Tag: good and evil

Announcing: The Rhetoric of Evil

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5–8 minutes

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.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast summarising the Rhetoric of Evil essay, not this page’s content.

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.

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Written by Bry Willis and MEAW GPT

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Problem of Evil

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I’m not religious, so that might be why I don’t understand the so-called ‘problem of evil’. To me, it’s a sophomoric question: If God exists—and is all-good, all-loving, and created everything—, then explain how evil came to be and why it seems to be so prevalent. There’s no reason to accept Occam’s Razor, but this might be a good time to adopt it. A narrative of God is created, and then—as with retrograde planetary motion to justify a geocentric ‘solar’ system—one needs to create odd sub-narratives to fill holes in the main storyline.

The problem of evil is that it doesn’t exist. Evil doesn’t exist. Denotatively, it can be defined as very bad. Connotatively, a moral element is manifest in the term, but the word is unnecessary judgmental hyperbole.

Etymologically, the word evil derives from the 

Old English yfel (Kentish evel) "bad, vicious, ill, wicked," from 
Proto- Germanic *ubilaz (source also of Old Saxon ubil, Old Frisian 
and Middle Dutch evel, Dutch euvel, Old High German ubil, 
German übel, Gothic ubils), from PIE *upelo-, from root *wap- "bad, evil"
 (source also of Hittite huwapp- "evil").

In Old English and other older Germanic languages other than
Scandinavian, "this word is the most comprehensive adjectival
expression of disapproval, dislike or disparagement" [OED]. 
Evil was the word the Anglo-Saxons used where we would use bad, cruel, 
unskillful, defective (adj.), or harm (n.), crime, misfortune, disease (n.). 
In Middle English, bad took the wider range of senses 
and evil began to focus on moral badness. 
Both words have good as their opposite. 
Evil-favored (1520s) meant "ugly." Evilchild is attested as an 
English surname from 13c.

The adverb is Old English yfele, originally of words or speech. 
Also as a noun in Old English, "what is bad; sin, wickedness; 
anything that causes injury, morally or physically." Especially of 
a malady or disease from c. 1200. The meaning "extreme moral
wickedness" was one of the senses of the Old English noun, but it did
not become established as the main sense of the modern word until
 18c. As a noun, Middle English also had evilty.

Adolf Hitler is evil. Pol Pot is evil. Charles Manson is Evil. This employment of evil intends to communicate that these are bad (versus good) people. The intent is that these people are possessed by evil—as in an evil metaphysical spirit controlling these people. They were born with an evil soul. That’s how the term is typically employed, but this is a kin to a 4-year-old. Having yet to adopt the term, a child might, upon reflection, assert that these so-called evil people as very, very, very, very (…) bad.

One could argue that the term is shorthand for the 4-year-old’s version, but this missing the connotative subtext.

Nietzsche gave an interesting account of the origins of the term in Beyond Good and Evil. I recommend reading it along with the Genealogy of Morals. I don’t have more to add, but somehow got on this tangent after reading Nagel’s defence of religion.

A Philosopher Defends Religion

What Still Remains

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I haven’t done any film reviews, and I’m not about to start now. I’ve just watched What Still Remains on Netflix.

People become their own kind of monster.

What Still Remains Film Trailer

This is decent post-apocalyptic fare, some catalyst, societies, competing factions, good versus evil, at least in the eyes of the devout. But that’s not what I am going to be writing about.

What still remains contains good writing and strong character development. It does over-employ tropes, but this seems to be the norm these days: modular writing; rearranging the Lego pieces to make something that appears fresh. So what do I have to say?

Spoiler Alert: Proceed with caution…

This is a perfect depiction of the problems with property rights and social contract theory. There are apparently 3 factions—4 if you count independents.

Anna

Initially, there were the Changed, never seen on screen and perhaps not even contemporaneous to the current period, though they may reside in the unseen cities. Anna, the protagonist, and her family are among the independent. Peter, a preacher from the ordained, holier than thou faction. In the realm of ‘if you’re not with me (and our God), you’re against me, thence evil’, they are the arbiters of all that is good. And then there are the Berserkers, as named by the Ordained. To the Ordained, Berserkers aspire to be Changed, but the Berserkers view themselves more along the line of Spartans: Pain is good.

Peter

All scenes are shot in the wilderness, but the various factions have staked property claims with wide perimeters. The penalty for trespass appears to usually involve death of the offending party—or at least a hefty fee. This is Hobbes’ ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ life outside of society quip, though he didn’t exactly account for a class of societies despite this being common in his day.

Berserker

So, these factions don’t actually have property rights; what they have is a notion of property, and they defend it with violence, as is a necessary condition for all property. In so-called modern societies, the violence is obfuscated much in the same manner that supermarkets obscure the carnage behind the meat. It’s still there; it’s just at arm’s length. Violate one of these ‘rights’, and you’ll see the violence inherent in the system.

And then there’s social contract theory—or the gaping flaw in the logic. Anna is an independent, but one can only be as independent as the ability to defend their independence. It’s sort of like contract law. If you can afford to defend a contract, you are entitled to having it enforced.

Redact intellectual property rant.

Anna doesn’t particularly want to belong to either faction, who have divided their world into two pieces in the same manner that, say, Britain and Scotland might have. If you happen to be born there through some loin lottery, you pretty much have to choose a side. Given Sartre’s no excuses policy, you can choose neither; it just won’t bode well for you. You’ve got no real choice.

Social Choice Theory

In Anna’s eyes, upon the death of her mother and brother, she is persuaded with reluctance to return with Peter to his community, a God-fearing bunch. Her mum had indoctrinated her into this cult of God through bible readings, so she was primed for the eventuality. Some independent interlopers attempted to block their return journey by claiming trespass, so Peter summarily offed them rather than paying their ransom—a fee Anna has been willing to tender.

When the two finally reached the sanctuary, Anna quickly realised that she had no say in the matter: she was either a (good) member or (an evil) dead. To reiterate, this is an underlying problem with social contract theory. There is no exit clause.

Side Bar: Some have argued that the cost of coerced—though they’d never use this term—participation and compliance is owed to the greater good. There is no reason given why this is preferred or across which dimensions better is being assessed—or good for that matter—, so don’t ask. Long live Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill with a hat tip to David Hume.

“The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said “This is mine,” and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society.

From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau each approached social contracts from their own perspectives, but it may be interesting to note that each was a privileged white male of his day. Sure, Hobbes was a monarchist, and Rousseau was the Thoreau of his day, a nostalgist, but he like the others were beneficiaries of the status quo, save perhaps at the margins.

Anna thought she had sovereignty over her choices. In the end, the plot line prevailed, but then again, this was just a movie, so even her choices were scripted.

Calvin & Hobbes