If Morality Is Conditional, So Is Evil
One of the quiet consequences of rejecting objective morality is that we must also reject objective evil—or rather, we must demystify it. Evil does not vanish; it sheds its illusions. The crude metaphysical specter dissolves, and what remains is a clarified understanding: evil as intentional harm within a chosen framework of values.
1. Evil Under Objective Morality
In the classical frameworks of moral realism, evil was metaphysically real. Aquinas held that evil was a privation of the good, a deficiency in being itself. Kant defined evil as maxims that contradict the universal law of reason. In both cases, evil was more than a word: it was a feature of reality, as inescapable as gravity or entropy. Murder, for example, was evil everywhere, always, and without qualification.
But this only works if one accepts an anchor external to human judgment—God, Platonic forms, or some rational structure that transcends perspective. Remove the anchor, and the concept floats free, unmoored and weightless.
2. Evil as Inter-Subjective Enforcement
The next step down is inter-subjective morality: morality as coordination. Here evil is not metaphysical but social, a collective label applied to behaviors that threaten the group’s survival, cohesion, or flourishing. Treason was evil in a tribe, witchcraft was evil in medieval Europe, communism was evil in mid-20th-century America, fascism in the early 21st.
This kind of evil is not eternal but contingent, shifting with norms and power. It is a tool of enforcement, not an objective truth. Its strength lies in consensus, not in metaphysics. To call something evil here is to marshal the tribe against it.
3. Evil Without Objectivity: A Conditional Definition
Once objectivity is abandoned entirely, what remains is the purely conditional. Within my own framework—Conditionalism—evil is defined as intentional harm caused by an agent. More precisely: evil is the deliberate reduction of agency, the purposeful destruction of another’s capacity to choose, flourish, or project into the future.
This is not the death of evil, but its demystification. Torture, coercion, enslavement: all are evil under this definition, not because the cosmos has decreed it so, but because within the framework of agency they represent the highest forms of intentional diminishment. The word still bites, but its teeth are sharpened by precision rather than superstition.
What We Lose, What We Gain
We lose the aura of cosmic decree. Evil is no longer a metaphysical demon hovering over history. We cannot simply invoke it as an unquestionable trump card.
But we gain intellectual honesty. We gain clarity. We gain the ability to define evil in terms that are operational, testable, and applicable without appeal to hidden gods. We can still call Hitler evil—not because of some eternal decree—but because his actions represent the deliberate annihilation of human agency on a mass scale. The conditional definition is enough.
Conclusion: The Demystification of Evil
Rejecting objective morality does not kill evil. It clarifies it. Evil remains as a sharpened, conditional tool: If agency is our value, then intentional harm to agency is evil.
What dies is the superstition; what emerges is the clarity of precision.