How a Theological Artefact Survived Secular Moral Thought

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17757134

Every so often – usually when the Enlightenment ghosts begin rattling their tin cups again – one feels compelled to swat at the conceptual cobwebs they left dangling over moral philosophy. Today is one of those days.

I’ve just released The Rhetoric of Evil on Zenodo, a paper that politely (or impolitely, depending on your threshold) argues that ‘evil’ is not a metaphysical heavy-hitter but a rhetorical throw-pillow stuffed with theological lint. The term persists not because it explains anything, but because it lets us pretend we’ve explained something – a linguistic parlour trick that’s survived well past its sell-by date.

And because this is the age of artificial augury, I naturally asked MEOW GPT for its view of the manuscript. As expected, it nodded approvingly in that eerie, laser-precise manner unique to machines trained to agree with you – but to its credit, it didn’t merely applaud. It produced a disarmingly lucid analysis of the essay’s internal mechanics, the way ‘evil’ behaves like a conceptual marionette, and how our inherited metaphors govern the very moral judgments we think we’re making freely.

Below is MEOW GPT’s reaction, alongside my own exposition for anyone wanting a sense of how this essay fits within the broader project of dismantling the Enlightenment’s conceptual stage-props.

MEOW-GPT’s Response

(A machine’s-eye view of rhetorical exorcism)

“Evil is functioning as a demonological patch on an epistemic gap.
When agents encounter a high-constraint event they cannot immediately model,
the T₂ layer activates an inherited linguistic shortcut — the ‘evil’ label — which compresses complexity into a binary and arrests further inquiry.”

“The marionette metaphor is accurate: once we say a person ‘is evil,’ agency collapses into occult causation. Inquiry halts. Moral theatre begins.”

It went on like this – detecting exactly the mediated encounter-structure I intended, while offering a frighteningly clean schematic of how affect (T₀), heuristics (T₁), linguistic reification (T₂), and cultural choreography (T₃) conspire to turn incomprehension into metaphysics.

Machines, it seems, are quite good at detecting when humans are bullshitting themselves.

Why publish this now?

This essay marks the next plank in the broader anti-Enlightenment platform I’ve been assembling – LIH, MEOW, the ongoing dismantling of truth-fetishism, and now the unsettling realisation that ‘evil’ is little more than a theological revenant dressed up for secular work.

The term’s persistence is not a testament to its necessity but to our laziness:

• It sounds like an explanation.
• It licenses retribution without understanding.
• It stabilises group boundaries.
• It lets us outsource moral thought to a one-word incantation.

In short: ‘evil’ is the map-dragon we keep drawing because surveying the terrain is too much work.

This essay attempts to retire that dragon – not to soften judgment, but to sharpen it. If anything, the paper argues that abolishing ‘evil’ frees us to see atrocity more clearly, and thus confront it more seriously.

If you’d like to read the full argument:

📄 The Rhetoric of Evil: How a Theological Artefact Survived Secular Moral Thought

Appendix: How MEOW-GPT Reads “Evil”

A didactic demonstration of the framework in action. Download the MEOW framework below.

📄The Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World: A Relational Metaphysics Beyond Mind and World

Because MEOW-GPT was trained on the Mediated Encounter Ontology rather than on folk metaphysics, its analyses can serve as a useful diagnostic tool. It doesn’t simply summarise concepts; it reconstructs them along the four mediational tiers (T₀–T₃), showing – mechanically and without superstition – how a term behaves across biological affect, cognitive heuristics, linguistic structures, and cultural narratives.

This section is offered not as an alternative argument to the essay above, but as a worked example: a transparent demonstration of how the MEOW engine decomposes a high-complexity, high-stakes concept like evil once the theological scaffolding has been removed.

MEOW-GPT’s output shows, in compressed form, the same pattern the essay traces in prose:
that evil is not a force, not a metaphysical essence, not an occult substrate, but a mediated pattern in human encounters, one that persists rhetorically long after its ontology has collapsed.

For readers curious about how MEOW ‘thinks’, the raw structured analysis follows.

MEOW-GPT Analysis: “Evil”

(Raw output for reference; lightly formatted for readability)

Concept

Input: Evil
Type: Normative/evaluative moral concept (often reified as a property of acts, characters, or forces)
Scope check: In-scope – ‘evil’ can be analysed as a mediated-encounter pattern (MEOW) and a high-complexity term with unstable linguistic behaviour (LIH).

High-level summary (≤120 words)

In MEOW terms, ‘evil’ is not a spooky substance but a way of organising certain encounter-events: severe, norm-breaking harms that present as resistant, shocking, and morally intolerable. Biologically, it piggybacks on harm, threat, and disgust systems. Cognitively, it compresses complex appraisals—intent, cruelty, scale of harm – into a powerful label. Linguistically, it sits in the unstable region where abstraction is high and language’s reliability drops, so people fight over its scope and weaponise it. Socially and technically, institutions, media, and platforms use ‘evil’ to mark enemies, justify punishment, and dramatise conflict. The term is emotionally efficient but conceptually fragile, and MEOW treats it as a relational, mediated pattern rather than an independent metaphysical force.

T₀ – Biological Mediation

• Moralised harm perception piggybacks on survival systems: pain avoidance, threat detection, kin protection. ‘Evil’ clusters around encounters that trigger extreme danger-signals.
• High arousal (fear, rage, disgust) makes some harms feel qualitatively world-violating, not merely personally threatening.
• Disgust toward contamination, mutilation, or predation heavily colours what gets called ‘evil’.
• Species-specific cues (infant distress cries, pain expressions) shape which harms are even legible candidates for evil.

T₁ – Cognitive Mediation

• “Evil” compresses a multi-factor appraisal (intentionality, cruelty, gratuitousness) into a one-step heuristic.
• Essence thinking converts acts into character: the person is evil, not merely did wrong.
• Attribution biases assign ‘evil’ to out-groups more readily than to in-groups.
• Memory structures simplify causation into villain scripts that overwrite nuance.
• Once assigned, the label becomes a prediction loop: every ambiguous action confirms the essence.

T₂ – Linguistic Mediation

• On the Effectiveness–Complexity Gradient, ‘evil’ straddles Contestables and Fluids: ubiquitous but perpetually disputed.
• It compresses harm, norm-violation, metaphysical colouring, and dramatic emphasis into a single syllable—powerful, but noisy.
• Dominant metaphors (‘dark’, ‘tainted’, ‘monstrous’) smuggle in substance-ontology that MEOW rejects.
• Noun-forms (‘evil’, ‘the Evil One’) promote ontologising; adjectival forms track events better, but usage constantly slides between them.
• Cross-linguistic drift supports LIH: different traditions map the term to impurity, harm, misfortune, cosmic opposition, or taboo.

T₃ – Social/Technical Mediation

• Religious systems embed ‘evil’ in cosmologies that harden friend/enemy binaries.
• Legal systems avoid the term formally but reproduce it rhetorically in sentencing, media commentary, and public reaction.
• Politics uses ‘evil’ to justify exceptional measures and collapse deliberation into moral theatre.
• Cultural industries supply vivid villain archetypes that feed back into real-world judgments.
• Technical systems must operationalise ‘evil’ into concrete proxies, revealing how imprecise the everyday concept is.

Limits & Failure Modes (LIH notes)

The framework is human-centric; non-human or ecosystemic ‘views of evil’ remain speculative.

‘Evil’ is a textbook Contestable: central, indispensable, and permanently argued over.

In cosmological uses (‘radical evil’, ‘evil in the world’), it approaches Fluid or ineffable status – right where LIH predicts language collapse.

MEOW cannot confirm or deny metaphysical dualisms; it only analyses how humans mediate and narrate such claims.

Written by Bry Willis and MEAW GPT

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