Considering that our life and world - and much of our social interaction - is underpinned and permeated with moral evaluations; we have a terrible problem about discussing the nature and presence of evil!
The difficulty about discussing evil is so lasting and intractable that there are plenty of people, including plenty of rich, powerful, famous and influential people - who will deny the reality of evil, in many and various ways!
But even those insightful and honest enough to admit that they regard evil as real, have a terrible problem with explaining themselves - at least, they seldom succeed in explaining the nature and presence of evil.
There are multiple reasons, many psychological and some spiritual, for the difficulty of explaining evil; here I am focusing on two important reasons: perspective and motivation.
Both problems arise because people are trying to find a way of explaining the reality of evil, and they do this by seeking a way of generating an objective consensus about what is evil.
In other words, they try to frame evil such that what-is-evil is defined in a way that "everyone" can agree upon (i.e. consensus) - and they seek criteria for evil that are, in principle, externally detectable and measurable (i.e. objective).
They want evil to be something like a "scientific fact"; as they imagine science actually to be! Or perhaps something more like an engineering principle - something that elicits general agreement among the competent, and that reliably works when properly comprehended and executed. Something pragmatically-true.
People therefore nearly-always try to explain evil in term of evil actions; and evil actions that are acknowledged to be evil by "everybody" - indifferent to the person's "perspective" .
This immediately means that the examples of evil up-for-discussion are going to be second-hand and remote - often historical, and concerning other-people, elsewhere. Things like a particular group killing done on the basis of an ethnic or religious identity. Such are what people usually try to understand and explain.
But in real life we find that we never actually do eliminate the effect of perspective! This is seen in evaluating current events. We find that from one perspective; perhaps a great and historical evil has been, or is actively being perpetrated, yet from another perspective this is not so.
What appears as an objective and massive evil is denied, explained away, or regarded as compelled. One perspectives great evil is seen by its perpetrators and defenders as merely a lesser and necessary evil, the sort of practical action that is needed to survive in this world.
I conclude that perspective never can, in practice be eliminated. To put it bluntly, evil people will have Good reasons for performing their "evil" acts.
Perspective changes everything! And this is one of the arguments used to argue (what nobody truly believes) that evil is "relative" and therefore not really real.
There are philosophical (or theological) arguments by which an objective model of reality is posited, within-which evil is objective; but these arguments are never universally accepted or believed.
All philosophical arguments require assumptions, and these assumptions are not universal - so that philosophical analysis does not solve the difficulty of explaining evil, but merely leads to the difficulty being shifted to another arena.
The other difficulty is that while evil is explained in terms of acts, or events, or phenomena - of a kind that can be defined, isolated and measured.
For instance murder is first assumed necessarily to be evil; then the discussion moves onto a definition of murder, the detections of particular murders, the number of people murdered...
Yet the whole process is undercut by the fact that "murder" is an abstraction intended to cover a wide range of very specific events; and when it gets down to specifics we find that - in order to accord with innate and general morality - the action itself needs to be evaluated in terms of its motivation.
In other words the objective aspect of murder turns-out to be underpinned by personal motivation which must be inferred.
In short, when it comes to explaining evil; we cannot escape the importance of perceptive and motivation; and both of these are substantially subjective, inner-states.
This is one reason why so many modern people in leadership roles try to assert that evil is unreal: i.e. because they do not wish to acknowledge the primacy of subjective, inner states; when it comes to the most important aspects of life.
Or else they claim to be able objectively to infer inner and subjective states, using objective criteria...
Given the primacy of morality in so much of life; and that authority will therefore always justify itself in moral terms (even if that morality is an inversion of common sense or intuition) - one can see the necessity of somehow excluding the necessity of perspective and motivation in explaining evil.
The outcome of which is that evil is not - cannot be - satisfactorily explained - which is where we came-in!
Since morality is inescapable and permeates our world; it seems obviously important that the nature of evil, and its presence and degrees, be explainable, and that these explanations be understandable.
The current state of incoherent confusion about evil is surely - and for reasons that I would suppose are obvious - an undesirable state of affairs.
Therefore, I suggest that when we ourselves find it necessary to discuss or explain evil in this world; we start with an acknowledgment that, for such discussion to proceed with any chance of being useful; it requires achieving mutual clarity about perspective and motivation.
Presumably (if the discussion is honest and sincere) - an up-front and two-sided declaration of where we personally stand on these matters.
In most instances; these will be found to differ - in which case there is no point in proceeding in the direction of arguing about whether such and such is evil. Instead, the discussion ought to go deeper, to consider the whys-and-hows of our assumed-perspective, and our assumptions concerning inferred motivations.
