 By contrast, it is not obvious how there can be any credible reason given for doing something that constitutes a denial of reason altogether. That is why radical evil in the repudiative sense threatens to be uniquely unintelligible and troubling. If someone—not a beast or a machine, but a human being—acts in a way that entirely disclaims not just an awareness of moral authority but also the basic rules of moral reason altogether, he effectively places himself in an antelapsarian state, unburdened with the knowledge of good and evil. His act asserts that he has transcended entirely the moral sphere—that what he does cannot be wrong.