As children, whenever I or one of my siblings said in my father’s earshot that we hated someone, he would retort ‘Don’t hate anybody!’ It was a noble but futile injunction. Ideally, we would not hate even our worst enemies, and even those sadists and psychopaths who inflicted gratuitous suffering on others would be seen as sick, not objects of odium.
Similarly, most psychologists and many philosophers would prefer that we never used the term ‘evil’. The problem is that it suggests some people or acts are in a different category to others, that evil inhabits its own wicked sphere, separate from ordinary badness. Evil ‘otherises’ the extremely bad, allowing us to feel that we could never have anything to do with it. Yet most, if not all, of what we call evil is the work of ordinary human beings. The Hutus in Rwanda who massacred over half a million mostly Tutsis over the course of just a few months in 1994, the Germans who sent millions to their deaths in concentration camps in the 1940s, the American Army and intelligence employees who tortured people in Abu Ghraib prison after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: all would probably have led blameless lives as upstanding citizens if they hadn’t been in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong weaknesses. The potential for evil lies within us all and so we ought not to talk of it as though it were some satanic other.
But like the call never to hate, the injunction to drop all talk of evil is well-intentioned but quixotic. There are some acts and some people for whom the word ‘bad’ will never seem strong enough, no matter how extreme the intensifier we add to it. So, the debate about the legitimacy of the term ‘evil’ can quickly become a merely linguistic one about what kind of vocabulary is appropriate when talking about different forms of wrongdoing. On the one side are those who argue against the use of ‘evil’ on the basis that it is not a category of badness in and of itself, and on the other those who may or may not agree with this, but either way believe we sometimes need recourse to the strongest words possible for badness, and ‘evil’ is one such word. Just as the term ‘deafening’ is more informative and precise than just ‘extremely loud’, or ‘obese’ tells us something ‘very fat’ does not, so ‘evil’ has a directness and explicitness that ‘extremely bad’ does not.
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