Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

SUBSCRIBE NOW

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Articles

Is Attributing Evil a Cognitive Bias?

Aner Govrin argues that a common perception of evil is mistaken.

Why do we still use the term ‘evil’? Why don’t we merely say ‘very, very bad’, or ‘a severe moral failure’? I think ‘evil’ describes a category of moral failures of a certain kind better than any other word. The question I want to look at now is how we determine those kinds of moral failure.

For thousands of years, the concept of evil was closely linked to a religious view of life. In Judaism and Christianity, evil in human conduct (which is known specifically as ‘moral evil’) is viewed as extreme defiance of God’s commandments. An act of evil radically violates that holy code.

…