VIOLENCE

Is the question of evil the same as the question of violence? It might seem so, since all violence is evil – even justified violence is the justification of a lesser evil. But is all evil violence? For the theory of radical evil, the answer might be no: evil does not remove or destroy; instead it sets up its own dark kingdom. But we have seen the incoherence of this view. For the theory of evil as privative, by contrast, evil always removes and destroys. The depriving of good is perforce also a disturbing of the peace. Inversely, if peace is a harmonious plenitude, when it is disturbed there is always an instance of noisy distortion, which impairs just distribution.