Evil

Evil is commonly seen as the opposite, or sometimes absence, of good. It can be an extremely broad concept, although in everyday usage it is often more narrowly used to talk about profound wickedness and against common good. It is generally seen as taking multiple possible forms, such as the form of personal moral evil commonly associated with the word, or impersonal natural evil (as in the case of natural disasters or illnesses), and in religious thought, the form of the demonic or supernatural/eternal.^[2] While some religions, world views, and philosophies focus on "good versus evil", others deny evil's existence and usefulness in describing people.


Evil can denote profound immorality,^[3] but typically not without some basis in the understanding of the human condition, where strife and suffering (cf. Hinduism) are the true roots of evil. In certain religious contexts, evil has been described as a supernatural force.^[3] Definitions of evil vary, as does the analysis of its motives.^[4] Elements that are commonly associated with personal forms of evil involve unbalanced behavior, including anger, revenge, hatred, psychological trauma, expediency, selfishness, ignorance, destruction and neglect.^[5]


In some forms of thought, evil is also sometimes perceived in absolute terms as the dualistic antagonistic binary opposite to good,^[6] in which good should prevail and evil should be defeated.^[7] In cultures with Buddhist spiritual influence, both good and evil are perceived as part of an antagonistic duality that itself must be overcome through achieving Nirvana.^[7] The ethical questions regarding good and evil are subsumed into three major areas of study:^[8] meta-ethics, concerning the nature of good and evil; normative ethics, concerning how we ought to behave; and applied ethics, concerning particular moral issues. While the term is applied to events and conditions without agency, the forms of evil addressed in this article presume one or more evildoers.

Question of a universal definition

A fundamental question is whether there is a universal, transcendent definition of evil, or whether one's definition of evil is determined by one's social or cultural background. C. S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, maintained that there are certain acts that are universally considered evil, such as rape and murder. However, the rape of women, by men, is found in every society, and there are more societies that see at least some versions of it, such as marital rape or punitive rape, as normative than there are societies that see all rape as non-normative (a crime).^[41] In nearly all societies, killing except for defense or duty is seen as murder. Yet the definition of defense and duty varies from one society to another.^[42] Social deviance is not uniformly defined across different cultures, and is not, in all circumstances, necessarily an aspect of evil.^[43][44]


Defining evil is complicated by its multiple, often ambiguous, common usages: evil is used to describe the whole range of suffering, including that caused by nature, and it is also used to describe the full range of human immorality from the "evil of genocide to the evil of malicious gossip".^[45]: 321 It is sometimes thought of as the generic opposite of good. Marcus Singer asserts that these common connotations must be set aside as overgeneralized ideas that do not sufficiently describe the nature of evil.^{[46]: 185, 186}


In contemporary philosophy, there are two basic concepts of evil: a broad concept and a narrow concept. A broad concept defines evil simply as any and all pain and suffering: "any bad state of affairs, wrongful action, or character flaw".^[47] Yet, it is also asserted that evil cannot be correctly understood "(as some of the utilitarians once thought) [on] a simple hedonic scale on which pleasure appears as a plus, and pain as a minus".^[48] This is because pain is necessary for survival.^[49] Renowned orthopedist and missionary to lepers, Dr. Paul Brand explains that leprosy attacks the nerve cells that feel pain resulting in no more pain for the leper, which leads to ever increasing, often catastrophic, damage to the body of the leper.^{[50]: 9, 50–51} Congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP), also known as congenital analgesia, is a neurological disorder that prevents feeling pain. It "leads to ... bone fractures, multiple scars, osteomyelitis, joint deformities, and limb amputation ... Mental retardation is common. Death from hyperpyrexia occurs within the first 3 years of life in almost 20% of the patients."^[51] Few with the disorder are able to live into adulthood.^[52] Evil cannot be simply defined as all pain and its connected suffering because, as Marcus Singer says: "If something is really evil, it can't be necessary, and if it is really necessary, it can't be evil".^[46]: 186


The narrow concept of evil involves moral condemnation, therefore it is ascribed only to moral agents and their actions.^[45]: 322 This eliminates natural disasters and animal suffering from consideration as evil: according to Claudia Card, "When not guided by moral agents, forces of nature are neither "goods" nor "evils". They just are. Their "agency" routinely produces consequences vital to some forms of life and lethal to others".^[53] The narrow definition of evil "picks out only the most morally despicable sorts of actions, characters, events, etc. Evil [in this sense] ... is the worst possible term of opprobrium imaginable”.^[46] Eve Garrard suggests that evil describes "particularly horrifying kinds of action which 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 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 possessing some specially horrific quality".^[45]: 321 In this context, the concept of evil is one element in a full nexus of moral concepts.^[45]: 324