You make a lot of excellent points but I think you might have misinterpreted my comment, because it doesn&#x27;t seem like we disagree. You mention that evil cannot be defined in precise terms, and that&#x27;s exactly what I&#x27;m talking about. It&#x27;s not a property of things in reality that can be measured, it&#x27;s a judgement about things made by people. The judgment may be very rational, but it can&#x27;t be based wholly on objective reality. For that to be the case, it&#x27;d have to be based on a physical law or property rather than a moral principle, and I just don&#x27;t see how that&#x27;s possible. Your argument for why Hitler was evil is really solid, not because it&#x27;s based in objective reality but because it&#x27;s based the principle that the continued existence of the human race is a good thing. I&#x27;d say that&#x27;s a solid enough principle that it may as well be objective reality. But technically speaking, it&#x27;s still a subjective judgement that we&#x27;re making about how things should be, rather than an objective observation of how they are.<p>This is a really pedantic, subtle and (I think) important distinction. If one sees good and evil as objective truth, they&#x27;re reliant on the source of that truth for their moral judgement. This explains the jihadists you mention. It&#x27;s not that they enjoy being murdering maniacs (although I&#x27;m sure some do), it&#x27;s that their source of moral truth tells them that the infidels are evil and must be destroyed (or whatever), so they see what they&#x27;re doing as a good thing.