ABSTRACT
Kant’s account of radical evil differs significantly from this conception. As shown below, his concept of radical evil in fact reflects what other philosophers have termed the banality of evil and nevertheless refers to a non-ordinary phenomenon.1 Radically evil actions could be as ordinary and insignificant in their consequences as deceiving a customer, telling a lie, or stealing a piece of candy from a grocery store. Yet, according to Kant, the moral worth of an action, including radically evil actions, does not lie in what results from it but in the reasons that motivated the action in question. The radicality of radical evil primarily concerns the grounds that led to the evil action. It is motivated by the person’s freedom to choose between the demands of moral action and the desires related to self-love. In contrast to an evil action that issues from the person’s weakness of the will, a radically evil action is motivated, according to Kant, by the person’s free choice to satisfy desires related to self-love, and not to act according to the demands of the impersonal moral law. These complex relations between freedom, the impersonal moral law, and the person’s self-love that constitute Kant’s moral psychology clarify why his theory of radical evil holds such a unique place in the
history of ideas, and why it should draw the interest of anyone interested in this phenomenon.
