The Nature Of Evil

 We often think of evil as something done by people, intentional, malicious, and unmistakably moral. But evil, as a concept, has deeper roots than morality alone. It can and should be understood as an ontological force, one that exists not just in actions or intentions, but in structures of being that obstruct the realization of the Good.

This is not to suggest that we abandon morality as a lens, but rather that we recognize a broader terrain, one in which evil is not merely what a person chooses, but what prevents something better from coming into being. In this light, cancer is evil not because it chooses to be, but because it destroys a higher-order organism, one that has the capacity for reason, action, and self-determination. Even if it were perfectly "natural," it would still be evil in the sense that it halts the realization of something greater.

This is what I mean when I speak of ontological evil: evil that arises not from malevolent intention, but from a distortion, delay, or destruction of the Good, where "the Good" is not some sentimental category, but the actualization of higher forms of being, especially those that culminate in freedom.

Ontological Evil vs. Moral Evil

While moral evil is always personal, intentional wrongdoing, betrayal, cruelty, ontological evil is impersonal, sometimes even mechanical. A flood is evil when it drowns a town. Not because the water hates the people, but because the flourishing of human life is a higher-order good that ought to prevail over brute physical processes. Cancer is evil not because it has will, but because it erodes the very body that sustains it. Like a parasite that kills its host, ontological evil is self-defeating in the long term, always dependent on the Good it seeks, intentionally or not, to destroy.

This is a key point: Evil is always parasitic. It does not create, it corrupts. It does not originate, it distorts. In this way, evil can be understood not as a positive force in itself, but as the misplacement, mistiming, or misordering of a good. Self-care becomes selfishness when it ignores the higher unity of community. Protection becomes oppression when imposed without knowledge or consent. Even innocence, typically seen as a moral good, can become evil when it obstructs the possibility of moral awareness and freedom.

Nature as Evil, But Only in Comparison to Spirit

From the standpoint of Spirit, reason, self-consciousness, and freedom, Nature is evil only insofar as it resists or halts the development of Spirit. Nature is the domain of finitude: things die, degrade, collapse. Nothing in Nature is truly self-sustaining or self-determining. All is contingent, all is ephemeral. Even atoms decay. The material world is a chain of causes and effects in which no entity is its own ground.

Spirit, by contrast, is self-determining. It is free. It is the realization of Being that is no longer external to itself but fully internal, aware, rational, and able to grasp universality. So when Nature is exalted above Spirit, as in materialist cosmologies that reduce thought to brain chemistry, or social theories that flatten freedom into instinct, it becomes evil. Not because it is unnatural to be natural, but because it is a reversal of the proper order of value: the lower mistaken for the higher.

Nature is good insofar as it is the precondition for Spirit, the scaffold upon which freedom is built. But it becomes evil when it is mistaken as an end in itself.

Animals and the Limits of Innocence

Consider animals: finite consciousnesses whose knowledge is tethered to instinct and particular ends. They are not evil. They act as they must, neither aware of good and evil nor able to question their nature. But now imagine a human being reduced to that level, incapable of abstract reasoning, devoid of social or moral insight, driven only by immediate desires.

We would say such a person has been wronged, even if they were happy. Their potential has been denied. Their capacity to understand and choose the Good has been taken from them. Even benevolently imposed ignorance, say, sheltering a child from moral development, becomes a form of evil when it blocks their path to freedom.

This is where innocence becomes suspect. If evil is the absence or distortion of the Good, and the highest Good is freedom (understood as rational self-determination), then innocence, when it denies knowledge and responsibility, is a kind of evil. The innocent sociopath who harms others for pleasure, yet lacks all comprehension of why this might be wrong, is not morally evil, but they are ontologically evil. Their being, as it stands, blocks the emergence of the ethical world.

Hegel, Nature, and the Human Condition

Hegel offers a powerful lens through which to view this. He notes that man is evil "by nature" not because our essence is corrupt, but because Nature itself is the realm of contingency and particularity. The body tempts us to live in finite ends, pleasure, comfort, power, rather than in universal reason. The Natural is not evil by choice, but it tempts us to choose evil by mistaking instinct for essence.

Our task, then, is not to kill the Natural, but to sublate it, to integrate it into Spirit. Just as the body becomes not an obstacle but an instrument of freedom when rightly ordered, so too must we reclaim Nature from within, not reject it from without.

So What Is Evil?

Evil is not simply doing wrong. It is the absence of a higher good where one ought to be. It is the ignorance that could have been knowledge. The innocence that should have become wisdom. The freedom that was possible, but never realized. It is always a lack, but a lack that has real consequences.

In this sense, evil is both tragic and inevitable. But it is not victorious. Like cancer, it devours the good it depends upon, and in doing so, destroys itself. Its triumph is always temporary, its logic always flawed. For evil is finite, and the Good, freedom, Spirit, God, is infinite.

And so, the path away from evil is not merely moral, but ontological. It is the path of becoming who we are in truth: rational, free, universal beings capable of knowing not just what is, but what ought to be.