Evil

1. The nature of evil

Evil is the most severe condemnation our moral vocabulary allows. Murder, torture, enslavement and prolonged humiliation are some examples of it. Evil must involve harm, and it must be serious enough to damage its victims’ capacity to function normally (see Suffering). Furthermore, the harm must be unjustified, since not even serious harm is in itself necessarily evil, as it may be just punishment for crimes committed or the only means of preventing even greater harm (see Crime and punishment §2). What harm is justified is one of the fundamental questions of moral philosophy. The competing answers to it, however, share the key idea of a moral equilibrium. In general terms, harms that tend to maintain the moral equilibrium are justified, while those that tend to produce a disequilibrium are unjustified. The generality of this explanation allows for disagreements about what count specifically as harms, and about how the moral equilibrium can be best maintained.

Evil may be the product of human or nonhuman agency. Inclement weather that causes crop failure and widespread starvation is an example of the latter, and it is usually described as natural evil. Evil caused by human beings, such as torturing an innocent person, is moral. This traditional distinction between natural and moral evil is useful, but it should not be drawn too sharply because human beings may be natural agents, as carriers of a disease, for instance, and evil caused by natural agency may warrant moral opprobrium, if it was preventable and those responsible for doing so failed. Moral thinking nevertheless tends to focus on moral evil, since it is much more likely to be within human control than natural evil.

The primary subjects to which moral evil (simply ‘evil’ from now on) may be ascribed are human actions. Intentions, agents, and institutions may also be evil, but only in a derivative sense. For intentions are evil if they lead to evil actions; agents are evil if the preponderance of their actions are evil; and institutions are evil if they regularly prompt agents representing them to perform evil actions. In its primary sense, therefore, evil is connected essentially with causing serious unjustified harm to sentient beings, and since the means by which this is done are human actions, an account of evil should begin by concentrating on them.

It is clear that evil actions are widespread, and that they are responsible for much suffering. The obvious explanation of this fact is that human beings are motivated by greed, cruelty, envy, rage, hatred, and so forth, and evil actions are the manifestations of these vices. But this is unilluminating, unless it is combined with an explanation of why human beings possess and act on vices. To attribute vices to choice is a poor explanation, since many vices are the unchosen consequences of genetic predispositions and corrupting circumstances, and even if vices are the results of choices, the question of why vices rather than virtues are chosen remains (see Virtues and vices §4).