by Michael Cox

Created on: October 04, 2009   Last Updated: October 06, 2009

The challenge we face in defining evil is that the word is inextricably bound to religious, moral, societal and even legal codes: thus all the excellent definitions on this page are worthy attempts at defining evil, but still lacking. We need to go back in anthropological terms to a pre-literate world in which our forebears, grouped in hunter-gatherer communities or even prior to communal living, were faced with what to do with people who stole or killed other people. There were no laws. There was no religious structure, not formally at least-many pre-literate groups would have had what we might term priests or shamans or even chiefs, who mediated conflicts and meted out decisions based on their own or their communal "standards," which would have varied from one community to another.

As populations grew, communities amalgamated, by intermarriage, or to jointly manage resources, or were co-opted in territorial disputes; they were forceably annexed in wars, or because they could no longer defend themselves due to members dying off in plagues and disasters. As the communities grew, so too grew the complexity of governing them. Rule by one man or, less often but certainly not unknown, one woman, was not possible: thus was born the "ruling class" of a nascent aristocracy and the "mandarins" of bureaucracy. And with them came informal and later formal rules for interpersonal and inter-community conduct, trade, and other matters. Socially, then, these once-disparate and now interconnected communities required agreement on several principles of morality, and arguably the most important of these was how one should treat one's neighbour.

From this came what various religions would later term, in their own way, the Golden Rule, which went something like, "Treat others as you would have them treat you." Of course there had always been social ostracizing for errant members of a community, banishment and even public punishment, including the murder by a chief or clan or community of an errant member of the group.

Thus the concept of evil, or the concept of morality, arose from communal standards of right and wrong acts. In a community where it was normal to expose some infants to the elements (to their death) due to birth defects or illegitimacy, another community would have thought this an immoral act. And so it is today, even with our complex legal codes, that some acts are "less bad" than others, and what one person terms evil another might not (such as abortion).

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