Bad vs Evil

I was thinking the other day about the way that we speak and how it shapes our minds which in turn shapes our societies and the course of human history.

Going into these kinds of rabbit holes of thoughts sometimes brings out some insightful knowledge which ends up being a lot more philosophical in nature than when I first started.

Bad and evil, what’s the difference between the two one may ask. The short answer is that bad can be justified for a good reason while evil cannot, let me explain.

Imagine yourself in a scenario where your three small children are starving at home in the winter and your spouse is sick in bed unable to help. You’ve exhausted all your options and the only thing you can do now is steal or rob to feed your kids. You’re most likely doing it, I know I am if it’s for my people, and that’s my point. Stealing or robbing someone are both “bad” and morally unjust, but we’ll justify them if the good outcome for us is high enough and most of society would to a degree agree with this sentiment.

However take a darker scenario now, sexual assault or genocide, people can and do try to, but there is really no way to rationalize a good reason for these evil actions. Guards at concentration camps in Nazi Germany said after the fact that “they were just following orders,” but everyone understand that it doesn’t justify the evil acts they did when they did them.

Evil goes past bad and it makes things enter the realm of the sacred where we deal with matters of life, birth, sexuality, individuality, among others, things that make us human. While something bad hurts us and those around us, ultimately we hope for a positive curve following up a bad act. However, something evil steps out of that framework completely by attempting to remove humanity from a person.

I’m being “bad” or mean if I refuse to offer the seat to an old lady on the subway, by doing that I would be minimizing her importance/value in relation. But I wouldn’t be completely violating it, maybe I just finished a 48-hour shift and I’m exhausted myself, maybe I didn’t notice her struggling to stay standing, you get my point.

I’m being “evil,” however, if I decide to let’s say, exterminate an entire ethnic group from existence on the planet or treat another as sub-human. Even if I do very much love my own people and would be doing it for their benefit and prosperity. How much I love my people doesn’t make the evil act of erasing the humanity of others worth it in the public consciousness and I’m certain in the perpetrator’s own hearts as well.

This opens up a new area to explore within human society as we know that we’re well capable of evil. Take the scenario of having to extinguish an entire group because they’re carrying a deadly virus that would otherwise eliminate all of humanity. This is an extreme scenario of course to stretch the limits of this idea of bad compared to evil. Assuming all other ways to fix the issues were explored and didn’t lead to anything, the only options left to us would be genocide or a slow death.

In this scenario, however, it’s uncertain whether the genocide would be bad or evil, as it would lead to the preservation of the rest of humanity’s lives which most of us can agree is priceless. Does believing humanity’s continuation is priceless become evil under this scenario? What about if instead of a genocide it’s just a containment or concentration camp? See what I’m doing here? It’s almost scary how fast this “evil” idea can start to become a “bad” idea just like I’m sure it happened with those German guards during World War II.

That indicates that “accidental evil” is a real thing. I’m sure that’s what those guards and colonial masters through history would describe their actions as. Thinking they did something bad for their personal good causes while in reality, what they did was quite evil.

This brings us all the way back to what is the only real safeguard against accidental evil. The way that we speak and classify things, actions, and ideas with our words is what makes the difference in our minds between seeing a bad or an evil choice to dealing with a problem, or not even having a problem in the first place.

Ultimately my answers may be different from yours, having the conversations is what I’m more interested in at the moment.