What Makes Something Evil? (And Should We Even Use the Word?)

Imagine you’re watching the news with your family. A reporter is talking about someone who did something terrible—maybe a person who hurt a lot of other people on purpose. Then someone in your family says, “That’s just evil.”

What do they mean?

Do they mean the person is like a monster in a movie? Do they mean what they did was worse than just “wrong”? Do they mean we should give up trying to understand why they did it? And is calling something “evil” actually dangerous—because it might make us think about the situation less clearly, or make it harder to fix the problems that led to it?

These are real questions philosophers argue about. Some think we should get rid of the word “evil” entirely. Others think it’s too important to lose.

Why Some People Want to Ditch the Word “Evil”

There’s a group of philosophers called “evil-skeptics.” They think the concept of evil causes more trouble than it’s worth. They have three main worries.

First, the spooky stuff. When people say “evil,” they often picture demons, dark spirits, or the devil. In horror movies, evil is something supernatural—like a possessed doll or a vampire. If you don’t believe in that stuff, maybe you shouldn’t use a word that drags it along. But defenders of “evil” say that’s not fair. When people call a school shooter evil, they’re usually not talking about demonic possession. They’re talking about a real person who did something horrible. So there’s a secular meaning of evil—one that doesn’t involve monsters or magic. And that’s the meaning philosophers should focus on.

Second, it doesn’t explain anything. Imagine two ten-year-old boys torture and kill a toddler. Why did those boys do it, while other kids with similar backgrounds didn’t? Some people say: “Because they were evil.” But that’s not really an explanation, is it? It’s just putting a label on the mystery. It’s like saying “it happened because it happened.” If we want to actually understand why people do terrible things—so we can stop them—calling them “evil” might just shut down our curiosity. The response from defenders: even if “evil” doesn’t explain why someone acted, it can still describe what they did and how we should feel about it. We can say “that was evil” and mean “this is the worst kind of wrong, and we should be horrified.”

Third, the word is dangerous. Think about how politicians sometimes use the word “evil.” When a US president called certain countries an “axis of evil,” it made it easier for people to support going to war. When you call someone evil, you’re not just saying they did a bad thing—you’re saying they’re a bad person, maybe beyond redemption. And if they’re beyond redemption, what do we do with them? Maybe we feel justified in treating them terribly. Maybe we stop thinking about whether they deserve fair treatment. The word can be used to dehumanize people. Defenders of the word say: that’s a good reason to be careful with the word, not to get rid of it. If we abandon it, we lose a way of talking about the worst things humans do to each other.

The Most Famous Attack on “Evil”

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche—who lived in the 1800s and had a dramatic mustache and even more dramatic ideas—thought the concept of evil was basically a weapon. He argued that weak people invented the idea of “evil” to take revenge on the strong people they were afraid of. When you call your enemy evil, you’re not describing reality—you’re making yourself feel powerful and righteous. Nietzsche thought we should move beyond good and evil entirely and stop judging people that way.

Some philosophers push back hard on this. They say: when victims of terrible crimes call what happened to them evil, they’re not being sneaky or resentful. They’re recognizing that something deeply unjust happened to them. Telling them to stop using the word can feel like dismissing their pain.

So What Actually Makes an Action Evil?

Assuming we keep the word, philosophers want to figure out what it really means. Most agree on a few things.

First, evil actions are wrong. That seems obvious. But they’re not just wrong. A wrong action might be cheating on a test or lying to your friend about why you can’t hang out. Those are bad, but we probably wouldn’t call them evil. Evil seems to be a special category of wrongness—something worse.

But how is it worse? Here’s where philosophers disagree.

Is evil just really bad, or is it a different kind of bad?

Some philosophers think evil is just extreme wrongdoing. It’s not a different type of wrong, just a much bigger amount of it. Like the difference between a puddle and an ocean—same stuff, different scale.

Others think evil is qualitatively different. They say you can add all the “very”s you want to “wrong” and you still won’t get to “evil.” There’s something about evil that’s different in kind, not just degree. Maybe it has to do with the perpetrator’s motives, like taking pleasure in hurting someone. Or maybe it has to do with the kind of harm—harm so severe that it makes life not worth living.

Does evil require serious harm?

Most philosophers say yes. For something to be evil, someone has to get really hurt. But this gets tricky. What about failed attempts? If someone tries to blow up a building full of people but the bomb doesn’t go off, is that evil? Some say yes—because the intention was there. What about someone who watches someone else suffer and enjoys it, but doesn’t cause the suffering? Is that evil? Some think so, even though no additional harm was caused.

And what about “small” evils? Could a school bully be evil, even if the harm isn’t life-destroying? Some philosophers say yes—evil doesn’t have to be huge. Others say that if the harm is small, we should use a different word.

What about the perpetrator’s mind?

This is where it gets really interesting. Does the person have to mean to cause harm? Or can they cause terrible harm accidentally?

Claudia Card, a contemporary philosopher, thinks we don’t need to look inside the perpetrator’s head at all. For her, evil is simply about causing intolerable harm—harm that makes life not worth living—in a way that’s foreseeable and inexcusable. If you should have known your actions would cause this kind of harm, and you did it anyway without a good reason, that’s evil. It doesn’t matter whether you felt angry, sadistic, or just indifferent.

Other philosophers disagree. They say the motivation matters a lot. Some think evil requires malevolence—a desire to harm for its own sake, or for pleasure. Others think it requires lack of certain motivations—like not caring enough about other people’s suffering when you should. Some philosophers try to mix these views.

Can ordinary people do evil?

Hannah Arendt studied the Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann, who helped organize the transportation of Jews to death camps. She expected him to be a monster. Instead, she found him terrifyingly normal. He wasn’t especially hateful or sadistic. He was just… thoughtless. He didn’t think deeply about what he was doing. This led her to talk about the “banality of evil”—the idea that ordinary people can do horrific things not because they’re demonic, but because they don’t stop and think.

This is disturbing. It suggests that under the right conditions, many of us might be capable of evil. Psychological experiments have supported this. In the famous Milgram experiments, ordinary people were willing to administer what they thought were painful electric shocks to strangers just because an authority figure told them to. Most people participated. Most people were not monsters.

What Makes a Person Evil?

Philosophers also argue about what it means to call a person evil, not just an action.

Some say an evil person is someone who regularly performs evil actions. If you do evil things often enough, you’re evil. Others say it’s about having the disposition to do evil—even if you never actually do it. Imagine someone who fantasizes about hurting others and would do it if they had the chance, but happens to never get the opportunity. Are they evil? Some say yes.

Others focus on what’s inside a person’s mind. Maybe an evil person is someone who desires the suffering of others, even if they never act on it. Or someone who takes pleasure in pain. Or someone who simply lacks the normal barriers that stop most of us from harming others.

There’s also debate about whether evil people are “fixed”—whether they can change. Some think evil people are beyond redemption, that their characters are so rotten they can’t be fixed. Others think this is too harsh. Maybe someone can do terrible things and still be capable of change.

But Wait—Can Institutions Be Evil?

Here’s a twist. Philosopher Claudia Card argues that institutions—social practices like slavery, genocide, but also things like marriage—can be evil. She argues that if an institution predictably causes intolerable harm in its normal operation, and there’s no justification for that harm, then the institution itself is evil.

This is controversial. Card argues that marriage, as it’s traditionally structured, creates conditions that make domestic abuse more likely. It gives abusers access to their victims, makes it hard for victims to leave, and makes abuse hard to detect. Since this harm is foreseeable and there are alternatives to marriage, she says marriage is an evil institution.

Many philosophers push back. They say that abuse is not an essential part of marriage—it’s a failure of marriage, not what marriage is. Calling marriage evil seems too harsh when what we should do is fix the problems within it, not abolish it entirely.

Should We Keep the Word or Not?

This is where we started, and it’s still unresolved.

The evil-skeptics say: the word is dangerous. It’s used to dehumanize people, to shut down thinking, to justify harsh punishments, and to avoid understanding the real causes of terrible behavior. We’d be better off using more precise language: talk about “terrible wrongs,” “extreme harm,” “cruelty,” “injustice.” We can condemn actions without reaching for a word that carries so much baggage.

The evil-revivalists say: sometimes only “evil” captures what we need to say. When you’ve experienced something truly horrific, calling it “very wrong” feels weak. The word “evil” expresses that something is beyond ordinary wrongdoing, that it demands our full attention and horror. And if we don’t name it, we can’t understand it—and if we don’t understand it, we can’t prevent it.

Neither side has clearly won. The debate continues.

Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Evil-skeptic	Someone who thinks we should stop using the word “evil” because it’s dangerous or meaningless
Evil-revivalist	Someone who thinks the concept of evil is important and should be carefully defined and kept
Secular evil	Evil explained without reference to demons, the devil, or supernatural forces
Banality of evil	The idea that ordinary thoughtlessness, not monstrous motives, can produce terrible evil
Malevolence	The desire to cause harm for its own sake or for pleasure
Intolerable harm	Harm so severe it makes life not worth living, from the victim’s perspective
Disposition	A tendency or likelihood to act or feel a certain way, even if you don’t always act on it

Key People

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) – A German philosopher with a dramatic mustache who argued that the concept of “evil” was invented by weak people to take revenge on the strong, and that we should move beyond it.
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) – A political theorist who studied the Holocaust and argued that evil could be “banal”—committed by ordinary, thoughtless people rather than monsters.
Claudia Card (1940–2015) – A contemporary philosopher who defined evil as foreseeable, intolerable harm caused by inexcusable wrongs, and argued that even institutions (like marriage) could be evil.

Things to Think About

Can you think of a situation where calling someone or something “evil” might actually make things worse instead of better? What would you say instead?
If someone does something terrible because they were raised in an environment where that behavior was normal—are they evil? Or does their background change how we should judge them?
Do you think there are actions that are unforgivable? If so, does calling them “evil” capture that? If not, does the word “evil” become less useful?
If most people, under the right circumstances, might do horrible things (as the Milgram experiments suggest), does that mean most people are secretly evil? Or does it mean the word “evil” doesn’t fit as neatly as we think?

Where This Shows Up

In courtrooms – When deciding whether someone is legally insane or responsible for their actions, judges and juries grapple with questions about whether someone “knew what they were doing was wrong.”
In video games and movies – Characters are often called “evil,” but thinking about what evil really means can make stories more interesting. Are villains evil because they want to be, or because of how they were shaped?
In arguments about punishment – If someone is “evil,” do they deserve harsher punishment? Or does calling them evil make it too easy to treat them cruelly?
In history class – When you learn about slavery, genocide, or other atrocities, you might wonder: were the people who did these things evil? Or were they ordinary people in terrible systems? The answer matters for how we try to prevent similar things from happening again.