It’s gratifying to see so many thoughtful comments on the nature of evil. Let me pull together a selection of some of the most potent ideas, as a way of looking back—and also as a way of keeping the conversation going. The class might be over, but the blog discussion lives on!
At the top, I think that a useful working definition of moral evil has arisen from these deliberations. Moral evil occurs when
a) a massive level of harm is done (mass death), and/or harm is particularly brutal (torture, abuse, etc.)
b) the perpetrators have intent to create this harm
c) and the victims are not themselves particularly culpable, or, worse, they are vulnerable/innocent.
Other scattered insights:
We have recognized something central in the discussion of “natural evil,” whether one comes at it as a theist or not: in our day and age, it’s extremely difficult to separate “natural evil” from “moral evil,” because a) we have a massive impact on our environment and b) a lot of the suffering associated with natural disasters is the product of human (in)activity (cf. building unsound structures in Lisbon, not responding to Katrina). And from the other side, what used to be considered purely "moral" has become "natural": brain defects, chemical imbalances, etc. lead to horrible acts.
There has been a fascinating discussion of the classic “free will defense” of God in light of the presence of suffering in the world. Giving the world’s (and our) imperfections, it is legitimate to distinguish, as Leibniz seems to, God’s role in getting things started (setting the rules) and his will to bring things to completion (ultimate, providential harmony?)—which will surely happen, eventually? In the meantime, everything is in process, on its way. The whole schmear is “perfect,” maybe…but while it’s unfolding, from our limited perspective, it sure doesn’t seem so! And, as many have noted, this kind of thinking seems to deny the very real harms we call “evil” by explaining them away…
In the end, the discussion of children—the abuse and punishment inflicted on them—became an important issue. It’s entirely relevant because as a number of folks have argued, while “evil” remains a diffuse, problematic term, it seems like a no-brainer to apply it to cruelty inflicted on children (like in Dostoevsky). Maybe this is an example of thinking about evil as a kind of protest against a world where things often just don’t seem right—and as exercise (a hardcore workout) for our moral capacity. There’s a big difference between a little boy torn apart by dogs and a child who receives a slap from his parent—but thinking about the extreme case maybe makes us a bit more morally sensitive to “lesser evils,” and it makes us wonder about devising more constructive responses to unruly children (or just unruly people in general) that aren’t _any_ kind of evil at all.
