The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful … is the great and most universal cause of our moral sentiments.
–Adam Smith
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One recent summer afternoon I received an email from a British podcast production company concerning, they said, “a project in development involving modern manifestations of the concept of evil.” They had found my book on the subject helpful. Would I be open to a short conversation off the record? After having put the subject aside for most of two decades, I was about to begin work on this book, so we met on Zoom a few weeks later. The serious young man asked if I’d heard about that case of cannibalism in Florida.
My face fell, and I did not hide it. “If that’s what you’re interested in, I can’t help you.”
“Why not?”
It should have been clear from the book itself, which doesn’t mention a single instance of cannibalism or serial murder or any of the gruesome cases that fill tabloids and true crime shows all over the world. “Cases like these are very rare, and they distract us from evils that are much more common and much more dangerous.”
“Like what?”
“Making war in order to stay in power. Cutting aid that will cost poor people’s lives in order to lower rich people’s taxes.”
“That’s true,” he granted. “But did you hear about this one? An ordinary man in an ordinary town killed a couple in their garage and was captured while eating their faces.”
“No.”
“Don’t you wonder how that could happen?”
To call evil banal is to call it boring, and if it is boring, its appeal is limited. Few things are less erotic than a fungus.
“Psychologically? Neurologically? There was once a mass shooter who was found to have a brain tumor. Maybe science will discover causes, since we aren’t going to find reasons. But I’m interested in the reasons for less spectacular cases.”
“He said he was a werewolf. Did you ever read about the werewolf trials? Like the witch trials in the Middle Ages?”
We would always rather externalize evil than examine it. The first witch trial in Ireland took place in Kilkenny in 1324, but people who were suspected as sources of suffering have been murdered since prehistory. It’s a way both to explain suffering and to expiate it. By portraying evil as something so outside the range of normal human behavior that most of us find it not just wrong but disgusting, we avoid hard questions about less gory crimes. Horror films and increasingly brutal crime stories reveal the very large market for the subject.
There are cynical explanations for their commercial success: People are hardwired to enjoy watching cruelty, even if they’re too frightened to participate themselves. Less grimly, you may take the fascination for rare and grisly crimes as a substitute for the question many cannot formulate or face: What accounts for less dramatic forms of evil that have become so common they serve as background for the lives we quietly inhabit? We focus on those who take pleasure in cruelty because they are seldom who we are—and because we are loath to recognize that the greater evil is the conviction that there is no good.
Hannah Arendt was prescient in understanding the desire to believe in evil as involving “satanic greatness.” Her work on the problem of evil was the search for an account that would undermine its appeal as something grand, maleficent, and terrifyingly sublime. The diabolical is ambiguous and often frankly sexy; the ridiculous is not. So she wrote in a famous letter to her friend Gershom Sholem:
Evil possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste to the world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface.
To call evil banal is to call it boring, and if it is boring, its appeal is limited. Few things are less erotic than a fungus.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil received more, and more furious, commentary than any other work of twentieth-century philosophy. Arendt herself complicated matters by calling it journalism instead of philosophy, which added to the misunderstandings. Its point was not that evil is banal, but rather that those who perpetrate it are. Thirty shekels, another ring on the bureaucratic ladder: The reward for which many are willing to sell their souls can be stunningly small. Unable to picture evil as anything other than devilish, critics accused Arendt of excusing the perpetrators and blaming the victims. Decades of friendship, including that with Sholem, were undone in the controversy.
Arendt’s account of evil was developed as she observed the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major architects of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Devoid of any hint of satanic greatness, the balding, nearsighted bureaucrat on the stand in Jerusalem looked more like an accountant than anything else. He wasn’t driven by personal hatred or pleasure in cruelty. He was punctilious in refusing to profit from stolen goods and had done nothing but what was expected of him after joining the SS in 1932. The one time he observed a gas chamber in action, he swore that it made him sick. Dostoyevsky’s sniveling devil comes closest to portraying the man chiefly responsible for organizing the Final Solution. Not malevolence but thoughtlessness was behind Eichmann’s deeds. He merely, wrote Arendt, did not realize what he was doing.
This last claim was false, as the German philosopher Bettina Stangneth proved in her 2011 book Eichmann Before Jerusalem. Unlike Arendt, Stangneth had access to recordings made in 1956 in Argentina. In a series of lectures Eichmann told other exiled Nazis the truth about what they had hitherto called “The Auschwitz Lie.” Protocols of every meeting were made, corrected, and signed by Eichmann himself. At those meetings he resisted every suggestion that he’d been the sort of mindless civil servant he performed at his trial, and he said his only regret was his failure to murder all 11 million Jews in Europe. So much for the claim that he didn’t know what he was doing; Arendt, like many, had been fooled by the role he played in hopes of escaping the gallows. But her fundamental point remains: Evil acts are seldom committed by monsters. All they require is an ordinary person who abandons integrity.
Arendt’s radical claims still stand, in principle, though not for the man Adolf Eichmann. The role of intention in determining claims of genocide is fiercely debated. According to Raphael Lemkin’s definition, a war crime becomes genocide if it involves the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” But how do we decide when destruction is intentional? Orders can be equivocal, statements ambiguous, instructions murky.
However we evaluate the aims of those who give the orders, no genocide would ever be committed without countless people following those orders without intending much of anything at all. Like other cases of mass murder, the Holocaust could never have happened without the willing participation of millions of people who were not particularly committed fascists or fascists of any kind. They were simply willing to accept whatever demands made their lives easiest. If they reflected at all, it was likely to produce the thought: If I didn’t do it, someone else would. This thought is a handy excuse. It is also usually true.
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In 1961 the social psychologist Stanley Milgram set out to understand how millions of Germans had been complicit in mass murder. In a series of experiments, hundreds of subjects were told they were participants in a study examining the role of stress in learning. They were instructed to give electric shocks to learners they could not see. In fact, the learners were actors; the shockers were the subjects of the experiment. Nearly half of them failed miserably. Even as the actors shouted in counterfeit pain from the next room, the subjects continued to administer increasingly intense shocks they’d been told could lead to unconsciousness or even death. Nor did they need encouragement or threats from Nazis in uniform. White coats and the four-letter word Yale were all that was needed to convince them they were serving the cause of science. Milgram concluded:
If a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium- sized American town.
The methodology of Milgram’s experiments as well as similar ones has been recently questioned and the numbers disputed. The results are still dispiriting enough: Half of those tested were willing to follow what they thought were orders to torture.
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In 1959 the Austrian philosopher Gunter Anders initiated a correspondence with Claude Eatherly, one of the pilots involved in the bombing of Hiroshima. He’d read that feelings of guilt over his role in the mass slaughter led the former pilot to a nervous breakdown. The correspondence helped convince Anders, who fled the Nazis for American exile in 1936, that different kinds of evil cause different kinds of harm. Crimes like those committed at Auschwitz pose greater threats to the human soul; what happened at Hiroshima is a greater menace to life itself. To lead a child to a gas chamber demands a hardness of heart that must be cultivated. Few of us are born that way. (Don’t forget that the gas chambers were invented to spare soldiers the qualms that less mechanized forms of murder might produce.) Dropping a bomb on a child who cannot see you is easier than looking her in the eye. (Prisoners executed by firing squad are not blindfolded for their sakes but to spare their executioners a final accusing glance.) Still it’s heartening to learn that even from a great height, Eatherly was troubled. One could argue this gives us some hope for humankind.
Anders did not classify evils as better or worse, but he wanted to distinguish them. Others are inclined to rank evils according to the amount of savagery evident in the perpetrator, not to the damage inflicted on the world. It’s a relic of the assumption that doing evil requires evil intentions, a view Arendt’s work was meant to demolish.
Shortly after the first photos of the Abu Ghraib tortures were published, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared:
What happened at Abu Ghraib was not right. But it’s not the same thing as cutting off someone’s head in front of a video camera.
True enough; it’s not the same thing. But only if you think that evil has an essence do you draw the conclusion Rumsfeld wanted us to draw: that one of those actions is evil and one is simply too bad. We’ve heard similar claims from those who defend Israel’s continuing war on Gaza:
Israel is fighting a war of self-defense to ensure that nothing like Hamas’s attack can ever happen again. Those who filmed themselves raping and murdering civilians are not even human; they’re animals.
You may take President Isaac Herzog’s remarks on October 8, 2023, to be offensive to animals, but he was not wrong to say the two kinds of terror were different. The terrorism committed by Hamas on October 7 and the subsequent destruction of Gaza by Israeli forces are not the same. One of these evils had the mass murder of civilians as its intended goal; the other claims that its victims are unfortunate accidents. One of them was the product of individual will, the other of complex systems that make it easy for individuals to evade scrutiny. One of those evils was highly visible through films of blood-drenched homes and interviews with survivors. The other has been hidden by banning media coverage, so the world has seen nothing but cell phone videos made by Palestinian journalists risking their lives to record them. What they have shown is horrendous enough.
It’s natural to hope we’ll find an essence connecting these different kinds of evil, for that would give us hope for a definition of it. Who wouldn’t like to whip out a formula that enabled you to judge this action as evil and the other as merely wrong? Or if you believe, as I do, that Hamas’s attack on October 7 and the subsequent destruction of Gaza are both evil, what core do they share?
The wish is understandable, but there’s little reason to think we will find the key that we seek. Previous definitions of evil are so broad as to be almost meaningless—Saint Augustine defined it as nothingness—or so narrow as to exclude everything but the particular form of evil you have in mind. Both Rumsfeld and Herzog show how easy it is to confine the definition of evil to that which is done to your people—and ignore what is done by the tribe you call your own.
Evil is not alone here. Most important concepts, like justice or beauty or judgment, elude definition. Though it’s usually the first thing people want from philosophers, it’s often the last we can offer. Thinkers as different as Theodor Adorno and Ludwig Wittgenstein, two of the most important philosophers of the last century, argued that definitions of vital and contested concepts are futile—precisely because they are vital and contested. Philosophical concepts are subject to change, which is how philosophy makes progress. It also means that such concepts can be defined only in relation to each other, as part of a view as a whole. Definitions are useful in subjects like mathematics, whose components are fixed enough to stay put. Adorno set out his views in an introductory lecture at the University of Frankfurt, and ended with the advice to give up formal definitions of philosophical concepts: “The task of a philosophical treatment of terminology can be only to awaken the life congealed in the words.”
Wittgenstein proposed to abandon the appeal to essences for the concept of family resemblance. It’s a deep analogy, for you usually recognize members of a family, though you can’t trace your recognition to the shape of a mouth or the slant of an eye. What most people want from philosophy is closer to what DNA reveals about families: the absolute proof that this is a case of evil, or heroism, or love. Most of us who do philosophy began by hoping to find definitions too. But if evil comes in too many forms to reduce to an essence, it doesn’t make philosophy helpless. Rather than seeking a recipe, we can learn to identify evils through careful analysis that proceeds case by case.
That’s the way to ensure that we don’t overlook evils that fail to fit our worldview, or decide that one evil is an excuse for another. To explain something is not to excuse it, despite centuries’ worth of claims to the contrary. For many, recognizing the evils Hamas committed on October 7 obviated the need to understand them. For their critics, understanding it as a response to the brutal occupation precluded calling it evil. We must seek understanding and still be able to conclude, with Israeli author and politician Avrum Burg:
Nothing Israel did to Gaza justified the massacres of October 7, and nothing Hamas did on October 7 justifies Israel’s war on Gaza.
S’expliquer n’est pas se justifier.
*
Without a definition, who’s to decide what’s evil? Do we wait for a sign from heaven?
A world that worked as reason assumes it ought to would be a world of marionettes. In such a world, would morality be possible?
Even if we had one, it wouldn’t be much use, as we’re told in one of the strongest passages of the Hebrew Bible. Sodom and Gomorrah have long stood as paradigm cases of crime and punishment. The Sodomites sinned and got what was coming to them; God turned their cities to rubble no one ever found. You needn’t be a fundamentalist to sympathize with the Lord: The sin that He punished was the local demand to drag out and gang-rape two strangers whom the good-hearted Lot had offered to shelter. Some sources expand on the account in Genesis, suggesting the Sodomites were not only immoral but positively antimoral. Their laws prescribed the death penalty for anyone who helped a stranger; after giving bread to a poor man, Lot’s daughter was immolated on a pyre. Even Sodom’s taxes were perversely regressive: Owners of two oxen were liable for one day’s civic service, while those with one ox were liable for two.
It’s hard to condemn the decision to wipe out such a vile crew—until you asked the question that Abraham dared pose: Surely you’re not a pedant? What if there are only forty-five good people in the city? Abraham bargains God down to ten. In morality, small distinctions matter. Moral judgment is not a matter of timeless fiats, even were they proclaimed by the Lord of Hosts.
There are many reasons to love this story, not least because of its resolute universalism. Abraham’s words—Let not the Lord be angry if I continue, I who am but dust and ashes—underline his dread. He risks his life, not for his tribe or his family, but for the sake of a principle that applies to anyone, anywhere. Innocents should not be punished along with the guilty. The story makes clear that even for those with direct connections to heaven, evil is not a theological concept. Abraham put his life on the line to give God a lesson in ethics.
Bible readers may wonder how this fit with Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac at God’s command, and philosophers have occasionally tried to reconcile the two stories with textual twists. But here as elsewhere, the Bible itself is magnificently equivocal. Though religious thinkers will fight fiercely to show one of the stories to be the one that religion really sanctions, each Abrahamic religion has signposts pointing both ways. Fundamentalists will claim that the moral code that follows from their faith needs no intellect to follow. But each of the three Western religions also has a rationalist strain that argues that if God gave us reason, he meant us to use it— even when that means calling him out.
Abraham’s standpoint at Sodom is not peculiar to monotheism. In arguing that things are not good because they are loved by the gods, but the gods love them because they are good, Socrates distinguishes religious from moral authority. He too risked his life for a principle. For undermining traditional religious authority, he was eventually sentenced to death.
The principle they defend gives us a clue about understanding evil, for only opposing evil is worth the risk of a life. What’s at issue is collateral damage, a term that came into use during the Vietnam War to obscure, through abstraction, that masses of civilians were being systematically blown to pieces. Here language does heavy work. The image of babies smashed to bits is likely to arouse protests like Abraham’s. Collateral damage, like Final Solution, is too foggy to arouse anything at all.
Let’s return to the just world hypothesis, a proposition we can neither believe nor entirely abandon. Evidence that the world is not just is so vast that we notice only when happiness and virtue are wildly out of balance: A child is killed, through violence or neglect; a tyrant prospers without penalty or regret. In both cases, your indignation expresses that what people do in the world, and what the world does to them, should be somehow connected. Those who are righteous for its own sake should be rewarded—not merely with a satisfied mind but with some of the happiness the world can bestow. Those who are rotten ought to suffer—not merely from a guilty conscience, which they show little sign of having anyway, but from something the world can impose.
Until the mid-eighteenth century, what we now call natural disasters were called natural evils, partly because they fell on the just and the unjust alike. Nowadays accounts of floods and earthquakes emphasize contingency: This person was saved by missing a train, that one by sleeping off a hangover. They also underscore the virtue or the innocence of the victims: This one rushed to save a child, that one was celebrating her honeymoon. You may not believe in the innocence of childhood, but the death of a child will always seem more tragic than others for the thought: Whatever faults she had, they cannot have merited a life cut so short.
Nature may be blind to the moral judgments Abraham demanded that God respect, but distinguishing between guilt and innocence is the least we expect from reasonable beings. Some earlier assassins expected it of themselves, canceling plots that would have killed bystanders. Contemporary terrorists reject the division between the guilty and the innocent, the implicated and the helpless. By defying those distinctions, terrorists reproduce the worst of nature’s rages. They create a world in which accident reigns, and fear is the rule.
We know from our own lives how seldom happiness and virtue are in tune. (The fact that some of us know it better than others is just an instance of the problem.) Tragedies aside, some decent people lead happy lives and many do not; some wicked people suffer and many do not. But the assumption that happiness and virtue should be systematically balanced is implied in every moral critique. When we act righteously, we do so in order to bring the world closer to an ideal we will never know. Both our indignation when the wicked flourish and our sorrow when the righteous suffer have their source in this assumption.
Crucially, our ignorance is not bliss. We must act on an assumption we can never know to be true. For that we should be grateful; only Disney could construct a world in which evil is always punished and good is always rewarded. Would you really want to live in it? Even if you have no objection to kitsch, just consider: A world that worked as reason assumes it ought to would be a world of marionettes. In such a world, would morality be possible? Could you decide to act for the sake of justice if you were certain you’d be rewarded? You’d likely behave better, but would it be for goodness’ sake? Refraining from doing wrong solely to avoid punishment is the virtue of a slave.
This is, of course, the conception of fundamentalist theology, which threatens eternal hellfire for anyone who defies its commandments. Those of us who no longer raise our children with sticks often have resource to carrots: If you clean up your room, you can go to the playground. What we seek, however, is to gradually educate children who distinguish right and wrong themselves, whether or not we are there to offer treats or sanctions. A world in which right was always rewarded, and wrong always punished, could never be a world of free adults.
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Excerpted from Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era by Susan Neiman. Copyright © 2026 by Susan Neiman. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
