ABSTRACT
Hatred does not strike us as a particularly ethical attitude. Though it seems righteous and praiseworthy to stand firmly against moral wrongs, “hating evil” takes the idea of moral sternness over the top. Moral condemnation of wrong is very different from hatred of evil. Though Plutarch largely draws on Aristotle in his treatise, Aristotle’s own discussion of hate in the Rhetoric is much more specific about the role of hate among the “inimical” attitudes than Plutarch’s. Ethical hate, Gandhi and Augustine argue, cannot be of the agent-targeted sort. We may be angry at people for what they do because what they do is wrong and should thus not be, that is, because what they do is hateworthy, but they themselves are never hateworthy. The missing conception of ethical hatred is a reason to be skeptical of evil-revivalism. The critique of the discourse of evil marks a progress in our moral outlook whose importance is difficult to overestimate.
