this.”12 Moreover, despite his acceptance of death
as inevitable, Zhuangzi clearly values life: famously, he prefers being alive and powerless over
being dead after having lived a life of influence.13
Rather exceptionally for a pre-Han thinker, Zhuangzi shows virtually no interest in matters
of government. Moreover, the term xing, “human nature,” does not occur in the inner chapters.
Zhuangzi not only rejects the idea that the human species is in any way special or privileged; he
also appears to reject the very idea that humans, qua humans, share a specifically human essence
or nature.14 Thus, Zhuangzi’s is a perspectivism that sees human values and standards as but one
of countless options or positions, without there being any one standard or criterion that has a
broader, let alone universal, validity. Moreover, even on a human scale, forms of evil that may
befall men are part of the inevitable flow of things, and hence should not be grieved over, least
of all for reasons of societal propriety, as the Confucianists demand. The most moving – or
perhaps shocking – example, of this attitude is the story of Zhuangzi’s reaction to the death of
his wife. Instead of going into extended mourning, as required by custom and Confucianism,
Zhuangzi is found making music. When asked why he does not mourn his wife, he replies:
When she first died, how could I alone have no distress? But I looked at her beginning
and that originally she was without life. . . . Now there has been another change and
she is dead. This is like the progression of the four seasons: spring, fall, winter, summer.
(Mair 1994: 169)
To condemn death, or to mourn the passing away of beloved ones as evil, is to remain trapped
in one’s human perspective.
A final question of a comparative character arises in this context: ancient Chinese philosophy
has on occasion been labeled “pragmatist,” in that it values practical concerns over metaphysical
claims. Now American pragmatism, in particular Rorty’s, shows a similarly practical orientation,
but Rorty famously adds the desire to alleviate or counter suffering caused by human cruelty
as a central concern; and this desire appears to presuppose a notion of evil of sorts.15 Given the
absence, or at least the philosophical irrelevance, of the problem of evil in pre-Han thought,
however, exactly what kind of pragmatism do we encounter here? Can we even insert a moral
concept of evil into a tradition that appears to reject any idea of morality as involving universal
claims, or to display an amoral Machiavellian concern with effective government? Conversely,
could a more Chinese-inspired pragmatism encourage us to discard the notion of evil alto-
gether, as it does not necessarily add anything beyond practical concerns with human suffering
and bad actions? At present, answers to these questions remain wide open.
Indian thought: Hinduism and Buddhism

Now let us turn to the Hindu tradition and its offshoots. In classical Indian thought, evil in the
broad sense of suffering caused by natural or cosmic causes is not a topic of any major moral
concern. Rather more attention is paid to the moral implications of human actions, primarily,
of course, in the idea of karma, i.e., the thought that whatever happens to us in this life is a
punishment or reward for our actions in our past lives. Indeed, one might argue that, in Indian
thought, all seeming cases of cosmic evil are in fact the result of moral evil: what appears to be
a natural disaster may turn out to be an instance of karmic law in action.
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The idea of cosmic evil as linked with moral evil through karma was first formulated in
more or less philosophical terms in the Upanishads, and further developed in later texts like the
Bhagavad Gita. In the Upanishads, the Hindu concept, or concepts, of rebirth (samsâra) appears
with the belief that the soul can leave the body upon death, and return in this world, and that
the conditions under which it is reborn are determined by the person’s actions in a previ-
ous life.16 Rebirth is not yet systematically linked to questions of evil, however. Further, the
Chandôgya Upanishad generally speaks narratively in mythological terms, rather than argumen-
tatively in philosophical terms, of the true self (âtman) as free from evils, old age and death, and
whose desires and intentions are real. In the Bhradarayaka Upanishad, this self is identification
with brahman or “immense being”; as such, however, it does not amount to individual identity,
as it dissolves into universal brahman like a chunk of salt thrown in water.
The Bhagavad Gita marks a further refinement of karmic law with its distinction of disci-
pline through action (karma), knowledge (jnana) and devotion (bhakti). It also appears to see
evil in terms of human action rather than natural or cosmic events. Famously, as the final battle
between the two groups of half-brothers, the Pândavas and the Kauravas, is about to begin, one
of the protagonists, Arjuna, develops doubts about the prospect of slaying one’s own kinsmen,
neighbors, and teachers as an “evil act” (pâpa karty), and hence refuses to fight. His charioteer,
who is none other than the god Krishna incarnate, scolds him for his weakness, and enjoins him
to fight, arguing that this apparently evil act is, in fact, the right course of action. Although he
acknowledges that Arjuna’s words are wise, Krishna nonetheless argues that the latter should
not grieve for his opponents’ death (nor for his own, for that matter) for a number of reasons.
First, Krishna says that, in killing an opponent, one only kills his mortal body, but not his
immortal and indestructible Self (âtman), which will reincarnate in another body. Second,
he claims that death is inevitable anyway, so there is no reason for mourning over it. Third,
he states that, for Arjuna, as a member of the caste of warriors (kshatriya), fighting is simply a
caste duty (dharma). Fourth, he addresses Arjuna’s sense of masculine honor: whereas killing
and dying in battle bring honor, in not fighting one brings “disgrace worse than death” over
oneself (2.34). Finally, and most importantly, he argues that one should not act for personal
gain like power or honor but liberate oneself from all desires and all attachment to the objects
of perceptions, in particular through “discipline” (yoga); in doing so, one is released from the
“bondage of action” (karma-bandhana) and – it is implied – will follow the right course of action
automatically or as a matter of course.
The Bhagavad Gita hardly involves any problem of evil: Arjuna’s misgivings about the appar-
ent evil of killing relatives are simply brushed aside, and no further doubts about either cosmic
or moral evil appear. The reasons given by Krishna, however, cannot easily be reconciled with
each other, as they combine a seemingly universalist notion of liberation with particularist
norms of caste-specific duty and gender-specific honor. Further, from the text of the Bhagavad
Gita, it does not become unambiguously clear whether good and evil are merely human labels for
human actions, or also apply to the cosmic order as a whole. Finally, the text does not unam-
biguously state whether the moral precepts given apply only to warriors or also to members of
other castes (not to mention women).
On such a view, evils like suffering, killing, and, most importantly, dying are not major
philosophical or theological problems but at worst mere nuisances that one can and should rid
oneself of by realizing one’s true self. And, indeed, many earlier scholars – starting, famously,
with Max Weber – have concluded that Indian thought does not see theodicy as a serious
problem, and actually succeeds in solving that problem. Against such claims, O’Flaherty (1976)
argues that the problem of theodicy is in fact pervasive in classical Indian culture, but it appears
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in mythology and folk traditions rather than in more philosophical writings and hence has long
been overlooked by Western scholars focusing on more canonical texts.
In the one major comparative study of this topic in a Western language, Arthur Herman
(1993) approaches what he calls the theological problem of evil in terms of the Western notion
of theodicy, that is, the question of how to reconcile human suffering with divine goodness and
justice. Prima facie, the Western and Indian traditions seem broadly comparable, and in fact such
a comparison constitutes a substantial portion of Herman’s study. A few caveats are in place,
however. Most importantly, to the extent that the philosophical currents of Hinduism discussed
by Herman (the Brahmanism of the Upanishads, the theism of the Bhagavad Gita, and the
Advaitan monism of Shankara) can be called theistic (let alone monotheistic) at all, they do not
involve an all-good and omnipotent creator god like the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic monotheistic
traditions do. Hence, it is not clear that theodicy does in fact pose as serious a problem in Hindu
philosophy as it does in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic thought. Accordingly, Herman (1987) has
coined the term “karmadicy” to formulate the problem in nontheistic terms, but this coinage
has not found wide acceptance.
After considering, and rejecting, attempts by Western thinkers from St. Augustine to Leibniz
to solve the theological problem of evil, Herman (1993) argues that Indian thinkers, in particular
Shankara (c. eighth century ce) do provide a tenable solution to the problem. In a comparative
vein, he argues that the theological problem of evil, so central in Western philosophy, simply
does not arise in Indian thought, since it is actually solved in a philosophically acceptable man-
ner by Indian theories of samsâra or rebirth. In making this case, Herman distinguishes two
notions of rebirth: transmigration, which involves an individual soul that migrates from body
to body and is capable of personal identity; and reincarnation, which involves rebirth without
such identity being preserved. It is in the guise of a doctrine of transmigration, he argues, that
the theological problem of evil can be solved in all of its current formulations:
No matter how terrible and awe-inspiring the suffering may be, the rebirth theorists
can simply attribute the suffering to previous misdeeds done in previous lives, and the
puzzle over extraordinary evil is solved with no harm done to the majesty and holiness
of Deity.17
This explanation presupposes the doctrine of rebirth, which is likely to be less acceptable
to a non-Indian, nonreligious, and/or philosophical audience, and faces other philosophical
problems. But, if it is philosophically tenable, then the Indian philosophical tradition may be
said to have succeeded in actually solving the problem of evil. And, indeed, karmic doctrine
has been praised for doing so by authors like Max Weber as the most rigorous solution to the
theodicy problem. It has hardly been subjected, however, to sustained philosophical critiques.
One recent critic is Kaufman (2005), who argues that a karma-and-rebirth theory, even if one
accepts the philosophically problematic assumption of rebirth, fails to adequately account for
evil in the sense of human suffering. He claims that the idea of punishment for deeds commit-
ted in a life one does not even remember empties the doctrine of any idea of moral growth,
learning, or improvement; further, it leads to an infinite regress (if all suffering in any life,
including death, is the result of earlier evil actions, then what was the origin of this evil?); it
presupposes rather than explains the supreme evil of death (why did God, or the gods, allow
this evil to come into the world in the first place?); and it simultaneously affirms and denies
human free will and responsibility. He bases his arguments not on the theory as encountered in
any one source, however, but on a “simplified and idealized version” of the doctrine, reflecting
specifically modern attempts to develop karmic doctrine into a “complete, systematic theory
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of the origins and explanation of human suffering.”18 It remains to be seen whether this does
justice to existing karmic doctrines.
More recently, Mike Burley has argued that the moral implications of karmic beliefs are less
straightforward than either proponents or critics suggest. In implying that whatever evil happens
to humans is morally just, these beliefs risk blaming the victim: any injustice, no matter how
seemingly undeserved or horrible, may now be explained as really a well-deserved punishment
for one’s actions in previous lives. In fact, however, widely different positions have been taken
by different Hindu and Buddhist thinkers; thus, when confronted with victims of torture, perse-
cution, or genocide, one – rather heartless – Buddhist reply is that these victims must themselves
have done something terrible in a previous life, and hence deserve such karmic punishment.
A more compassionate Buddhist answer is that committing evil is itself a misfortune, and war-
rants forgiveness toward, or prayer for, the perpetrators rather than condemnation.19 Shocking
or moving as such positions may be, in general they do not offer any clear practical guidance for
ethical or political action, in particular the question of whether and how one may avoid, lessen,
or counter any evil done by humans.
The development of Buddhism in India and its later spread to China deserves a special men-
tion in this context. Early Buddhism not only denies that there is a deity responsible for the
creation of the world, and hence, in a sense, for the existence of cosmic or metaphysical evil;
it also denies the existence of an unchanging self (âtman), and hence, in a sense, of moral evil.
Nonetheless, evil, in the guise of suffering (duhkha), does of course play a central role in Buddhist
eschatology: suffering is an inevitable part of life, but it is predicated on the illusory belief that we
have a self; and, once we rid ourselves of this belief, suffering will also come to an end. This is
not simply a denial of the self, however: already in the famous “Questions of Milinda” the early
Buddhist sage Nâgasena refuses to either affirm or deny that there is a self. What survives death,
it is sometimes asserted, is merely the flame that passes from one candle to another.
This immediately leads to even more pressing conceptual and normative problems than we
encountered in Hinduism concerning the justice – and, indeed, the very coherence – of karmic
law. These primarily concern the underlying actor or entity undergoing rebirth, and assuming
responsibility for past actions: if there is no self, then exactly what is the underlying entity or
identity that is reborn? And how can I reasonably be rewarded or punished for actions in the past
that have not been committed by me or my self? Likewise, tough questions concerning evil lie
ahead if one thinks, as the early Buddhists do, that human suffering is not primarily the conse-
quence of evil actions in a previous life but rather of the belief that there is a self in the first place.
These are difficult questions; but they do not appear to have been of central concern in early
Buddhism. Nor is it such problems which guided or motivated the rise of the later form of
Buddhism usually referred to as Mahâyâna Buddhism; if anything, questions concerning exist-
ence, self, and evil are complicated even further by the novel doctrine of emptiness (sunyata),
i.e., the belief that neither the objects of perception nor the concepts of our thinking have any
substance, essence, or “own-being” (sva-bhâva), or “massive” (and ultimately indestructible)
existence of their own. The topic of evil does not figure prominently in these later Buddhist
writings; instead, actions are “merely” good or bad, proper or improper (dharma/adharma), or,
more rarely, commendable (or “skillful”) or reprehensible (kusala/akusala). One is faced, how-
ever, with the complex question of exactly what the status of moral rules or precepts is when
simultaneously the emptiness of those rules is asserted.
The most influential, and philosophically rewarding, of these later Buddhist authors is
undoubtedly Nâgârjuna (d. approx. ce 250). In his Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (“Fundamental
Verses of the Middle Way”), the most influential and sophisticated statement of this doctrine,
Nâgârjuna argues that not only metaphysical entities or notions like time and causality are
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empty but also our terms and concepts, like the very opposition between samsâra (rebirth) and
nirvâna (liberation from rebirth), and, by extension, between good (dharma) and bad (adharma),
are equally devoid of own-being (sva-bhâva). Instead, he argues, these entities are neither caused
nor destroyed but “dependently arising” (pratîtya samutpâdá). With this doctrine, Nâgârjuna
calls attention to the radical impermanence and contingency of all things. His views carry
the threat of nihilism, however, an objection raised most forcefully in the opening verses of
Chapter 24: emptiness, it is alleged here, leads to a denial of the four noble truths of Buddhism,
of the “three jewels” (i.e., the Buddha, his doctrine or dharma, and his community or samgha),
and thus of good and bad:
Delving in emptiness (sunyata), you will destroy the reality of the fruit of attainment,
the proper (dharma) and improper (adharma) acts, and all the everyday practices relative
to the empirical world.
(24.6)
Against such criticisms, Nâgârjuna argues that his position does not amount to the nihilist denial,
but to a reinterpretation, of classical Buddhist doctrine. His claims are considerably complicated,
however, by his distinction between provisional or conventional and ultimate truth (24.8); the
latter goes beyond the former, but cannot be taught without it. This suggests that the ultimate
truth is, to speak in a Nietzschean vein, beyond good and evil, that is, beyond the conventional
concepts and distinctions by which we order the world. That leaves open, however, the question
of what exactly a doctrine of evil as empty but real would amount to, let alone whether Nâgârjuna
formulates any positive ethical (or other) doctrine, instead of strictly denying all doctrines.
Nâgârjuna’s views on the emptiness of our concepts and distinctions, including that between
good and evil, and between provisional and ultimate truth, have had an enormous influence on
various later Buddhist schools, but they lead to major conceptual and moral challenges, which
we are only beginning to fathom. To mention but one example: Brook Ziporyn claims that,
in Tiantai Buddhism, provisional and ultimate truth are identical. This, he argues, is an episte-
mologically important but ethically problematic insight, as it suggests not merely that good and
evil are conceptually dependent, as each other’s negation or complement, but also that compas-
sionate actions are equivalent to deeds of aggression, given that any apparently evil action can
be recontextualized and turn out to be, in fact, good: “the most horrible evils are . . . fully and
eternally present even in Buddhahood.”20 In a lengthy review of this work, David Loy (2004)
points out some of the problems of this view. The fact that all apparently evil acts can be recon-
textualized as really good is too general, in that it gives us no practical moral guidance as to
when we must do so in our daily lives, rhetorically asking what Tiantai Buddhists would make
of Hitler and the Holocaust.
Finally, it seems that it was Buddhist authors who gave the idea of evil or sin as a violation
of a universal or divinely given law a wider circulation in Chinese thought from the second
century ce on. The Chinese term, zui, does not occur in this sense in the oldest Chinese texts,
and appears in Chinese translations of Buddhist works, where it renders Sanskrit pâpa (“bad”);
likewise, Chinese è acquires a meaning closer to Sanskrit akusala or “reprehensible.”
Islamic philosophy
For comparative and intercultural philosophical inquiry, the Islamic and Jewish traditions are
qualitatively different from the Chinese and Indian traditions discussed above. Theologically,
the Islamic tradition shows important continuities with the earlier Near Eastern monotheistic
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faiths of Judaism and Christianity, in particular the belief in an omniscient, omnipotent, and
benevolent creator; philosophically, it is informed by the pagan Greek philosophers of antiquity,
and in particular by the view that being is good and that evil is in some sense nonexistent.
Islam being a monotheistic religion with a notion of an all-good and all-powerful divin-
ity, the existence of evil in the world poses a much more serious problem than it does for the
Chinese and Indian traditions discussed above. The early Muslim theologians were well aware
of this challenge. The earliest schools of kalâm or speculative theology, like the rationalist
school of the Mu’tazila, and somewhat later the more voluntarist Ash‘arite school, focused
on questions of God’s unity (tawhîd) and justice (‘adl), and of predestination and free will.21
Good and evil, the Mu’tazilites argue, are notions that can be established and distinguished
by reason, rather than arbitrary postulates of the divine will. On this account, God cannot
enjoin what is contrary to reason, or act against the (rational) principles of justice. Against
this extreme rationalism, the tenth-century theologian al Ash‘arî argues that God cannot be
called unjust, since injustice is the transgression of laws imposed by a superior, and nobody is
superior to God, the lawgiver of the universe. There are acts and commands by God that we
may not understand rationally, he adds, but these show the limitations of human reason and
should be accepted “without asking how” (bi-lâ kayfa). On this voluntarist view, good and
evil cannot be determined rationally but are, respectively, what God has prescribed and what
He has prohibited.
Islamic ideas about evil and theodicy are developed in rather more sophisticated terms by
later philosophers like Ibn Sîna (Avicenna, d. ce 1037). He discusses evil (sharr) in Book IX,
Chapter 6 of the section on metaphysics, or theologia (ilâhiyyât), of his massive work of synthe-
sis, The Healing (al-shifâ‘). Ibn Sîna’s views on evil, as with so many of his doctrines, have been
decisively shaped by those of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus. From the former two, he derives the
idea of being or existence (wujûd) as good (khayr), and evil (sharr) as nonexistence or as privation
(‘adam) of existence. From the latter, he derives the view of the intellect (Gr. noûs, Ar. ‘aql) as
good and the body, or matter, as evil. He further refines the doctrines of his predecessors with
his metaphysics of necessity and contingency, and of essence and accident.
For Ibn Sîna, evil occurs only in the material and sublunary realm, and affects only individual
human beings, not the entire human species. Moreover, its existence is a metaphysical or natural
necessity rather than a moral concern. First, he distinguishes metaphysical or cosmic evil, which
is evil, disorder, or imperfection occurring in the cosmos at large, from moral or psychological
evil, which is an imperfection of the soul (or more generally of perishable animals, in particular
humans). He sees evil as only a partial privation of being, since an absolute privation would
amount to a negation of being, that is, to nonbeing. At one point, Ibn Sîna claims that evil in
the human soul is the result of ignorance; elsewhere, however, he argues that human evil is
caused by human free will (ikhtiyâr), which would seem to imply that humans can freely choose
to commit an evil act even if they know it is evil.
He further distinguishes essential evil (al-sharr bi’l-dhât) and accidental evil (al-sharr bi’l-‘arad).
Essential evil, he argues, is the privation of predicates required for a subject’s essence, or of an
element common to a species (for example, of corporeality for human beings or of having wings
for birds). As essential evil is nonbeing, however, it cannot be a cause (whether an efficient
or an existential one); it comes about not as the result of the action of some external agent or
cause but precisely because of the latter’s inaction. Accidental evil, by contrast, is “that which
withholds perfection from what deserves it,” like pain, grief, and injustice; unlike essential evil,
which is privation of being without itself possessing any being, accidental evil is being in itself,
but withholds or destroys perfection. To the extent that it exists, or has being, accidental evil
may in itself be good; but it can be called evil since it causes evil.22 For example, fire may in
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itself be good, but if it burns the legs and prevents a human from walking it destroys a human
perfection and, as such, it is evil.
On this account, evil is a necessary concomitant of the constitution of the (material) world,
which is in itself good. Moreover, it is relatively rare: for example, the privation of the natural
perfection of a particular species (i.e., of that which makes an entity into a member of that spe-
cies), such as the flawed generation of an embryo resulting in a handicapped or deformed human
or animal, is the exception rather than the rule. Humans, Ibn Sîna adds, may also be deprived
of secondary perfections, such as knowledge of philosophy or geometry; but this is not an evil
with respect to the species “human being” but with respect to such secondary perfections only.
Thus, Ibn Sîna’s is a fundamentally optimistic world view: evil occurs relatively rarely in the
world, he argues, and never becomes dominant. It occurs only in one small part of the universe,
the sublunary sphere; moreover, it is only accidental evil that affects larger numbers of people,
and it does so only relatively rarely in their lives. Still, one may ask why should there be any evil
at all. Couldn’t God have made the universe all good? Here, Ibn Sîna argues that evil is a neces-
sary consequence of the good, for “were the elements not to oppose each other, and be acted
upon by the dominant one, these noble species would not have arisen from them.”23 The good
that is possible in things, in other words, becomes good only after, and in virtue of, the evil that
may occur in them. For example, it is precisely because fire is capable of destroying things that
benefits may also be derived from it. Conversely, he argues, evil may also be a necessary means
to the good; for example, a lion’s killing other animals is in itself evil, but it is necessary for the
preservation of the species, and hence good.
Fair enough, but couldn’t God have made creation free of all such evils or imperfections
altogether? For example, couldn’t He have made all lions vegetarians, and all humans intelligent
or immaterial? Ibn Sîna’s answer remains implicit but seems to be negative. All of God’s acts, he
writes, are done by necessity; this implies that even God is bound by the laws of logical and/or
(meta)physical necessity, and cannot arbitrarily act or will things excluded by these laws. The
“hard determinism”24 that Ibn Sîna appears to defend as a philosopher, however, appears dif-
ficult to reconcile with his – seemingly theologically motivated – belief in both human freedom
and divine omnipotence.
Moreover, unlike Christian thinkers such as Augustine and Aquinas, Ibn Sîna feels no need
to relate (moral) evil to sin, in particular original sin.25 This suggests that, unlike his Christian
counterparts, he is able to account for moral or psychological evil in purely naturalistic terms of
conflicting psychological forces rather than in moral terms of guilt and punishment.26 A more
detailed confrontation of naturalist-descriptive and normative-moral accounts of human evil
however, awaits another occasion.
Ibn Sîna’s doctrines on evil, as with his ideas in other realms, have had a tremendous and
lasting influence. Two of the most important later Islamic authors who are strongly indebted
to his views on evil are Abu Hâmid Al-Ghazâlî (d. ce 1111) and Ibn Taymiyya (d. ce 1328).
The terms in which both discuss evil and theodicy are clearly shaped by Ibn Sîna’s discussions.
However, both try to do more justice to the theistic notion of a personal God as the creator
(rather than a more abstract cause) of the world, and who can reward and punish people for their
actions – and to a theistic notion of evil as embodied by Satan, or Iblîs.27
Ibn Taymiyya, famous – or notorious – for his sustained polemics against every person or
innovation he considers undesirable or harmful for the existence and well-being of the Muslim
community, or umma, discusses the problem of evil in various of his numerous writings, in
particular in the Hasana, a lengthy exegesis of Qur’an (4: 78–9). Here he states, among other
things, that all good befalling man comes from God, and all evil comes from himself. Here, Ibn
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Evil
Taymiyya follows various lines of argument, not all of which are easily reconciled with each
other. On the one hand, he argues that evil should be attributed not to God but only to inter-
mediate secondary causes; on the other, he argues that what we regard as evil is good by virtue
of God’s wise purpose. Echoing Ibn Sîna, he states that whatever evil God creates is not absolute
(mutlaq) and general, but particular and accidental; moreover, whatever evil there is, is therefore
relative to those who commit or suffer it, that is, to creatures. On his account, Mu’tazilites and
Ash‘arites fail to make this distinction between absolute and particular evil, and hence only
speak of absolute evil as applying equally to man and God; thus, they wind up, respectively,
denying that God wills all things, and asserting that God may create evil without a wise purpose.
What this wise purpose is, however, we do not know and should not ask, he states, quoting a
Qur’anic verse: “God is not questioned as to what he does, but they are questioned” (Qur’an
21: 23). Yet, elsewhere, Ibn Taymiyya argues that, although God is the source of all things, evil,
as nonbeing, cannot strictly speaking have been created. Yet, God is just in punishing sins, as sin
is the failure to do that which God’s servants were created to do.
It should be clear that Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Sîna share a similar optimism about the exist-
ence, amount, and strength of evil in the world. Neither in Ibn Sîna nor in al-Ghazâlî nor in
Ibn Taymiyya, incidentally, do we find anything remotely like a suggestion that individuals,
civilizations, or empires may be evil simply because they are infidels. Hence, whatever sweeping
rejection of the West, America, or Zionists and Crusaders we may find among some present-day
Islamic radicals, this does not in any straightforward manner derive from either the Qur’an and
hadîth, or from the Islamic philosophical and theological tradition. Despite his own claims to
the contrary, Bin Laden’s justification of mass violence against civilians (see also, e.g., Lawrence
(ed.) 2005: Chapter 11) has no precedent in, and cannot simply be justified from, any suppos-
edly timeless Islamic precepts or unchanging Islamic conceptions or doctrines.
One particularly striking teaching of the nonexistence of evil may be found among some
currents of Islamic mysticism, or Sufism. This view focuses on the character and status of the
devil or Satan (Shaytan or Iblîs in Arabic). In the Qur’an, Iblîs is not only the great tempter of
humans but also a fallen angel, cast out of Heaven for all eternity for his arrogant refusal to bow
before Adam when ordered to do so by God.28 Some authors in the Sufi tradition, however,
argue that, in disobeying God’s command (amr) Iblîs was in fact obeying the divine will (irâda),
which clearly enjoins all creatures to worship God alone. In ordering his angels to bow before
Adam, in other words, God has put his servants to the test; and Iblîs, in his refusal, is not only
the sole angel to pass this test; in fact, he is also God’s most loyal servant and the most consist-
ent monotheist. On this view, his residence in hell is a temporary tribulation rather than a final
punishment: Iblîs will help and/or guide all sinners, and will voluntarily remain far away from
his Creator, until Judgment Day (yawm al-qiyâma), when he will once again take up his right-
ful place next to God. On this Sufi view, Iblîs is the enemy of God, man, and creation only in
appearance; in reality, he is a lovable, indeed tragic, character.
This view, or vision, of a guiltless Iblîs leads Islamic mystics more generally to see persons
and events as evil only in appearance; on a higher plane, even they form part of a divine escha-
tological plan. Regardless of whether this amounts to a coherent ethical position, it has inspired
countless classical Islamic poets, including Rûmî and Farîd al-Dîn al-Attâr, modern authors like
Mohammad Iqbal, and folk beliefs and practices. It amounts to an even more radical denial of
the reality of evil than can already be found in classical Islamic theological and philosophical
literature. This view rests not on any ontological doctrine that evil consists in the privation of
being but rather on a more personalized eschatological narrative of (seeming) arrogance and
humility, and of punishment, purification, and the salvation of man’s soul.
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Judaism
Ever since the Book of Job, questions of evil, unwarranted suffering, and divine justice have
haunted Jewish thinkers. Job, a virtuous man, innocent of any crime, and blessed (by God) with
wealth and offspring, is made to undergo the most terrible sufferings, for no reason other than a
contest between God and the Devil. Challenged by Satan to put the strength of Job’s faith to the
test, God allows Job to lose, first, his possessions, then his children, and finally his health. Yet,
despite “all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him” (42:11), and despite bitterly bemoaning
his fate, Job keeps his faith, refusing to curse God even when called upon to do so by his wife.
Job’s story emphasizes the mystery rather than the justice of God’s actions, and does not itself
try to explain or justify human suffering in terms of God’s plans and actions. It has, however, led
later Jewish – and other – authors to ask why, if God is just and omnipotent, He inflicts suffering
on people He has chosen. These questions were raised anew by various modern Jewish thinkers
in the wake of the Nazis’ attempted extermination of European Jewry. The enormity of the
Holocaust, however, defies both brief summary and reductionist analysis; hence, this topic will
not be discussed here.29 Instead, I will restrict my discussion here to two earlier thinkers from the
Jewish philosophical (as distinct from religious) tradition, namely Moses Maimonides (d. 1204)
and Baruch de Spinoza (1632–1677).30
It may cause surprise to discuss the Judaic tradition after Islam, which it obviously antedates,
but Jewish philosophy has in important respects been shaped by Islamic thought. Hence, there are
good reasons for discussing it against the background of Islam.31 The medieval Jewish philosophical
tradition, as philosophy, is literally unthinkable without its Islamic roots; it developed in Islamic
lands, and in interaction with Islamic learning. Thus, Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed (Dalâlat
al-hâ’irîn), possibly the most widely read and discussed work of philosophy in the entire Jewish
tradition, was originally written in Arabic and owed both its technical vocabulary and its philo-
sophical themes to Islamic philosophers, most importantly al-Fârâbî and Ibn Rushd (Averroes).32
Maimonides’s discussion of evil leans more emphatically on his Neoplatonic and Islamic
philosophical ancestors than on the rabbinic literature of the Judaic tradition. Although he does
address Job’s undeserved suffering (III.23–4), he does so as an illustration of broader philosophi-
cal points he has discussed in the preceding chapters. Initially, he appears to see evil as a human
rather than a divine responsibility. Most evils in the world, he argues, are the work of (deficient)
individual humans acting of their own free will:
the greater part of the evils that befall its individuals are due to . . . the deficient indi-
viduals of the human species. . . . We suffer because of evils that we have produced
ourselves of our free will; but we attribute them to God.
(Guide, III.12: 443)
Things turn out to be more complicated, however, in particular because of his argument that
evil is in itself not an independently existing thing (mawjûd), but nonbeing or privation (‘adam).
Following Isaiah (45:7), he writes that God does indeed create darkness and evil, but only as
privations; that is, He creates them accidentally as privations of individual existents, rather than
essentially as characteristics of entire species. For example, God has created the species of man-
kind as essentially endowed with speech, but the evil of lacking speech is a privation that may
accidentally occur in any particular human being. Death, too, is an evil, since it is nonbeing in
itself, and consists in a privation of form, i.e., of that which makes men into what they essentially
are: living beings endowed with speech (III, 10: 439).
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Evil is thus not an essential act of God, but is consequent upon privation. To this, however,
Maimonides puzzlingly adds that all evils derive from ignorance, that is, the privation of knowl-
edge (III.11). This seems to mean not that ignorance is the root cause of all evil, but rather
that what we call “evil” is a product of ignorance rather than a reality in itself. This leaves it
somewhat ambiguous as to whether Maimonides believes we should think of evil in primar-
ily ontological or in epistemological terms. The latter reading is encouraged by his subsequent
remarks that the masses (‘âmma) believe that there is more evil than good in the world as a result
of their ignorance. More precisely, he appears to argue that the belief that there are more evils
than good things is a product of the imagination rather than the intellect. For, he continues,
ignorant people imagine that good or evil concerns individual human beings rather than the
human species at large; whatever exists, however, exists not for the sake of the individual but as
a result of the will of the Creator.
One puzzling implication of Maimonides’s conception of evil is his claim that divine provi-
dence (‘inâya) is proportional to the degree and adequacy of human knowledge. Following
the Islamic Neoplatonist philosophers, Maimonides sees the human intellect not in naturalistic
terms as a faculty of the soul but as an emanation (fayd).33 This implies that the actualization of
the human intellect, which in itself is merely potential intellect, is a good of sorts. Rejecting,
among others, the view (which he ascribes to Aristotle) that providence only watches over the
heavenly spheres and not to individual humans and other creatures in the sublunar space of
growth and decay, Maimonides argues that human beings, alone among mortal earthly crea-
tures, are watched over by providence. This providence, however, is proportional to the degree
of human perfection, that is, to the degree that humans have realized or actualized their highest
potential, which is their intellect (476). He concludes that providence is consequent upon the
intellect and attached to it:
divine providence does not watch in an equal manner over all the individuals of the
human species, but providence is graded as their human perfection is graded.
(III.17: 474)
Divine providence, that is, only watches over human beings to the degree that they have actual-
ized their intellect, and have liberated themselves from their imagination and ignorance. Even
more astonishingly, if not shockingly, he adds that the ignorant and disobedient have been rel-
egated to the rank of animals, and that hence it is a “light thing to kill them” (ibid.).
Maimonides also reads the biblical story of Job in the light of these views. He emphasizes that
the evils befalling Job are caused by Satan rather than God; but, more importantly, he argues
that Job is repeatedly called “virtuous” and “righteous” but not “wise” or “intelligent.” Job’s
perplexity and complaints arise, he argues, because he did not have true knowledge of God,
but merely imagined health, wealth, and offspring as his ultimate goal (III.23: 492–3). That is,
in questioning the privation of an individual human rather than the human species, he relied
on his imagination rather than his intellect. In acquiring true knowledge, however, we cease
being troubled by evils and misfortunes, including even death. According to Leaman (1995),
Maimonides thinks that asking about God’s justice is simply to pose the wrong question here:
the question concerning apparent evil in the world, he argues, should be replaced by one
concerning our relation to God. Maimonides’s is not a personal God whom one can criticize
for causing undeserved suffering, but a more impersonal deity. Leaman also rejects the wide-
spread idea that Maimonides’s position cannot be reconciled with the Judaic faith, arguing that
the latter draws some unusual conclusions that are incompatible only with religious revelation
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as traditionally conceived. This is one way in which Maimonides may be said to anticipate
Spinoza. Let us therefore now turn to the latter.
Spinoza is even more remote from the traditional rabbinic literature on evil than his pre-
decessor: Job appears only occasionally in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP), and not at all
in the Ethics. Various present-day Spinoza scholars consider his position so remote from Judaic
tradition, and from more theistic visions of a personal God, as to amount to atheism, but it
may be said to belong to the Jewish philosophical tradition insofar as it discusses themes like an
impersonal divinity and the relation between intellect and imagination in terms that are recog-
nizably and arguably similar to those of medieval Jewish (and, by extension, Islamic) philosophy.
Even though Spinoza strongly criticizes Maimonides, in particular for reading philosophi-
cal meanings into Scripture, he may be said to stand in the Jewish philosophical tradition to
the extent that he further develops themes and questions addressed by the latter. These themes
include the relation between philosophy and prophecy, between mass and elites, and between
intellect and imagination. More specifically, as Leaman already observes, Spinoza radicalizes
doctrines concerning good and evil, already found in his Jewish predecessors, notably in relation
to an impersonal God and the significance of reason (or, more correctly speaking, the intellect)
“as a route to relative salvation” (1995: 121–2), and, even more strongly than Maimonides,
Spinoza links the imagination to error. This holds in particular for our knowledge of the notions
of good and evil.
Surprisingly, perhaps, Spinoza appears not to consider evil a major philosophical problem.
Neither in the TTP nor in the Ethics does he discuss questions of cosmic evil or theodicy, or
of evil human thoughts and actions, in any great detail. In fact, his conception leaves little
if any room for seeing any kind of human action, for example theft or murder, as evil. He
would argue that these acts are driven by affects such as greed or hate, and people who are
driven by such affects, or passions, are by definition passive rather than active; that is, their
actions are not free. A genuinely free person acts on the basis of adequate knowledge, not on
appearances or affects. This need not imply, of course, that such acts cannot or should not be
punished, but, for Spinoza, punishment involves not so much holding people responsible for
their actions but rather deterring unwanted actions. Ultimately, however, he sees education
as preferable to sanction.
Nor does Spinoza’s thought leave any room for believing that God’s actions may in any
way be evil. The reason for this is obvious. Spinoza’s God is not a quasi-personal transcendent
being who has created the world, and can intervene in his creation, at will. Rather, his “God
or nature” (deus sive natura) is an immanent cause of things, and an infinite and indivisible
substance – in fact, the sole substance.34 God, moreover, acts from the laws of his nature alone,
and in that sense is a free cause (13). The world created by this God may be said to be good
insofar as things have been produced with the highest perfection, because they follow from
His most perfect nature. Thus, we cannot say that good and bad are the products of God’s will.
In fact, Spinoza sees evil no longer even as a privation, as does Maimonides, but rather as a
mere mode of thinking. In the preface to book IV of the Ethics, he argues that Good and Evil
“indicate nothing positive in things, considered in themselves, nor are they anything other than
modes of thinking, or notions we form because we compare things to one another” (115). In
particular, humans who “take the imagination for the intellect” call things in the world “good”
or “evil” because they imagine that there is a moral order of things (29). For Spinoza, therefore,
good and evil are strictly speaking not even modes of thinking, i.e., matters of intellectual knowl-
edge; rather they are modes of imagining, which are driven by the passions or affects, and lead us
to erroneously accept affects of the imagination as things (30). Despite their illusory character,
however, we should not eliminate the terms “good” and “evil” from our vocabulary, Spinoza
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Evil
continues, “because we desire to form an idea of man, as a model of human nature which we
may look to, it will be useful to retain these words” (115). Thus, emotions that increase the
body’s power of acting, like joy, may be called good; affects like sadness, by contrast, diminish
this power, and thus may be labeled “evil.” This view also has political implications: things that
promote harmony among men are useful, Spinoza elaborates, whereas things that bring discord
to the state are evil (Ethics IV, P40: 138). People can be contrary to each other only insofar as
they are subject to passions or affects (and, by implication, guided by their imagination), and,
insofar as men live to the guidance of reason, they must always agree among themselves (Ethics
IV, P35: 132). Thus, the evil of political discord or conflict can be avoided only by following
the guidance of reason.
Seen from this perspective, even death is not really an evil: we may be sad at death because
it stops us from enjoying worldly pleasures, but, insofar as we come to understand the causes of
this sadness through our intellect, it ceases to be a passion. That is, by intellectually understand-
ing death as a cause of sadness, we stop feeling sadness, and actually rejoice (Ethics V, P18: 169).
This leads Spinoza to his well-known notion of the “intellectual love of God” (amor dei intel-
lectualis). This intellectual love of God, he adds, is eternal, since it arises from the highest kind of
knowledge, which does not depend on the body or the imagination and therefore is adequate
as well as eternal (Ethics V, P33: 175). It is in this sense that salvation, or eternal life, may be said
to be relative or proportional to reason, or more correctly, to intellectual knowledge and love.
Thus, according to Leaman (1995: 140–41), for Spinoza, as for Maimonides, the problem
of evil as undeserved suffering is not a question of God’s justice but of human understanding:
the better we understand our predicament intellectually, the more the importance of evil will
diminish. Our imagination misleadingly leads us to see the world as endowed with a moral
order, and God as a quasi-human actor capable of letting evil befall men; but our intellect
should lead us to an adequate knowledge of a more impersonal divinity, in which the whole
notion of evil disappears.
Conclusions
As seen above, notions and problems of evil vary widely across different philosophical traditions,
but these differences do not appear to be so large as to render any comparative or intercultural
confrontation meaningless. All traditions, it seems, show some reflection on the inevitable suf-
ferings of life and death; on natural disasters like floods and famines; and on evil acts committed
and suffered by humans. Much rarer is the idea that gods themselves may be evil or destruc-
tive; this idea seems to occur only in some forms of Hinduism. Although the authors discussed
above are by no means blind or indifferent to the misery caused by natural disasters or cruel or
vicious human actions, on the whole they recommend understanding – and accepting – this as
an inevitable part of a larger order that is itself either morally neutral or positively good and just.
Behind this broad agreement, however, we find major conceptual and other differences. Not
only have we seen radically differing views on whether the natural or cosmic order is good, and
thus inherently value-laden; the different traditions discussed also involve qualitatively differ-
ent kinds of normativity: divine command, rational validity, ritual correctness, and others. This
may make it rather more difficult to speak of any unitary concept or phenomenon of moral evil
across different traditions. In fact, a confrontation with different traditions may more forcefully
restate the question of whether we can actually formulate, or even need, a substantial and uni-
versal moral concept of evil at all.
None of the traditions discussed has much to say on the modern philosophical notion of
evil as expressed in, or based on, supremely cruel or violent actions, like unrestrained torture,
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terrorism, or genocide. That is, both the social phenomenon of, and the moral concern with,
evil as a qualitatively and/or quantitatively extreme form or degree of morally unjustifiable
violence may be specifically modern. None of the traditions discussed above provides any
straightforward way of dealing with such forms of modern violence; even less do any of them
provide the means for justifying them. This suggests that any attempt to address the specif-
ically modern concept of evil by appealing to religious or ancient philosophical traditions,
i.e., to premodern conceptions and doctrines, is at best unhelpful and, at worse, justifies or
ignores the very worst of human behavior and human suffering. Nevertheless, the various
religious traditions provide a number of philosophically interesting and challenging examples
of ways to grapple with what is a pressing, enduring and ineliminable (and, in some sense, uni-
versal) aspect of human experience. Contemporary discussions of evil would do well to take
such traditions into account, so that they can avoid the pitfalls of earlier approaches and increase
their own cross-cultural relevance.
Notes
1 To mention but a few: Bernstein (2002: x) sees the assaults as “the very epitome of evil in our time;”
Neiman (2002: 281–6) calls them a form of evil that is “old-fashioned in structure” and describes how
all attempts at explanation risk being rejected as attempts to relativize if not justify them; and Russell
(2014: v) remarks that they triggered his subsequent philosophical reflection on evil.
2 For Bin Laden’s wavering justifications of the assaults, see Lawrence (ed.) (2005), in particular Chapter 14,
“Nineteen Students,” and Chapter 16, “To the Americans.”
3 I use the inadequate term “non-Western” here for want of anything better. Islamic Spain in fact lay to
the west of most European regions conventionally headed under “the West”; and as seen below, Judaic
philosophy is discussed here primarily against its background in Islamic thought.
4 See, for example, Panaïoti (2013).
5 For a recent overview, see Perkins’s (2014) indispensable study.The present paragraph owes much to this
work, even if I do not necessarily agree with all of Perkins’s analyses and conclusions.
6 Perkins (2014: 17; 32).
7 Lau (1970: 38).
8 Xunzi, 17.1; Knoblock (1994: vol. 1, p. 68).
9 Lau (1970: 79; see also p. 49).
10 Cf. Perkins (2014: 90); Lau (1970: 61).
11 Perkins (2014: 90–99).
12 Mair (1994: 168); see also Perkins (2014: 172).
13 Mair (1994: 164).
14 See also Perkins (2014: 158–65).
15 See Rorty (1989), in particular Part III, “Cruelty and Solidarity.”
16 See, for example, Chandôgya Upanishad,V.10.7–10, in Olivelle (1996: 142–143).
17 Herman (1993: 287–8).
18 Kaufman (2005: 18).
19 Burley (2014: 420–24).
20 Ziporyn (2000), as quoted in Loy (2005: 348)
21 For a fuller account of both the Mu’tazilî and the Ash‘arî theological position, see Fakhry (1983: 42–65
and 203–17).The pretheological and prephilosophical literature of the so-called hadîths, or traditions of
the prophet, has a rather broad view of evil, arguing that the Devil is attracted to all bodily filth; hence,
it enjoins a strict bodily hygiene. I will not address this literature, however.
22 For both kinds of evil, see in particular al-shifâ‘, Ilâhiyyât, p. 416. See also Inati (2000: Chapter 3) for a
fuller discussion.
23 Al-shifâ‘, Ilâhiyyât, p. 418.
24 See also Inati (2000: 161).
25 For a comparative study of Ibn Sîna and Aquinas, based on the Latin translation of the former’s Ilâhiyyât, see
Steel (2002). Inati (2000: 173) argues that Ibn Sîna implies a denial of God’s omnipotence, but stops short
of explicitly drawing this conclusion, allegedly out of fear of the mutakallimûn, or Islamic theologians.
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Evil
26 See also Steel (2002: 195).

27 On al-Ghazâlî on theodicy, see in particular Ormsby (1984); on Ibn Taymiyya’s ideas, see Hoover
(2007), on which the following paragraph is largely based.
28 See, in particular, Qur’an (38: 71–85).
29 For some preliminary philosophical discussion, see the chapters on Hannah Arendt and on genocide in
the present volume; see also Cohn-Sherbok (ed.) 2002.
30 This section owes much to the important monograph by Oliver Leaman (1995). For more detailed
discussion of Maimindes, see Raffel (1987), Pines (1990); on Spinoza, see e.g., Frankena (1977).
31 The Jewish and Islamic philosophical traditions bear more resemblance to each other than to that of
Christianity. For example, medieval Islamic and Jewish thinkers tend to discuss prophecy and revealed
religion in terms of laws rather more consistently than their Christian near-contemporaries.
32 The intellectual culture of al-Andalus, or Islamic Spain, is marked by a relatively pronounced rational-
ism, and a relative dislike (at least among the literate elites) of mysticism. Hence, authors like Ibn Sîna
and al-Ghazâlî do not figure very prominently in Maimonides’s writings either. Obviously, he cannot
have read Ibn Taymiyya, who was active over a century later. A fuller discussion of his Islamic sources
and inspirations on the topic of evil awaits another occasion.
33 Pines’s translation renders this term as “overflow” rather than “emanation,” but this rendering that
makes Maimonides’s backgrounds in Neoplatonist philosophy more obscure.
34 This immanence, of course, is the reason that many present-day intepreters view Spinoza’s position as a
form of atheism, but it should be kept in mind that Spinoza himself vehemently denied being an atheist.
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INDEX
Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Page numbers in bold refer to tables.
absence-based accounts 236–7 Asch, Solomon 347

absolute evil 99–100 Aschheim, Steven 271
accidental evil 371–2 Ash‘arite school 371, 373
act-consequentialism 223, 226–7, 228 atheism 124, 125–6
act-first views 257, 259 atonement 284
action-based accounts 234–6 Atrocity Paradigm, The (Card) 291
actions, evil 245–54, 256–65 Augustine 30–40, 84, 85, 91, 165, 253
Adam 30, 31, 34, 35–6, 38, 308, 373; see also Augustinus (Jansen) 39
original sin Author of Sin, The (Leibniz) 84
Adorno, Theodore 131, 187 autonomy component 183, 184, 186, 187
affective accounts 237–40 “Axis of Evil” 4
Agathocles 62, 63
agency: evil 181–4; Kant on 118–19; moral luck Baglioni, Giovanpagolo 62
and 299; shrinking 300–3, 304; skepticism Baker, Marjorie 285
and 178 banality of evil 156–61, 251–3, 271, 272, 313–15,
agglomerative accounts 240–2, 243 324, 348
Alford, C. Fred 296–7 Bargh, John 301
Al-Ghazâlî, Abu Hâmid 372, 373 Baron-Cohen, S. 206–7
Allison, Henry 119 Barth, Karl 39
altered states 349 Bataille, George 131, 132, 312
altruism 213, 224, 225–6 Baurmann, Michael 345
Alvarez, Alex 344 Bayle, Pierre 83, 165
amour propre 102–5 Beaumont, Christophe de 98
Analects 362–3 Beauvoir, Simone de 130–1
Angst 39 Bell, Mary 322, 325
Anti-Christ, The (Nietzsche) 144 Benedict XVI, Pope 38
apathy 130 Bentham, Jeremy 111, 269
Aquinas, Thomas 36, 37, 42–53, 85, 90, 91, 246 Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche) 140, 141, 146
Arendt, Hannah 5, 114, 148–61, 191, 251–3, Bhagavad Gita 367
270–5, 277–8, 280, 283–4, 291, 314, 324–5, Billy Budd (Melville) 239
346, 348 bin Laden, Osama 360, 373
Ariès, Philippe 319 Blanchot, Maurice 128, 129, 130
Aristotle 20, 22, 24, 42, 44, 235, 371 blasphemy 124–5
Arminius 90 Bloxham, Donald 350
381
Index
Blumenberg, Hans 165 consequentialism 62, 78, 224, 227, 229, 248–9,
Bonner, Gerald 31, 34 270, 274, 288, 290
Borgia, Cesare 57–8, 62–3 Conversation with Steno Concerning Freedom
boundaries, subversion of 204 (Leibniz) 84
bourgeoisie, emancipation of 150 convertibility (or coextensionality) of being and
Bramhall, John 70, 77–80 goodness 43
broad evil 101–2 Cormer, Lord 157
Brothers Karamazov, The (Dostoevsky) 164–5, corruption 32–3, 58–61, 65–6, 103–4, 107
167, 312 crime, Hobbes on 74–5
Browning, Christopher 193, 344, 347 Critique of Practical Reason (Kant) 110, 111
Buber, Martin 39 cruelty 62–3, 67
Buddhism 366–70 cults 186–7
Bulger, Jamie 4, 321–2 cyclical theory of constitutions 24
Burley, Mike 369
Burnet 90 Damascene, John 90
Bush, George W. 4 Daoism 364–6
Dauenhauer, Bernard 282
Calder, Todd 183–4, 185, 187, 212–13, 241, Davies, Brian 46–7, 48
248–9, 324, 329 Deary, Melissa 185–6
Camus, Albert 5, 39, 163–74 death, Hobbes on 71–2, 80
Candide, or Optimism (Voltaire) 83, 99, 164 death camps 149, 154, 157–8, 161, 344
Card, Claudia 199, 224–6, 234, 237, 241, 249, De Cive (Hobbes) 71–4, 75, 76, 77, 79
275, 280n4, 282–3, 287, 291, 296, 329, 331 De Corpore (Hobbes) 71
Cargas, Henry James 283 definitional stops 284
Carmi, Israel 334 dehumanization 177, 188, 199–200, 277, 343,
Carnets (Camus) 170 350–1
Caruso, Gregg 303 Delbanco, A. 4, 205
categorical imperative 112–13, 120, 178, 227–8 Delos, J-T 158
Causa Dei (Leibniz) 86, 92 De Malo (Aquinas) 42
Cesarani, David 156, 157 Demiurge 16–17
Chandler, David 347 demonicness 320–2
character-first views 257 Demons (Dostoevsky) 312
characteristic vulnerability 332 De origine mali (King) 86
characters, evil 234–43 depravity 116–17
childhood 317–26 de Swaan, Abram 330
child soldiers 186 determinism 127, 298–300, 303–4
Chinese thought 362–6 de Wijze, Stephen 199–200, 241, 251, 259
Chirot, Daniel 346 diabolical will 118–19, 120
Christianity 76, 144, 165–6, 308–10 diachronic characteristics 328–38
Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism (Camus) Dialogues (Rousseau) 103
165, 173 Diderot, Denis 97
civil sovereigns 70, 74, 76, 77, 80 direct victims 286–7
Cladis, Mark 99 Discourse on Inequality (Rousseau) 100, 102–3
Clamence, Jean-Baptiste 166, 170, 171–2 Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (Rousseau)
Clark, S. 214n7 102, 104
Clendinnen, Inga 191–3, 198 Discourses (Machiavelli) 56, 57, 60, 61–2, 65
Cleomenes 66 disjunctive accounts 240–1
Cole, Phillip 191–2, 214n9, 322 dispositions/dispositional accounts 113, 182–4,
Collins, Randall 347 235–6, 238, 239–40, 242–3
combination theory of evil 256, 262–5 dissonance 84
Commodus 63 divine intellect 86–8, 91
concupiscence 36, 38 divine right of kings 166
Confession of a Philosopher, The (Leibniz) 83–4 divine will 86–91
Confessions (Augustine) 37 Doris, John 351
Confucianism 362–5 dormitivity 190
Congo, examples from 180–1, 186 Dostoevsky, F. 164–5
Conjectural Beginning of Human History (Kant) 110 Dostoevsky paradigm 312–13
382
Index
egoism 128–9 Formosa, Paul 240, 262–5

egoist hedonism 128 Formula of Universal Law 112, 113
Ehrenreich, Barbara 349 Forsyth, Neil 179
Eichmann, Adolf 152, 156–61, 192, 195, 251–3, fortuna 57–8, 63
270–5, 277–8, 279–80, 324, 346, 348 Foucault, Michel 39, 145, 152, 313–14
Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt) 148, 251, 270–1, Fox, Matthew 283
314, 346 frailty 116–17
election, doctrine of 36 Franquières 99
Elements of Law, The (Hobbes) 71, 73, 76 free will disillusionism 303
Emile (Rousseau) 107n12 free will/freedom 33–4, 35, 57, 70, 77–81,
“empathy erosion” 206–7 294–304, 308–10
Enright, Robert 288 free will illusionism 303
Epicure 124 Freiheitschrift (Schelling) 312
epiphenomenalism 301–2 French, Peter 329, 335–6
equality, Plato and 20–1 Freud, Sigmund 312–13
error theory 179, 193, 194, 197 Friedman, Marilyn 292
Essays of Theodicy (Leibniz) 83, 85, 86–7, 89 Fujii, Lee Ann 347
essential evil 371
ethics, Plato on 24–5 Garrard, Eve 179, 180, 181, 182, 186, 208, 221,
Ethics (Spinoza) 376–7 253–4, 259, 271, 321, 352
Ethics of Capital Punishment, The (Kramer) 177, 184–5 Gay Science, The (Nietzsche) 129
euetheia 17 genealogy of morals 138, 139
evil: Aquinas on 42–53; Arendt on 148–61; general evil 101
Augustine on 30–40; Camus on 163–74; general will 102
childhood and 317–26; comparative overview genocide 199–200, 342–53; see also Holocaust
of 360–78; defining concept of 203–14, Gestapo 334–6, 337
245–54, 256–65; diachronic characteristics of global absence-based accounts 236–7
328–38; as explanatory term 189–200, 203, Gnosticism 165
212; forgiveness and 282–92; freedom and Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla 285, 291
294–304; historical accounts of 1–2, 5; Hobbes God: Aquinas on 46–9, 51–2; Camus on 170;
on 70–81; introduction regarding 1–12; Kant freedom and 308–10; Hobbes on 70, 77–81;
on 109–20; Leibniz on 83–94; Machiavelli on incorruptibility of 32–3; Islamic philosophy
55–68; mass atrocities and 342–53; Nietzsche and 371, 372–3; Judaism and 374–5; Leibniz
on 135–46; Plato on 15–28; power and on 84–5, 86–93; Plato on 16, 17; Rousseau
306–15; punishment and 269–80; Rousseau on on 98–100; Sade and 124–5; source of evil
97–108; Sade on 122–33; secular approach to and 31–2
2–4, 5–6; skepticism and 177–88; wrongdoing Goedert, Georges 143
and 218–30, 248–9 Goering, Herman 272
evil actions 245–54, 256–65 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 109
evil characters 234–43 Goldhagen, Daniel 193, 347
Exile and the Kingdom (Camus) 171, 172 Gorer, Geoffrey 124, 129
explanatory power of term “evil” 189–200, 203, 212 Gorgias (Plato) 16, 23, 25
expropriation 149, 152–3, 156 Govier, Trudy 289
extremity accounts 242–3, 249–51 grace 34–6, 39
Graham, Jesse 351
fairness 210 Great Evils 210
Fall, The (Camus) 163, 166, 170–2 Grenier, Jean 172
fascism 168, 169 Griswold, Charles 287–8, 289
Feinberg, Joel 270, 273–4, 277, 280 Groundwork (Kant) 118
feminist views of forgiveness 291–2 Guide of the Perplexed (Maimonides) 374
Ferdinand of Aragon 62
First Man, The (Camus) 173 Haber, Joram 286, 287–8, 290
Fischer, John Martin 298, 330 Habermas, Jürgen 168
fixity component 183, 320–3 Hampshire, Stuart 210
Florentine Histories (Machiavelli) 60–1 Harding, Tonya 275
folk psychology 182, 186 harm element 331–4, 352; see also suffering
forgiveness 4–5, 282–92 Harrington, Fred 213, 220, 224–6
383
Index
Harris, Robert Alton 323 Jansen, Cornelius 39

Hart, H.L.A. 284 Jansenists 39
Hasana (Ibn Taymiyya) 372–3 Jaspers, Karl 271
Haybron, Daniel 236–7, 240–1, 247, 324 Jefferson, Thomas 150
heartlessness 259, 260–1 Jeffery, Renée 288
hedonism 128 Job 48, 374, 375–6
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 307–8 Judaism 374–7
Heidegger, M. 313 Julian of Ecclanum 38–9
“Helen’s Exile” (Camus) 173 Julius II, Pope 62
Herman, Arthur 368 juridical person, death of 154–5
Herman, B. 215n37 justice 24–5, 26; see also punishment
heroism 213, 224, 225–6 justificatory beliefs 344–5, 347–8
Hesiod 16 Justine (Sade) 124, 127–8
Hick, John 295
hidden essences 253–4 Kant, Immanuel 39, 107n10, 109–20, 130, 135,
Hieronymi, Pamela 287 161n3, 178, 227–8, 238, 283, 307, 311–12
Hillman, James 349 Kantian ethics 224, 226, 227–9
Himmler, Heinrich 156, 159 karma 366–7, 368–9
Hinduism 366–70 Kaufman, W. 368
historical accounts of evil, introduction regarding 1–2 Kekes, John 242, 248, 252, 274–6, 335
Historical and Critical Dictionary (Bayle) 83 Keller, Rose 122
historical phenomena 329–30 Kerrigan, Nancy 275
Hitler, Adolf 164, 187, 253, 360 Kierkegaard, S. 39
Hobbes, Thomas 2, 70–81, 98, 151, 152, 178, 310–11 King, Alex and Derek 321
Hochschild, Adam 180–1 King, William 86
Hoess, Rudolph 193, 198 Klusemann, Stefan 347
Holmgren, Margaret 289 Kollias, Niko 332
Holocaust 177, 251, 277–8, 296, 306, 334, 343, Koonz, Claudia 348
350, 353; see also genocide Koresh, David 187
Horkheimer, M. 131 Krafft-Ebin, Richard von 122
Howard, Jeff 351 Kramer, Matthew 177, 184–5, 186, 187, 207, 250,
Human, All Too Human (Nietzsche) 137–8, 139, 141 256, 259–61, 262, 265
Human Condition, The (Arendt) 114, 152 Kristallnacht 272
human rights 154 Kühne, Thomas 349
human uniqueness and individuality, death of
154, 155 Lacan, Jacques 130, 312, 313
Hume, D. 178, 211 La Caze, Marguerite 283
hybrid accounts 240–2 Laozi 364–5
Hyde, Edward 77 Leaman, Oliver 375, 376, 377
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (Hegel) 308
Ibn Sîna 371–2, 373 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 2, 27n3, 83–94, 98,
Ibn Taymiyya 372–3 100, 125, 294, 308
identity thesis 234–5 Letter to Beaumont (Rousseau) 99, 103
ill-being 111 Letter to D’Alembert (Rousseau) 104
imperialism 150–1, 153 Letter to Magnus Wedderkopff (Leibniz) 87
impurity 116–17 Letter to Voltaire (Rousseau) 100, 101, 105
Incarnation of Christ 92 Levi, Primo 192, 314, 344
Indian thought 366–70 Leviathan (Hobbes) 71, 72, 74–5, 77, 80
infant damnation 35, 38, 173 Levinas, E. 313
intelligence, necessity and 16 Levy, Neil 299
intelligible act 116 Lewis, C. S. 30
“Is Evil Action Qualitatively Distinct from Moral Lewis, David 239
Wrongdoing” (Russell) 212 Liberto, Hallie 213, 220, 224–6
Islamic philosophy 370–3, 374 Libet, Benjamin 302
Lisbon earthquake 2, 83, 109–10, 125, 164
Jacobins 164 Locke, John 310–11
Jankélévitch, Vladimir 283 Loy, David 370
384
Index
Lubin, Eilhard 85 moral motivation 114

Luther, Martin 30 moral necessity 89–90
moral person, death of 154, 155
Machiavelli, Niccolò 2, 55–68 moral retributivism 335–6
MacLachlan, Alice 288–9 moral thoughtlessness 156–61
Maimonides, Moses 374–5 moral worth approach 334, 335, 336, 337
Malesherbes 97–8 Morland, Michael 322, 323–4
malice 252 Morton, Adam 241, 253, 259, 321
Malicious Hirer 227, 229, 248–9 motive/motivation 263, 275, 277–8, 296–7, 325
Manichaeanism 31–2, 39 Mulamadhyamakakarikam (“Fundamental Verses of
Mann, Thomas 143 the Middle Way”; Nagarjuna) 369–70
Maritain, Jacques 52 multiplicity, principle of 20
marriage, Augustine and 38–9 Murphy, Dominic 351
martyrdom 77 Murphy, Jeffrie 285, 286, 290
Marx, Karl 152–3, 308 Mu’tazilites 371, 373
Marxism-Leninism 168, 169 Myth of Evil, The (Cole) 178, 180, 183, 191
mass atrocities 342–53; see also genocide; Myth of Sisyphus, The (Camus) 164, 167
Holocaust
mass violence 330–1 Naaman 77
master morality 139, 140 Nadelhoffer, Thomas 301, 303
match, theory of 57 Nagarjuna 369–70
maxims 112–13, 117, 120 Nâgasena 369
McCarthy, Cormac 240 Nagel, Thomas 299
McCauley, Clark 346 narrow evil 101–2
McDoom, Omar 347 Nation, La (Delos) 158
McDowell, John 195–6 natural evil 110–11, 120, 294–5
McGary, Howard 287 natural law 70–2, 73–5
McGinn, Colin 195, 199, 238–9, 249, 296 “Nature of Evil, The” (Garrard) 271
McNaughton, David 179, 180, 182, 186, 208 Nazis 156–61, 177, 192, 271, 272–4, 277–8, 279,
Melville, Herman 239 283, 306, 334–5; see also Holocaust
Mencius 363 necessity 16–17, 19, 55, 61–3, 64–5, 67, 89–90
metaphysical evil 105–6, 294 negligence 259–60, 262–3
metaphysical silencing 196–7 Neiman, Susan 206
metaphysical solitude 128, 129, 133 Nietzsche, Friedrich 124, 129, 135–46, 178–9,
metaphysics 16–20 312–13, 361
Metaphysics of Morals (Kant) 119 nihilism 312–13, 370
middle ground approach 334, 336–7 No Country for Old Men (McCarthy) 240
Midgley, Mary 236 nonhistorical phenomena 329–30
Milam, Per-Erik 289 nonideal theory 282, 284–6, 288, 289, 291
Milgram, Stanley 184, 342, 347, 348, 351 normality of evil 313–15
Milgram scenarios 184, 185, 186, 250 Novitz, David 287
Mill, John Stuart 111 Nozick, Robert 278
Minority Treaties 154 Numa 59
mirror thesis 265n4 Nuremburg Trials 334
mixed conceptions 258–9, 265
monarchy 24 obedience, absolute 152
monstrous conception 178, 183 O’Flaherty, W. D. 367
Moore, G. E. 128 Of Liberty and Necessity (Hobbes) 78
moral defiance 343, 345 Oliverotto 62
moral evil (sin) 3, 33–4, 45–6, 72–80, 99–102, 120 Days of Sodom (Sade) 122, 126
110–11, 120, 294 On Predestination (Burnet) 90
moral horror 179–81, 203, 209, 212 On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche) 135, 136,
morality: Aquinas on 47; knowing defiance of 139, 140, 144
252–3; Plato on 24–7 On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in
moral luck 299–300, 303–4 Theodicy (Kant) 110
morally disvaluable objects 242 ontological optimism 30, 31, 37, 38
moral merit approach 334, 335–6, 337 ontological vulnerability 331–2
385
Index
Ordinary Men (Browning) 344 psychopaths 119

“Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility” punishment 4–5, 78–80, 184–5, 269–80
(Arendt) 156 purgative theory of punishment 184–5
“Orgueil” (Camus) 170
original sin 35–6, 38, 115, 308–9; see also Adam qualitative difference thesis 203–4, 212–13, 218–30
Origins of Totalitarianism, The (Arendt) 114, 148–9, quality of emphasis account 213, 220, 224–6, 230
151, 155, 157, 251 Questions of Liberty Necessity and Chance, The
origin stories 16 (Hobbes) 78
pain 50 race-thinking 153

Paradise Lost (Milton) 123, 252, 253 racism 153–4, 156–7
particular evil 101 radical evil 114–16, 120, 135, 148, 149–56, 251,
passion of self-respect 286 283, 309, 311
Pelagians 31, 34–5 Rai, Tage S. 351
Pereboom, Derk 303 Ravizza, Mark 298, 330
performative speech acts 287 Rawls, John 124, 214n2, 343
Perkins, F. 362, 363, 365 readiness potential 302
perpetrator conceptions/element 258, 259, 260, Reading the Holocaust (Clendinnen) 191
265, 328–9, 331 Rebel, The (Camus) 163, 164, 166, 167, 170, 171
personal vulnerability 331–2 reciprocity thesis 119
Pettigrove, Glen 284, 286–8, 289 recklessness 259–61, 262–3
philosophical suicide 167 reconciliation 285–6
Philosophy in the Boudoir (Sade) 126 Rée, Paul 135
Phosphorus, On the First Cause and Nature of Evil reflective equilibrium 4
(Lubin) 85 Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (Kant)
physical evil 100–1, 294 109, 114, 115, 118, 119, 311
Plague, The (Camus) 165, 166, 167 “Renegade, The” (Camus) 163, 171, 172
Plato 1, 5, 15–28, 57, 59, 68n24, 307, 371 Republic (Plato) 17, 19, 21–2, 23, 24–6, 68n24
Platonism 32, 38, 85 responsibility 297–8
Plotinus 371 retributive theory of punishment 270
pluralist theory of evil 199, 253–4 revenge squads 334–6, 337, 338
Poem on the Lisbon Disaster (Voltaire) 110, 125 Rhodes, Cecil 150
pointlessness 277–9 right to kill 166–9
political authority 2 Rivera-López, Eduardo 284
politics: evil in 20–4; Machiaveli on 55–67 Rohingya Muslims 345–6
Politics (Aristotle) 24 Romanticism 168
Politics as a Vocation (Weber) 65 Romulus 62, 66
Politicus (Plato) 17–18, 19–20, 24, 59 Rorty, R. 366
Pope, Alexander 98, 100, 101 Rosen, Stanley 18
possible worlds 87–9, 92 Roth, Paul A. 347
power 306–15 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 97–108, 294–5, 310–11
pragmatism 366 Rubenstein, Joshua 283
pre-cognitive responses 203–14 Rules of Evil Salience (RES) 211
predestination 36 rules of moral salience (RMS) 215n37
predispositions 117 Russell, Luke 182–4, 186–7, 199, 212, 220, 223,
pride 33 241, 243, 250–1, 320–1, 324, 329, 343, 350, 352
Prince, The (Machiavelli) 57–8, 61, 63, 64–5
private property 23 Sade, Marquis de 122–33, 164
privatio boni 307–8, 311 sadism 122, 123, 129–30, 252, 259, 260–1
privation 42–5, 49–50, 52, 84–6, 236, 308, 372 Scarre, Geoffrey 277–8
privative theory of evil 32, 37–8 Schadenfreude 238–9
Problems at the Roots of Law (Feinberg) 270 Schein, Edgar 187
propensity to evil 114–15, 116 Schelling, F.W.J. 312
providence 36–8 Scholem, Gershom 148, 155
prudence 61 Scotus 90
psychological equifinality 351 secular accounts to evil, introduction regarding
psychological thickness 251–3, 324, 350 2–4, 5–6
386
Index
secularization of evil 310–11 Thucydides 21, 58, 59

self-authorship 185 Timaeus (Plato) 16–17
self-love 117–18, 120, 311 Timmons, M. 115
semi-compatibilism 298 Todorov, Tzvetan 344
September 11 attacks 360–1, 362 totalist leaders 187
Sereny, Gitta 192–3, 322, 325 totalitarianism 149–50, 153, 154, 158, 164, 171
Severus, Septimius 63 Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP; Spinoza) 376
Shankara 368 transcendental idealism 116
Shklar, Judith 349 transgression 131–2
silencing 196–7, 199, 254, 321 treason 74
Simon, Émile 163 Truman, Harry S. 67
sin see moral evil (sin) Tuck, R. 73
Singer, Peter 247, 250 Tutu, Desmond 289
skepticism 177–88 two-sided view of evil 30–1
slave morality 142 tyranny 23–4, 58–61
slavery 150
Smilansky, Saul 303 uniqueness, death of 154, 155
Smith, Nick 284 unity, principle of 20, 21, 22
Socrates 25–6, 167 universality thesis 115–16, 276–9
Soderini, Giovan Battista 57 unpersuadability 320–2
soul, immortality of 26 Upanishads 367
Soyinka, Wole 283 utilitarianism 111–12, 141–2, 270
“Speak No Evil” (Garrard and McNaughton) 179
spectator conceptions 258, 262, 265 Valdesolo, Piercalo 351
Spencer, Herber 135, 138 Vargas, Manuel 252
Spinoza, Baruch de 89, 298, 374, 376–7 Venables, Jon 321–2, 323–4
Stalin, J. 164 Vetlesen, Arne Johan 342, 346
Stalinism 171 victim conceptions 257, 259, 265
Stanford Prison experiment 347 virtue and vice: extremity accounts and 242;
Stangl, Franz 193 Machiaveli on 63; Plato on 24–7; Rousseau on
Stangneth, Bettina 156 104; Sade and 126–7
Steiker, Carol J. 177, 181, 185 Voltaire 83, 99, 101, 110, 125, 164
Stein, Alexandra 186–7 vulnerability 331–3
Steiner, Hillel 106, 221, 241, 249
Strawson, Galen 299–300 Walker, Margaret 284
Sturgeon, Nicholas 192 Waller, James 343, 348
suffering 37, 48, 101–2, 110, 124–5, 129, 163–8, Watkins, Jeffrey 285, 286
178, 180–3, 191–3, 194–7, 198–9, 369; see also Watson, Gary 322–3
harm element Weber, Max 65, 367, 368
Sufism 373 Wegner, Daniel M. 301–2
Summa contra gentiles (Aquinas) 42 Wesley, John 39
Summa theologiae (Aquinas) 42 Whitehall, John 77
supererogatory acts 194–5, 257 Wiesenthal, Simon 283
superfluousness 148–56, 157–8, 160–1 wisdom 61
Suppes, Patrick 298 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 206
Wolf, Susan 299, 300
Tec, Nechama 283 women, Plato on 22
Tenison, Thomas 77 wrongdoing 218–30, 248–9
Terror in France 107, 164 Wulf, C. 143
theodicy: Hegel on 308; Indian thought and 367–8;
Rousseau and 98–100; Sade and 124; see also God Xunzi 364
Theodicy (Leibniz) 2
Theogony (Hesiod) 16 Zarathustra 142–3, 144
Thomas, Laurence 252 Zero Degrees of Empathy (Baron-Cohen) 206
Thompson, Robert 321–2, 323–4 Zhuangzi 364–6
Thoreau, Henry David 156 Zimbardo, Philip 185, 342, 347
thoughtlessness 277–8 Ziporyn, Brook 370
387

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF THE

•• Historical explorations of evil

Thomas Nys is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, the

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF MORAL EPISTEMOLOGY

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF LOVE IN PHILOSOPHY

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF THE PHILOSOPHY

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF EMERGENCE

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVIL

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/

Edited by Thomas Nys and Stephen de Wijze

ISBN: 978-1-138-93179-4 (hbk)

Notes on contributors viii

4 Machiavelli: The drama of politics and its inherent evil 55

6 Leibniz on evil: God’s justice in the best of all possible worlds 83

7 Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the origin and nature of evil 97

8 Kant: The evil in all of us 109

9 Sade: Mushroom clouds and silver linings 122

10 Nietzsche’s critique of morality and his effort to create an

11 Hannah Arendt’s double account of evil: Political superfluousness

12 After the fall: Camus on evil 163

13 Deliver us from evil: The case for skepticism 177

14 Does the term “evil” have any explanatory power? 189

16 Evil and wrongdoing 218

17 Evil characters 234

18 Defining evil actions: Different approaches 245

19 Different substantive conceptions of evil actions 256

20 Evil and punishment 269

21 Evil and forgiveness 282

22 Evil and freedom 294

23 Evil and power 306

24 Evil and childhood 317

25 Evil’s diachronic characteristics 328

26 Evil, genocide, and mass atrocities 342

27 Evil: A comparative overview 360

Peg Birmingham is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. She is the author of

Todd Calder is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at Saint Mary’s

Phillip Cary is Professor of Philosophy at Eastern University near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Paul Formosa is a senior lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Macquarie University,

Giovanni Giorgini is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Bologna and

Zachary J. Goldberg is currently principal investigator of the DFG Research Grant

W. Matthews Grant is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of

Jonathan Leader Maynard is a departmental lecturer in international relations at the University

Jason Neidleman is Professor of Political Science at the University of La Verne. He is the

Luke Russell is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Sydney. He works in

Alina Scudieri is Adjunct Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Political

Matthew Sharpe teaches philosophy at Deakin University in Australia. He is the author

Stephen de Wijze is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Manchester.

Why ought we to concern ourselves with understanding a concept of evil? It is elusive,

Historical accounts of evil

Thinking about evil – the recent secular approach

The purpose and structure of the Handbook

1 Historical accounts of evil

by exploring our pre-cognitive responses to this phenomenon. The phenomenology of evil,

Historical explorations of evil

Plato’s contribution to philosophy can hardly be overstated: he invented it. He took a

Metaphysics: evil and the structure of the universe

Evil in politics: civil strife and tyranny

The education of desire: morality, virtue and vice

Evil as corruption in good things

Moral evil as disordered love

Sin and grace

Providence and evil