 Kant appropriates this idea in a modern context, arguing that we are all originally afflicted by a propensity to moral evil (Hang zum Bösen), even apart from any specific actions that we perform. This “radical evil”—the metaphysical evil at the root of our nature (“radix” = Latin for “root”)—is something for which not Adam but we as individual agents (or perhaps the species itself) are somehow responsible. And this is reflected even in garden-variety peccadillos: any act that subordinates commitment to the moral law to something else is an expression of radical evil. This makes it clear that people who use “radical evil” to refer to something particularly horrendous or awful (Arendt 1951, Bernstein 2002) are departing from the Kantian concept (see  Section 7  below). That said, whether it is intelligible to say that we are culpable for a status that is not temporal is a notoriously open question in Kant-interpretation (see Card 2010, Wood 2010, and other essays in Anderson-Gold &amp; Muchnik 2010).