 Suppose, for example, we come across the sort of scene that drove Friedrich Nietzsche mad in Turin: a coachman mercilessly beating his horse (Prideaux 2018). In this version of the case, however, suppose that the coachman’s cruelty is a response to his having been recently diagnosed with terminal cancer. So here there is certainly some empirical evil: the cancerous disruption to the body, the cruelty of the man, the pain of the horse. Some philosophers will say that there is also metaphysical evil: neither the man nor the horse is metaphysically perfect, and so on the Absence Theory considered below  (section 3.1.1)  both are in that respect evil. We might also regard the body and character of the man as corrupted and conclude that he is metaphysically evil in a “privative” way too (see  section 3.1.3).  Metaphysical evils like these are distinct from the empirical evils of the cancer, the cruelty, and the suffering of the horse, though on many accounts they are the ground of the latter.