ABSTRACT
It is true that radical evil is not heroic, demonic, or tragic. None of the evil protagonists of William Shakespeare’s plays are radical evildoers; they are simply criminals of various kinds. It was Pascal who was the only thinker in the whole tradition who had any inkling of radical evil. The reason that we call the worst evil of the twentieth century “radical evil” is largely due to Hannah Arendt’s fortuitous misreading of Immanuel Kant. Judgments of evil are those that concern the most aggravated cases of wrongdoing one of whose key distinguishing features is that they involve irremediable harm done to other people. On the continuum of evils, radical evil stands at the opposite pole to criminal evil. The criminal or sinner in traditional religious terms is fully aware that what he is doing is evil or at least wrong.
