Abstract

Unde malum? What is evil—if it is anything at all—and whence does it arise? Is evil just badness by another name? Is it the inevitable “shadow side” of the good? Or is it more substantial: an active, striving force that is opposed to the good in a Star Wars, Manichean kind of way? Does evil always originate in the causal powers of nature? Is it sometimes based in the choices of moral agents? Or, perhaps most disturbingly, does evil sometimes have its source in something non-human and impersonal—a malevolent tendency in the universe not just to general winding-down but also to outbreaks of targeted hellishness? Finally, what is radical evil, and how does it differ from other kinds of evil? These are some of the key metaphysical questions that philosophers have raised concerning evil. The goal of this entry is to provide a taxonomy of the most prominent answers: the main theories of evil’s kinds and origins on offer in the western philosophical tradition. This is meant to supplement the discussion in the entry on the concept of evil, although Section 1 begins with some conceptual and semantic issues. Section 2 introduces two key distinctions that are then further developed in Sections 3 and 4. The first distinction has to do with the kinds of evil: insofar as evil is anything at all, is it a deep metaphysical feature of things, or is it always (or at least sometimes) merely an empirical phenomenon? The second distinction has to do with the origins of evil: is evil ever (or always) based in entirely natural phenomena, or does it sometimes (or always) have a moral or supernatural origin? Sections 5 through 7 consider some puzzling cases of hard-to-categorize evils: systemic evil; symbolic evil; and so-called “radical” evil.