Evil

The Nature of Evil

The notion of evil is complex but usually involves some combination of or interplay between four basic categories, consisting of two sorts of effect and two sorts of cause or origin. The two sorts of effect are suffering and metaphysical evil, and the two sorts of cause are moral and natural evil.

Suffering includes both physical and psychological pain and distress, while metaphysical evil involves facts such as the impermanence of the world and the things in it, and especially human death (for simplicity's sake, in what follows, the term suffering will generally be used to includemetaphysical evil). Moral evil is roughly what the Christian, for example, would call “sin,” the Hindu “p∼pa” or “adharma”: deliberate actions, typically of human beings, but sometimes of other creatures or of supernatural beings. Natural evil is the result of the workings of the natural world as left to itself, without outside or supernatural intervention; it involves natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and famines but also individual events such as lightning strikes and sickness. While much if not most discussion in Western traditions of thought has concentrated on the issue of moral evil, other traditions have often been more concerned with the occurrence and degree of suffering and of metaphysical [Page 879]evil. For example, in the Buddhist tradition, Siddhartha was led to give up his life of princely luxury in order to seek enlightenment (the Great Renunciation) when, for the first time in his life, he encountered old age, sickness, and death and realized that suffering (dukkha,which is founded in anicca, “impermanence”) is universal among human beings. In fact, whatever philosophers, theologians, and other thinkers have taken as central, ordinary people in most cultures generally see as problems arising out of the effects rather than out of the causes; in religious terms, especially, it's the occurrence and quantity of pain and suffering, the cutting short of lives, and so on, that causes people to question their faith.

A further important distinction should be drawn between the view that evil is a positive property or entity in itself and the view that evil is a mere privation or absence of goodness. In different cultures this takes very different forms, ranging from a conceptual distinction between kinds of property to a concrete distinction between the presence of a malevolent, evil supernatural being and the absence of a benevolent one. In whatever form, the distinction is especially relevant to the categories of moral evil and suffering, of course, though it can also be applied to the other two categories. The distinction is important, for those who view evil as something positive are usually thought to be under particular pressure to explain its origin.

Different cultures have developed various accounts of the nature and origin of evil, accounts that perform a variety of functions. These include the provision of psychological comfort in the face of suffering or perceived unfairness and the reconciling of evil with other aspects of the culture's belief system, especially with religious beliefs; the latter, of course, will generally also encompass the former.

...