The Moral Significance of Evil

Abstract

Evil is the strongest one-word condemnation our moral vocabulary affords. In its primary sense, evil is predicated of actions. An action is evil if the agent performing it has a malevolent motive, the action causes grievous, gratuitous harm to innocent victims, and lacks a morally acceptable excuse. Understood in this way, evil is prevalent. The moral significance of evil is that it is the most serious obstacle to human well-being.

There are numerous religious and secular thinkers who go to extraordinary lengths, proposing the most ingenious evasions, to deny the moral significance of evil. They attempt to explain it by explaining it away. The three most influential attempts to do so are the Socratic view that no one does evil knowingly, the Stoic- Spinozistic view that evil is illusory, and the Leibnizian view that evil is the byproduct of much greater good which could not exist without it. I argue that there are obvious and conclusive reasons for rejecting each of these attempts.

There is no reasonable alternative to acknowledging the discouraging fact that evil is prevalent, because we are ambivalent beings. Malevolent and benevolent motives are both part of human nature. As a result, neither religious nor secular optimism about the human condition is warranted. This may be viewed as a secular version of original sin. It should lead to the realization that there is not only a theological but also a secular problem of evil. The conclusion that follows is that it is a dangerous mistake to refuse to face the fact that evil is the enemy of human well-being. If, unlikely as it is, evil has some good consequences, they are incidental and dwarfed by the terrible injury evil actions inflict on innocent people.