h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It seems to me that there are 2 different kinds of evil that you are talking about. Capital E Evil - evil at the cosmic level which is what is meant ussually when people talk about the "nature of evil". The other kind of evil (which you refer to at the end of your article) is Little e evil - actions which are deemed evil or unappropriate.
I agree that in this day and age where morality is deemed subjective, that there is a tendency for people to trivialize Evil into evil (if you get my drift). I wonder if there is space for Evil in our cosmic view of our world. Perhaps the thing is that we have lost our view of the cosmic altogether - there is no space for concepts which refer to forces greater than man himself. Maybe when the light of our myths went out, we lost the shadow that they used to shed.

Belvill

Has it ever occurred to us that if we took humanity out of the equation the question of Evil, evil; Good, good; Ying-Yang, ying-yang would not arise at all? Reality as we do not really know it would still go on existing as before? Nature and the universe has its own rule of law and, whether we like to admit it or not, we are no more important in this scheme of things than the dinosaurs or the coelacanths were. Nature gave each of them the necessary equipment by which they would have to grasp reality in order for the species to survive. Humans were given a more complex equipment. A part of this more complex equipment is our ethical mode. We seem to apprehend reality through a filter of Good and Evil. We have an inkling that such an ethical filter exists in us (conscience), but we are not exactly sure about what is Good and Evil. Hence we get all the little letters of "good" and "evil".

This is what Kant's categorical imperative is all about. This ethical category is necessary for us to grasp reality - from our point of view - in an ethical manner. This is necessary for us, otherwise we end up killing each other. This category exercises judgment. Hence to call something evil you already know what is good (from your point of view). It is therefore not possible to talk about Evil until you already know what is Good. Ethics therefore is a necessary category of reality. We need it to grasp reality as Good and Evil. That's when we use captial letters. We use the small letters when we assess someone's own particular expression of "evil", or "good". So, Evil vs. evil does not occur. There are no two types of evil.

Evil itself is purely subjective due to the circumstances around which the viewer of evil has been shaped. This shaping is directly related to many factors including but not limited to, their culture which may call for the death of red-haired babies. How are we to truly know that red haired babies will not rise up one day and enslave us all in the belgium acid mines. No one truly knows the definition of evil though everybody believes that they do. So that until our lazy creator gets off of his cloud and stops watching Jon & Kate + 8 we will debate this topic until the begining of the next universe.Truly intelligent people soon realize the folly of wasting precious gray matter on the study of evil. That's what the Ivory Tower was created for in the first place by Reginald Ivory an aloof and paranoid english Count. Reginald Jules Ivory 1254-1309