Intent determines whether the person committing the harmful act is guilty or at fault. Acts committed with the intention of doing good or without the desire to harm are not evil, but mere faults.
In the simplest terms, we can define evil as the entirety of human actions and thoughts that cause harm to anything, living or non-living, with malicious intent.
For a harmful act to be defined as “evil,” the sole condition is that the actor’s intent must be evil. If their intent is evil, they are already in the wrong. It is not merely a matter of desiring to cause harm or knowing that harm will ensue. A person approving the death penalty for their loved one’s murderer is not an act of evil, even if they desired harm. The same applies to harm inflicted intentionally upon the opposing side in wars or to protect one’s possessions. Besides, someone who desires to cause harm already knows they will do so. Since intent and justification are relative concepts, to judge whether an act is evil, one must look at the rules of the sphere in which the act takes place. An act committed within a family might be defined as evil by its members, whereas it may be perceived as normal behavior by another family. The same holds true for societies. This depends entirely on the mutually agreed-upon rules of the group in which the act occurs. Intent determines whether the person committing the harmful act is guilty or at fault. Acts committed with the intention of doing good or without the desire to harm are not evil, but mere faults. Harming another under mandatory circumstances does not make a person innocent, because even if they feel compelled, they have no right to do so; and if they have no right, their intent is not good to begin with. Furthermore, they already know they will cause harm, and their conscience and sense of justice are expected to restrain them. The only innocent profile here is the one who causes harm unintentionally or with good intentions.
Even if the intent is good, if a person has no right, the harm they inflict is still an act of evil, because where there is harm, there is a victim. While harm requires restitution, good intent is considered merely an extenuating factor. The act of one with bad intent is deemed a crime, whereas that of one with good intent is accepted as a fault. There are also situations that appear innocent yet are still characterized as evil, such as a young child burning ants in the garden. In any case, such actions are acts of evil. Whether directed against humans or ants does not change the outcome, because an injustice has still occurred. Since the child is capable of picking up and using a flammable substance, they both know and desire that they will harm the ants, and there is premeditation involved. For an act to assume the quality of evil, the possession of mental and moral capacities is required. Evil is evil precisely because of the suffering of the victim. To be branded as evil, the perpetrator must also desire to cause harm. Knowing or not knowing the harm one will cause is an intellectual matter, whereas desiring the harm one will inflict is a moral and human one. One does not need to be a scholar to avoid causing harm; possessing a conscience is enough. The harm caused by very young children or the mentally disabled, who lack mental and moral capacity, cannot be evaluated as evil.
“Evil is not a substance existing on its own; it is the turning away of man’s own will and fleshly desires from God—the highest good—toward lower desires.”
— St. Augustine (Confessions)
To understand real evil, then, we must understand the evil person. What makes a person evil is doing what they do, knowing that something will be harmed because of the actions or thoughts they will carry out for their own self-interest, and adopting this as a habit, a way of life. We say “they will carry out,” rather than “they carried out,” because this is the threshold where the decision is made—whether momentary or long-term. The fact that the evil person executed their act of evil—the crop of their nature—in a suddenly developing situation does not render them innocent. On the contrary, throughout their life, they witnessed hundreds or thousands of proofs that evil is evil, yet the clamor of the pleasure derived from their acquisitions consistently drowned out the voice of their conscience. Thus, that person was evil, and what they did was evil. Otherwise, a long-term evil intention—such as planning to seize the inheritance left behind by a deceased brother from his children while he is still alive—and rushing to avoid sharing an elevator despite seeing a mother with a stroller approaching from behind are the exact same thing. Both are the work of an evil person.
Not every act committed by an evil person is evil. In fact, we cannot call every act of an evil person that results in harm an act of evil either. For us to call them evil, and their act an evil, they must have committed that act with malicious intent. An evil person damaging someone else’s vehicle while parking their own is called an undesirable situation or an accident, not evil—even though it originated from a person defined as evil. The evil lies in their noticing no one is watching, immediately parking their car elsewhere, continuing their life as if nothing happened, and feeling at ease by taking this as a gain and boasting about it. This is what makes them evil—not what they did.
“Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.”
— The Bible (Hebrews 4:13)
Real evil stems only from the evil person. That is why no evil comes from good people, whether they want it to or not. For good people make mistakes, and whether they believe in God or not, as soon as they realize what they did was a mistake, they feel remorse. Once they understand the mistake, they avoid repeating it, and this state inevitably keeps them away from evil. Remorse and evil cannot coexist in the same heart.
A person removes a stone from the path so others won’t trip and fall; yet if someone trips over that stone and gets injured, that person cannot be called evil.
“The action of one whose love and intent are right cannot be wrong. Love, and do what you will. If the root is love (pure intent), only good fruit can come from that root.”
— St. Augustine
Evil is a concept that can be judged solely by intent, not by the action itself. The same goes for goodness. A person removes a stone from the path so others won’t trip and fall; yet if someone trips over that stone and gets injured, that person cannot be called evil. On the contrary, what they did is worthy of praise. They acted with good intent, and from God, from whom nothing can escape, they receive reward, not punishment. But if an evil person sees that a task undertaken with malicious intent yields a good outcome, they cannot hope for a reward, because they acted with evil intent. In both scenarios, fate and divine judgment intervened in the end. In truth, to fully understand evil, it suffices to look at goodness; and to recognize the evil person, it suffices to look at the good. The sole criterion for classifying the evil and evil itself is intent.
“Actions are judged by intentions, and every person will get the reward according to what he has intended…”
— Hadith
“All our exertion, our fasting, our sleeplessness, and our readings must serve a single goal: the Purity of the Heart. If in the works we do we have any aim other than the love of God and a pure intent, all those heavy austerities and devotions are in vain.”
— St. John Cassian
“Intent is a seed, and action is the tree that springs from that seed. Whatever the seed is, such is the fruit.”
— Rumi
For evil to materialize, it is essential that something in existence suffers harm as a result of an action or thought carried out purely with malicious intent. The intent must strictly be evil, and the outcome must be harm. Although some thinkers suggest that if an action or thought does not end with a visible, comprehensible harm, it cannot be termed evil, a person who looks at their neighbor’s 4-year-old daughter or wife with a sexual eye is harmful to that girl and woman, to that family, to the neighborhood, and to society. The fact that the father or the family does not know this, or that the diseased individual has not acted upon their obsessions, does not alter this reality. Everyone expects a trustworthy neighbor and an unthreatening environment, or at least everyone has the right to such a setting. This intent, though unacted upon, harms the need for security that is the right of society and individuals. And even if the situation is not a matter of legal debate because the person did not act, they have still harmed this right of individuals and society. Were this malicious intent of theirs known, individuals and society would immediately ostracize them out of concern that their safety might be compromised.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
— Gospel of Matthew (5:27-28, Sermon on the Mount)
“Before God, intent speaks as loudly as the act itself. The fact that you lacked the opportunity to commit an evil does not remove the guilt of having conceived it in your mind.”
— St. Jerome
“A sudden thought entering the mind is forgiven. But the moment that thought takes root in the heart and turns into will and resolve, even if it is not acted upon, it is now a sin of the heart.”
— Al-Ghazali
Evil can be directed not only against living beings, but also against inanimate objects. A person may pick up a large stone by the riverside and smash a smaller stone with it. This is not evil. The evil lies in doing this with the intention of spoiling a beautiful river landscape for some reason, so that people coming later will see a uglier environment. For it was done with the desire to ruin what is natural and to render ugly what is beautiful. Nor is there any evil in taking that stone and throwing it into the lake. But if it was done with the intention of scaring away the fish of someone fishing a little further from where the stone fell, then evil is present. In the first example, harm was done with an object to an object; in the second, the object was used to commit evil against a human.
There is no such thing as little or much harm. A single drop of water is called water, and so is a full bottle of it. It depends entirely on where you look from. When the subject is evil, looking from the divine perspective of God is the healthiest and most accurate choice. Looking from there, you see only two circles: good and evil. Every intent, thought, and action is inside either the good ring or the evil ring. Furthermore, insisting on the view that “unknown harm is not evil” (the Kantian ethical approach) is nothing more than trying to force an adult foot into a child’s shoe. For the very name of the concept is harm. Mitigating excuses like “infringement, simple lies, unnoticed minor offenses, non-destructive harms” are great harms inflicted upon goodness and the expectations of good people, if nothing else.
“Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much.”
— The Bible (Luke 16:10)
“Beware of sins and harms that are held in small esteem, for they accumulate until they destroy a person.”
— Hadith
