E.G.

There are many different views about what the basic stuff of material reality is. Some have said, for instance, that everything either is an atom or is made out of atoms; others have said that, in addition to atoms, there are forces as well; some have said that there are atoms, forces, and laws, and so on.

Similarly there are many views about what the basic stuff of moral reality is. Here are some of the categories that get mentioned: obligations, oughts, value, goodness, badness, rightness, wrongness, justice, reasons, principles, virtue, vice.

Some people think that some of these sorts of things are fundamental. For example, some say that value is the basic stuff out of which everything moral is made. Some say that reasons are the basic stuff. Some have relatively sparse ontologies and others have more complex ontologies.

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My opinion is that the most important sorts of things in moral reality are: moral reasons, which are given by individuals' interests; and moral obligations, which arise from a complex interplay between interest-given moral reasons, and our relationships with one another. That is what I think moral reality is like: ratiocinative, relational, and emergently deontic.

And I will say that pretty much all of the other moral stuff (or at least all of the important moral stuff) is somehow built up out of that basic material. For example, I'd like to say that there is wrongness: some actions are wrong. And I'd like to say that this property of wrongness is just the property of being obligation-violating.

And that is also what I think our experience of moral reality is like. I think that moral obligations are the most glaringly apparent things on our moral radar screen. When moral reality is really impressive to us, I think, it's impressive via a sense of what must be done, which I think is an awareness of what I would like to call a moral obligation. And I think we gain awareness of such moral obligations through (a) our understanding of the reasons given by others' interests, (b) our understanding of our relationships with others, and (c) our intuitive apprehension of a kind of alchemical interaction that can occur involving such reasons and such relationships.

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Evil is not in the picture I've just sketched. I would say that we can get a serviceable picture of moral reality without ever talking about evil. But it does seem to me that evil exists. I think there are various types of wrongdoing (understood as obligation violation) that we do, and should, call evil.

Philosophers have put forward various definitions of evil. The definitions that I have seen usually seem to me to be on to something. I suspect it's not worthwhile to try to identify a uniquely correct notion of evil. It's better to delineate various forms of evil. But here I don't want to try to produce a full list of types of evil. Instead I'll point to one kind of evil that I think is particularly important (which is not to say that it's more important than other kinds).

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Augustine famously tells a story in his Confessions about a time when he and his friends stole some pears from a neighbor's tree. I believe they may have eaten some of the pears, but they just threw most of them away. They stole the pears just for the heck of it. In my recollection of his telling of the story, Augustine indicates that he feels particularly guilty about doing this, which I gather many readers find a bit puzzling, because stealing those pears wasn't hugely harmful.

There's a kind of wrongdoing that is done just for the heck of it, i.e., for no good reason. What does it mean to do something for no good reason? Here is an idea. As I've said before, I like the view that

a reason to φ is a moral reason to φ =def it is the sort of reason that can, in the right circumstances, give rise to a moral obligation to φ.

Maybe we should say that S φs for no good reason when S has no moral reason to φ. 

If Augustine had stolen those pears because he was hungry and he needed (all of) them to satisfy his hunger, then he'd have had a moral reason to steal them, I'd say. I think that the fact that you need to φ in order to satisfy your hunger can, in the right circumstances, generate a moral obligation (to yourself) to φ. But he didn't need the pears to satisfy his hunger. He didn't need them at all. He stole them for the heck of it; for no good reason; for no moral reason.

I might like to say that, in general,

an action is evil, in a certain way, if (i) it is morally wrong (obligation-violating) and (ii) the agent who performs the action has no moral reason for performing it.

This form of evil, which we might call flagrant evil, will come in degrees. The thing that Augustine did was only a little bit flagrantly evil, because it wasn't very seriously wrong, though it was somewhat wrong. By contrast, I would want to say that what is being done to immigrants and refugees in America today, for example, is flagrantly evil in the extreme, because it is very seriously wrong, and because it is being done for no moral reason.

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I think that this sort of evil, flagrant evil, is worth paying special attention to, in part because it is a form of wrongdoing that people might already be well motivated to avoid.

Susan Wolf memorably argues that most of us don't care very much about being moral saints, and we might even want not to be moral saints. Part of what this means, I think, is that most of us do not mind engaging in some wrongdoing, here and there. But I think we do generally want it to be the case that, when we act wrongly, we don't do it just for the heck of it. We don't want to be the sorts of people who behave like that. And I think this means that if you have a convincing argument for the view that a certain pattern of behavior is flagrantly evil, then you stand a good chance of being able to use that argument to motivate people to avoid that pattern of behavior, even if they don't in general particularly mind engaging in some forms of wrongdoing.