 Pressed with such questions, many people (philosophers included) revert to the more tractable terms. Of course what we are really talking about (whispering about, thundering about, shaking our heads about) in those moments of condemnation and lament is an extreme instance of suffering or disutility. Of course “evil” is to “bad” what “wicked” is to “immoral”: a conceptual vestige of a pre-scientific, credulous past that we invoke for the sake of solemnity, empathy, or emphasis. A concept that—outside of horror films and fiction—is best analyzed in terms of nature’s frustration of the basic needs of sentient creatures, or as the effects of illness and ill-parenting. Yes, evil happenings have an excessive, egregious quality that makes them notable, even transfixing. But they are not, in the end, sui generis or metaphysically mysterious: neuroscience, medicine, psychology, and law have domesticated evil. Taken to its logical extreme, the doctrine that characterizes this camp would be that all evil is “natural” (a product of various causal processes in nature).