1. Speaking of Evil

“Evil” and related terms in the Germanic branch of
Indo-European have referred, at various points, to suffering and
wrongdoing, but also to defecation, latrines, spoiled fruit, diseases,
prostitution, and (oddly enough) forks.

The Greek term “kakos” may be related to the
Proto-Indo-European term
“kakka”—“defecation”. But only
the first two meanings survive in English, and non-ironic uses of the
term are relatively rare outside of ceremonial and literary contexts.
Indeed, speaking of evil nowadays often feels like an exercise in
anachronism—like speaking of wickedness, abomination,
uncleanness, and iniquity.

The Oxford English Dictionary explains:

In modern colloquial English it [evil]; is little used, such
currency as it has being due to literary influence. In quite familiar
speech the adjective is commonly superseded by bad; the noun
is somewhat more frequent, but chiefly in the widest senses, the more
specific senses being expressed by other words, such as harm,
injury, misfortune, disease, etc.
(“evil, adj. and n.1”, under A.,
abbreviations expanded, OED Online, accessed September
2021)

This trend is found in other modern languages, but not in all. Ruppel
(2019) notes that in German-speaking lands “das
Übel” declined just like “evil” did in
England, but was soon replaced by “das
Böse”, which is still alive and well in Germany.

This slow erasure of “evil” and its cognates from many
European languages, which began in the seventeenth century, was due to
the rejection of the concept of evil, especially by elites.
Doctors, moral philosophers, natural scientists, and even theologians
shied away from evil—preferring more tractable notions
like badness, harm, and misfortune, or
quasi-quantifiable concepts like pain, suffering,
trauma, and
disutility. Traditional views of ontologically substantive
and supernatural evil—something able to possess a body or
terrorize a soul—came to be seen as quaint, unscientific,
embarrassing (Ruppel 2019).

Philosophers of religion are a half-exception to the rule. They did
and do continue to speak of evil, at least when discussing the
“problem” thereof. (See the entry on
the problem of evil.) If pressed, though, they typically
admit that this is because the great framers of the
problem—Augustine, Aquinas, Leibniz, Bayle—used the term
(in Latin or French), and then proceed to gloss it generically as, in
Michael Tooley’s words, “any undesirable states of
affairs” (2002 [2019]). Philosophers of religion in the broadly
Continental tradition are less likely to assimilate evil to more
general or anodyne notions in this way, and more likely to discuss the
nature of evil as opposed to the “problem” it raises for
theism (e.g., Kearney 2001 and Matuštík 2008).

Despite this widespread squeamishness about “evil” in both
scientific culture and common parlance, there are moments when the
pull of the ancient lexicon is irresistible—at the very least
expressively, in the mode of both condemnation and lament.
Premeditated mass shootings aren’t just bad or traumatic;
rather, they are something else: here people still reach for
“evil” or even “radical evil”. The years-long
imprisonment and rape of children by their parents is a misfortune
that produces negative utility, to be sure, but the transfixing horror
of it seems only to be captured by the invocation of
“evil”. The same is true of most instances of genocide,
sex-trafficking, torture-slaying, terrorism, serial killing, and
slavery: these are one and all bad, harmful, and traumatic activities,
but they are also something else—something excessive,
mesmerizing, and revolting all at once (see Stone 2009 for a
psychologist’s account). In the face of such acts,
we—along with our spiritual leaders, newscasters, and
politicians—are still willing to speak, preach, and tweet about
“pure evil”.

Thus after a school shooting in February 2017, Donald Trump
(@realDonaldTrump) tweeted that “we must keep ‘evil’
out of our country”. (Despite the quotation marks, it was clear
that he meant evil the entity, and not “evil” the word.)
After the Las Vegas mass shooting in October 2017, Trump and many
others in leadership referred to the event as “an act of pure
evil” (Matuson 2017). Less recently, George W. Bush referred to
Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as the “Axis of Evil” in a
state of the union address on 29 January 2002 (see Other Internet
Resources), and Ronald Reagan repeatedly characterized the Soviet
Union as “the evil empire”, famously at a speech on 8
March 1983 to the National Association of Evangelicals (see Other
Internet Resources).

But when we do this—when we speak of evil, das
Böse, il male nowadays—what is it
that we are referring to, and where does it come from?

Pressed with such questions, many people (philosophers included)
revert to the more tractable terms. Of course what we are
really talking about (whispering about, thundering about, shaking our
heads about) in those moments of condemnation and lament is an extreme
instance of suffering or disutility. Of course
“evil” is to “bad” what “wicked”
is to “immoral”: a conceptual vestige of a pre-scientific,
credulous past that we invoke for the sake of solemnity, empathy, or
emphasis. A concept that—outside of horror films and
fiction—is best analyzed in terms of nature’s frustration
of the basic needs of sentient creatures, or as the effects of illness
and ill-parenting. Yes, evil happenings have an excessive, egregious
quality that makes them notable, even transfixing. But they are not,
in the end, sui generis or metaphysically mysterious:
neuroscience, medicine, psychology, and law have domesticated evil.
Taken to its logical extreme, the doctrine that characterizes this
camp would be that all evil is “natural” (a
product of various causal processes in nature).

Others prefer to answer the questions about the origins of evil in
terms of choice, agency, and will. For people in
this camp, evil consists in malevolent intentions, malice with
forethought, and self-conscious cruelty that leads to extreme
suffering and tribulation. They may allow that there are contributing
factors and preconditions, but ultimately hold the agents
themselves responsible for evil. Note, however, that the appeal
to human free will can also be seen as an effort to domesticate
evil—to make it explicable in terms of familiar concepts, to set
it on a continuum with other, familiar acts and events. Taken to its
logical extreme, the doctrine held by people in this camp is that
all evil has “moral” origins—it is a
product of choice or agency of some sort.

This debate about the roots of evil plays out not only in philosophy
seminar rooms and psychology labs, but also on cable news stations and
op-ed pages. People in the second camp tend to the political right,
and sometimes even make a show of using “evil” because
they think that people in the first camp (who tend to the political
left) are uncomfortable with the idea of personal responsibility and
blameworthiness.

I said these were the two opposing camps. In truth there is
another one—one that used to be very popular but now seems
sparsely populated, at least among philosophers. People in this third
camp eschew efforts to domesticate evil; for them, what we mean by
“evil” is not equivalent to what we mean by
“bad” or “wrong” or even “very very very
bad” or “very very very wrong”. In other words, evil
is not just illness, misfortune, or malevolent choices by another name
but rather a positive, substantial rottenness in the universe. It is,
or has its origin in, some non-agential force or shadow side of
reality—something spooky, imperceptible, but out there
(“in them woods”).

2. Two Distinctions in Evil: Kinds and Origins

The late antique (Plotinus, Proclus, Augustine, Boethius), medieval
(Anselm, Ibn Sina, Aquinas), and early modern (Descartes, Leibniz,
Bayle, Kant) eras contain sophisticated traditions of reflection on
questions about evil—about its being or non-being, its intrinsic
features and natural manifestations, and its origins in nature, will,
or supernature. Over the course of that centuries-long discussion, two
main distinctions emerged.

The first main distinction has to do with the nature or
kinds of evil: is evil at bottom just an empirical
phenomenon—something that is given in the causal, phenomenal
world of our experience? Or is there a deeper, metaphysical
aspect to some evils? Note that this is not an exclusive distinction:
people who endorse the idea of metaphysical evil typically assume that
it also has an empirical character or manifestation.

Suppose, for example, we come across the sort of scene that drove
Friedrich Nietzsche mad in Turin: a coachman mercilessly beating his
horse (Prideaux 2018). In this version of the case, however, suppose
that the coachman’s cruelty is a response to his having been
recently diagnosed with terminal cancer. So here there is certainly
some empirical evil: the cancerous disruption to the body, the cruelty
of the man, the pain of the horse. Some philosophers will say that
there is also metaphysical evil: neither the man nor the horse is
metaphysically perfect, and so on the Absence Theory considered below
(section 3.1.1)
both are in that respect evil. We might also regard the body and
character of the man as corrupted and conclude that he is
metaphysically evil in a “privative” way too (see
section 3.1.3).
Metaphysical evils like these are distinct from the empirical evils
of the cancer, the cruelty, and the suffering of the horse, though on
many accounts they are the ground of the latter.

The second main distinction has to do with the origins of
evil, and tracks the differences between the three camps mentioned
above. The first option here is to say that a specific evil arises
entirely from natural phenomena for which no one is
responsible. In the case of the man and his horse, it is common to
think that their metaphysical finitude and incapacities, as well as
the cancerous tumor and the canine pain, are “natural” in
this way: they seem to be based in facts about the natures, events,
and causal laws involved.

An alternative is to say that a specific evil has its origin in
moral actions and intentions. Applied to our case, it is
common to think that the man’s agency—the choice to beat
his vulnerable steed—is the origin of the cruelty and the pain.
If there is metaphysical evil here, then it too might have a moral
origin: on some religious pictures, for instance, the corrupted human
nature that leads to disease, cruelty, and enmity between him and
other creatures is a result of free choice on the part of his
primordial ancestors. (If there is agency in any non-human
creatures—animals or angelic—then it would also fit
here.)

The third (and now-quite-unpopular) view about origins says that a
specific evil arises ultimately not from nature or from choice but
from something that is both supernatural and non-agential (call this a
“spooky non-agential” origin). On such views there is a
dark force or side of reality that is the ultimate origin of, say, the
metaphysical evil in the man’s nature. It may also be the
ultimate source of the empirical evil involved.

Three further preliminary notes:

1. The second main distinction here is often regarded as exclusive
   with respect to a specific evil, since we are asking about its
   ultimate origin. If the man’s cancer and ill-treatment
   of the horse originate entirely in the causal powers of the physical
   universe, then they are not also based in either free choice or
   supernatural spookiness (and vice versa). “Typically” here
   is key, however, since a compatibilist picture of free will
   (O’Connor & Franklin 2018 [2021]) says that free choices
   themselves are determined by natural causes. On that view, perhaps,
   the origin of the man’s cruel act is both moral
   and natural. Compatibilisms between natural and spooky
   origins are also conceptually possible.
2. Although some theorists think that all instances of evil
   (whether metaphysical or empirical) are grounded in just one of these
   ultimate origins, most will allow that different evils have different
   ultimate origins. For instance, someone might coherently think that
   the man’s cancer has a natural origin, that his cruelty has a
   moral origin, and yet that the ferociousness of the beating has a
   spooky or “dark force” origin.
   Section 4
   considers some historical efforts to suggest that all evils
   are ultimately moral in origin.
3. Although these conceptual distinctions are fairly clear, there is
   terminological variation in the historical and contemporary literature
   with respect to the term “natural evil”. Some philosophers
   and theologians use “natural evil” to refer not to an
   origin but to a kind—the kind that is here called
   “empirical evil”. When the distinctions are maintained,
   however, it should be clear that they are orthogonal: both
   metaphysical evil and empirical evil can have natural, moral, or
   spooky origins (see
   Figure 1).

The distinctions represented in the Table of Evil are the topics of
Sections 3 and 4. Sections 5 through 7 look at three varieties of evil
(systemic, symbolic, and radical) whose positions within the Table are
more difficult to discern.

The first key distinction is concerned with the kinds of
evil—with what evil is or consists in, and thus with where and
how it manifests. Again, the distinction is not exclusive: someone
might hold that there is both metaphysical evil and empirical
evil, and that the latter is typically a manifestation of metaphysical
evil. Someone else, however, might hold that there is no such thing as
metaphysical evil, and that all evils can be accounted for at the
empirical, causal level.

3.1 Metaphysical Evil

Many of the traditional kakologists believed in metaphysical
evil—i.e., evil that has to do with the way things exist or
fail to exist. Typically, metaphysical evil is supposed to be a
function of a thing’s nature and characterized by a kind of
unintelligiblity. As we have seen, many such theorists also typically
assume that metaphysical evil has empirical manifestations.

Both metaphysical and empirical evil have been described in terms of
four main theory-templates: Absence, Matter, Privation, and
Real Property. These templates are laid out in more detail in
the discussion of metaphysical evil in this section, and applied again
in
section 3.2’s
discussion of empirical evil.

3.1.1 Absence Theory

The Absence Theory of Evil has its origins in the Platonic
idea that there are different “degrees of being”
corresponding to the number and kinds of capacities a thing has.
Roughly speaking, the more numerous and impressive a thing’s
capacities, the more real and thus better it is,
metaphysically-speaking. A dog cannot stand erect; an ape