ABSTRACT
Evil is a subject that even the strongest-minded philosophers are apt to find depressing. To reflect on evil is to consider the myriad ways in which lives – animal, as well as human – can be destroyed or damaged or prevented from reaching their full potential. Evils large/small, lasting/transient, are part of the common experience of all sentient creatures. This chapter describes how one should ask whether the concept of evil possesses any genuine explanatory force. What, if anything, would an appeal to evil be able to explain, and how would it explain it? The chapter shows that the idea of evil is explanatory have a somewhat Procrustean effect through tending to rely on a single model of what evil is. For instance, Eve Garrard's proposal that the idea of evil has explanatory power once we interpret it in terms of a dangerous cognitive deficiency in agents, a blindness that prevents their grasping the reasons against performing harmful acts.
