Evil: Between Circumstance and Disposition
The claim that “evil does not exist” offers seductive comfort in our contemporary moment. It suggests that all human harm can be explained away through trauma, ideology, or circumstance—that beneath every atrocity lies a victim of forces beyond their control. Yet this denial, however psychologically appealing, fails to account for both lived experience and the wisdom of traditions across the globe that have grappled with evil’s reality for millennia.
The Persistent Duality
Across human cultures, a pattern emerges that refuses both naive optimism about human nature and cynical despair about human prospects: the recognition of evil as both universal potential and rare embodiment.
Religious Wisdom: The Universal and the Particular
Religious traditions worldwide have long navigated this tension. In Christianity, Augustine and Aquinas understood evil as privation—parasitic on goodness, lacking independent essence—yet the tradition simultaneously recognizes agents who willfully choose destruction. It can speak of evil’s ultimate unreality while acknowledging figures like Satan or earthly tyrants who embody malevolent will.
Judaism offers the yetzer hara, the evil inclination present in all humans, alongside stories of figures like Pharaoh whose hearts become hardened beyond redemption. Islam acknowledges how Shaytan’s whispers can lead anyone astray while identifying certain individuals as “corrupters on earth”—those who seem fundamentally oriented toward destruction.
Buddhism sees evil arising from the universal poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion, yet personifies persistent temptation in Mara. Hinduism recognizes the interplay of dharma and adharma, while acknowledging that some souls become so entangled in maya and negative karma that they embody destructive patterns across lifetimes. The Bhagavad Gita speaks of those who, “knowing what is right, still choose what is wrong.”
In African traditional religions, evil often appears as imbalance—a disruption of cosmic harmony that anyone might fall into—yet there are also concepts like the Yoruba notion of certain individuals whose ori (destiny) seems bound to destructive paths. Native American traditions similarly balance the potential for any person to lose their way with recognition that some become consistently harmful to the community’s wellbeing.
Even traditions emphasizing cosmic harmony, like Confucianism and Daoism, preserve stories of tyrants whose cruelty seems to transcend circumstantial explanation. The Dao encompasses all, yet some individuals appear to embody persistent disharmony.
Ancient Greek thought offers its own version: while anyone might be led astray by hubris or circumstance, figures like tyrants in their tragedies represent something deeper—a fundamental corruption of character that goes beyond mere error.
Psychology: The Ordinary and the Exceptional
Modern psychology tells a similar story. Most human cruelty turns out to be situational: Milgram’s obedience experiments and Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment show how ordinary people can be induced to inflict extraordinary harm. Hannah Arendt captured this with her phrase “the banality of evil”—most atrocities emerge not from demonic intent but from thoughtlessness, conformity, and moral abdication.
But psychology also confirms something more troubling. Research on psychopathy and sadism reveals that a small minority—less than one percent of the population—appear genuinely inclined toward harm. This statistical rarity matters: we’re not describing a common human variant but an exceptional one. For these individuals, cruelty isn’t just a response to pressure but seems to emerge from character itself. They harm not because they must, but because they choose to.
Philosophy: Freedom, Relation, and System
Secular philosophy has explored these same themes through different lenses. Kant spoke of “radical evil”—the willful choice to subordinate moral law to self-interest. For him, evil wasn’t mere weakness but the deliberate perversion of human freedom. It was rare but undeniably real.
Nietzsche, despite rejecting traditional morality, acknowledged what he called “ressentiment”—the active diminishment of life by certain human types. While denying metaphysical evil, he admitted dispositional tendencies toward life-denial that echo religious ideas about evil character.
Levinas located evil in the refusal to acknowledge the Other’s humanity. For him, atrocities happen when responsibility for others is denied. This links evil to relational failure rather than metaphysical essence, yet his framework still admits that some people seem persistently closed to ethical encounter.
Bauman’s analysis of the Holocaust showed how evil thrives within bureaucratic rationality, revealing how institutions provide cover for both situational compliance and dispositional malice. Camus, in The Plague, presented evil as both universal threat and resistible force—something requiring constant vigilance without falling into despair.
Why Evil Spreads
Here’s a crucial insight: evil rarely coordinates effectively on its own. Dispositionally malicious individuals compete more than they cooperate—their fundamental orientation toward exploitation makes stable alliances nearly impossible. For evil to achieve systematic expression—to become genocide, slavery, or totalitarian oppression—it needs to borrow structures from cooperative society: institutions, ideologies, and cultural mechanisms that let it parasitize ordinary human compliance.
This coordination failure explains why history’s greatest atrocities, from ancient tyrannies to medieval inquisitions, from colonial genocides to modern totalitarian states, follow similar patterns. A small number of genuinely malicious actors manipulate existing systems, exploiting the situational susceptibility of otherwise decent people. Evil spreads not through multiplying evil individuals, but through corrupting normal human psychology and social vulnerabilities.
Beyond Simple Denial
The claim that “evil does not exist” offers seductive comfort in our contemporary moment. It suggests that all human harm can be explained away through trauma, ideology, or circumstance—that beneath every atrocity lies a victim of forces beyond their control. Yet this denial, however psychologically appealing, fails to account for both lived experience and the wisdom of traditions across the globe that have grappled with evil’s reality for millennia.
The contemporary impulse to deny evil’s reality captures something important while making a logical error. Yes, most human cruelty is circumstantial, explainable through trauma, social pressure, and systemic forces. This recognition matters for effective intervention and prevention. But the absence of definitive proof for dispositional evil isn’t proof of its absence—particularly when historical evidence and psychological research point consistently toward its reality, however rare.
The category “evil” also serves essential moral functions that purely descriptive language can’t. It operates as a boundary marker for the unacceptable, a term of moral shock that pierces through euphemism and rationalization, and rallying language for collective resistance. To abandon it is to weaken our moral vocabulary precisely when we need it most.
The sober truth requires holding both realities simultaneously: evil exists as a rare but real disposition in some individuals, even as it remains a universal potential that circumstances can activate in almost anyone. Religious traditions preserve this duality through their stories of universal inclination and particular incarnation. Psychology confirms it through experimental evidence and diagnostic categories. Philosophy reframes it through analyses of freedom, relationality, and systematic dynamics.
Toward Moral Clarity
To deny evil entirely leaves us without adequate language for the worst human actions and insufficient tools for prevention. To overinflate evil paralyzes moral judgment and social action. The mature response recognizes that dispositional evil, while affecting less than one percent of the population, remains real and dangerous when it gains institutional power.
This recognition demands neither naive optimism nor cynical despair, but rather sustained vigilance—toward both the circumstances that can corrupt ordinary people and the rare individuals whose corruption seems to transcend circumstance. Only by acknowledging evil’s reality in both forms—as universal human potential and exceptional human disposition—can we hope to resist its expression in either.
Objections and Replies
Any account of evil must face the skeptical objection: we cannot know whether evil is innate or circumstantial, because we cannot access another person’s inner life. If that’s so, then the distinction between dispositional and situational evil is meaningless, and judgments of “evil” are presumptuous at best.
This objection has force, but it doesn’t succeed. Several replies are available:
Fallibility doesn’t erase categories. The fact that we sometimes misclassify phenomena doesn’t mean the categories themselves are invalid. We occasionally confuse red with orange, yet both colors exist. Likewise, the possibility of misjudgment doesn’t nullify the distinction between situational and dispositional evil.
We judge by patterns, not private access. We don’t need privileged access to another’s inner life to recognize recurring shapes of behavior. If someone repeatedly and eagerly seeks opportunities to harm, even across varying circumstances, the pattern itself justifies our judgment. Categories arise from public observation, not private certainties.
The distinction has practical consequences. Even if we only ever perceive outcomes, it matters whether harm is situationally induced or dispositionally driven. The situationally corruptible can often be redirected or rehabilitated; the dispositionally malicious require containment and constant vigilance. To erase the distinction is to flatten vital moral and political differences.
The objection itself assumes too much. The skeptic claims that because we cannot know perfectly, we cannot know at all. But absence of definitive proof isn’t proof of absence. The historical and psychological record consistently suggests that dispositional malice, while rare, is real. Denying the category isn’t humility but overreach.
In short, caution in judgment is wise, but categorical denial isn’t. Evil may be difficult to classify in practice, but difficulty doesn’t equal impossibility. The recognition of dispositional evil remains necessary if we are to describe human reality truthfully and equip ourselves to resist its most dangerous forms.
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