What Is Evil? Are Humans the Only Animals Capable of Evil?

A lion kills a gazelle and nobody calls it evil. A human kills another human and suddenly we reach for one of the oldest and heaviest words in our vocabulary. So what exactly changed? A fascinating discussion from Voided Thoughts on YouTube got me thinking about that question, and the more I thought about it, the stranger it became. What if nothing is actually evil?

Maybe “evil” isn’t a thing that exists on its own. Maybe it is the word we invented for what happens when one person meets their own needs by dominating another person’s life.

Pop culture has given us plenty of faces for evil. Satan has horns, Dracula has fangs, Darth Vader has that unforgettable breathing problem, the Joker smiles while everything around him falls apart, and Hannibal Lecter is probably the last person you want sitting across from you at dinner. We know these characters are supposed to be evil because they aren’t simply dangerous. They make choices, and those choices come at someone else’s expense.

Animals make things more complicated. Chimpanzees fight, wolves kill, and animals compete for food, territory and mates. Some species even attack members of their own groups. Yet we don’t normally call a lion evil for killing a zebra. We generally understand that killing as predation rather than a moral decision to make another creature suffer.

Humans can do something different. We can understand another person’s suffering and still decide to cause it because doing so satisfies something we want or need. That need might be power, revenge, control, pleasure or status. The other person’s suffering becomes part of the payoff.

That is where sadism makes the whole question considerably darker. A person can understand pain, recognize exactly what they are doing and still enjoy causing it. The important part isn’t simply that suffering happened. Someone has decided that another person’s suffering is useful to them.

Maybe that is closer to what we mean when we call something evil.

Even the word has changed over time. “Evil” comes from the Old English yfel, which could mean bad, harmful, wicked, ill or unfortunate. As language changed, “bad” took over many of those everyday meanings while “evil” became increasingly connected with serious moral wrongdoing. We didn’t just develop ideas about morality. We developed a vocabulary for them.

Philosophers have been arguing about evil for centuries. Augustine was influenced by the earlier Neoplatonic tradition of Plotinus, who also treated evil as a kind of privation rather than an independent evil substance. Augustine developed his own Christian version of the idea, arguing that evil was a corruption or absence of goodness. Hollywood had a much easier solution. Give evil a cape, some fangs and maybe a really good soundtrack, and everyone knows who the bad guy is.

The blues had an even simpler way of putting it. Howlin’ Wolf recorded “Evil,” written by legendary songwriter Willie Dixon, in 1954. The warning is blunt: “That’s evil / Evil is goin’ on.” No demons. No philosophical explanation. Something is wrong, and somebody needs to pay attention.

That may be the strange thing about evil. We keep trying to turn it into a monster when it might be something much more ordinary. A person wants something badly enough, decides another person’s life matters less than that desire, and acts accordingly.

Darth Vader is interesting because his story isn’t really about a monster being born. It is about a person becoming consumed by fear, power and control, and eventually finding a way back. The Joker takes the opposite position and treats morality as something that can be discarded. Hannibal Lecter is unsettling for another reason entirely. He shows us that someone can be intelligent, charming and completely comfortable crossing moral lines.

Maybe that is why humans need the word “evil” in the first place. We are capable of looking at our own behavior, understanding its consequences and deciding whether we are going to do something anyway.

So perhaps nothing is inherently evil. Perhaps evil is what we call the moment when one person’s needs become more important to them than another person’s humanity, and they decide to satisfy those needs by taking control of someone else’s life.

Maybe we didn’t discover evil. Maybe we invented the word because we became capable of understanding it. And perhaps the most frightening thing about being human isn’t that we can recognize evil. It’s that we can choose it.