Revisiting a thing I wrote back in 2012, on the idea of #evil, on #everything2. Gonna repost the entire thing here, as it's not very long:
Evil is a problem, and I don't mean the 'Problem of Evil'. The problem has to do with the fact that the usual modern sense of 'evil' is something more like 'a calculating desire to cause unjustified harm to others', and that explains only a tiny fraction of the unnecessary suffering in the world. When people do each other wrong, it is much more likely to be because they are scared or careless. Sometimes people are vengeful for some perceived slight - convincing yourself that someone deserves vengeance is an easy way to justify doing things to them which would otherwise be wrong. Another way is to convince yourself that someone just doesn't deserve your respect because they aren't good enough, or human enough.
Scared people are not really calculating. Careless people don't want to do wrong. Vengeful people tell themselves their actions are justified. When someone dehumanises their victim, they are not really counting them as others. In their own heads, almost nobody is evil. Hatefulness and disdain for others can fall within the definition I gave earlier, but even that depends on your perspective in any given case. This makes it interesting to me that there are so many fictional antagonists whose perspective we are not really expected to understand. They are evil, so of course the good guys need to fight against them; their ideas about why it would be okay to do what they do are completely opaque to us. The most interesting thing about this is that the 'evil' party here is painted as inherently hateful, barely even human. You may sense a kind of circularity here.
