Rational Morality
Good, Bad, and Evil
The next draft chapter in the upcoming book, “Rational Morality”. Comments are welcome. I’ll publish the final version through the usual book stores and channels when it's all been released online. Enjoy!
If we’re serious about reclaiming a moral compass in today’s chaotic world, we have to start by getting clear about the words we use—especially the ones that carry real weight. Good. Bad. Evil. These aren’t just abstract labels or dramatic flourishes. They shape how we see the world and how we respond to it. But in everyday conversation, these words are often reduced to little more than personal opinion, emotional reaction, or political branding. One person’s “good” is another’s “bad,” and when everything becomes subjective, nothing means anything. Without shared definitions, morality becomes just another flavor of preference, and when that happens, what’s left is noise, impulse, and confusion pretending to be principle.
So let’s get specific. Goodness is not the same as being nice. It’s not about being liked, being agreeable, or avoiding conflict. Goodness isn’t a performance, it’s a posture toward the world and those we share it with. At its core, goodness means a concern for others. It is the active, sustained effort to live in a way that benefits not only yourself, but those around you. A good person isn’t just someone who avoids harming others; they’re someone who steps in when help is needed, who chooses service over self, who takes responsibility not just for themselves but for their impact on the world around them.
This kind of goodness demands more than good intentions. It requires action, discipline, and moral clarity. It involves telling the truth even when it’s unpopular, protecting others even when there’s no recognition, and doing the right thing not because it pays off but because it’s right. Goodness often requires sacrifice—of time, of comfort, of status—and it always demands presence. It doesn’t sit on the sidelines. It builds, it shields, it uplifts. It’s what drives the teacher who stays late to help a struggling student, the nurse who speaks up for a patient others have overlooked, the friend who tells the hard truth because they care enough not to lie. Goodness is rooted in the belief that others matter—and that we are responsible for acting like they do.
Badness, by contrast, isn’t about cruelty. It’s about selfishness. A bad person consistently prioritize themselves, their feelings and their needs, at the expense of others. They ignore the needs around them, and rationalize their inaction as neutrality. But neutrality in the face of need is not neutral—it is neglect. It is the parent who avoids disciplining their child because they want to be liked more than they want to guide. It is the coworker who sees corruption but says nothing, because speaking up might be uncomfortable or jeopardize their job. It is the citizen who checks out of civic life, letting rot spread while they protect their peace.
Badness doesn’t usually draw attention to itself, and that’s part of what makes it dangerous. It flourishes in passivity. It cloaks itself in politeness, in tolerance, in detachment. It avoids conflict, avoids responsibility, and avoids the effort it takes to care. And in doing so, it creates space for harm to grow unchecked. A bad person may not be the one causing harm, but they are the ones who let it happen, again and again, because they refuse to engage.
Evil is something else entirely. It is not passive. It does not merely look away or fail to act. Evil chooses to harm. It does so deliberately, strategically, and often with pride. Where goodness helps others and badness ignores them, evil targets them. It manipulates, exploits, and destroys—not by accident, but by design. It twists truth, mocks virtue, and inflicts pain with full awareness of the cost. Evil knows exactly what it’s doing, and does it anyway.
Today, evil doesn’t usually come in the form of snarling villains or cartoonish tyrants. It wears suits. It delivers presentations. It moves through systems that reward results over conscience. It presents itself as professional, pragmatic, and efficient. The contractor who uses substandard materials knowing it puts lives at risk, the executive who suppresses test results to fast-track a drug that may kill people, the policymaker who exploits fear to expand control—these are not examples of clumsy misjudgment. They are conscious choices to harm others for personal or institutional gain.
When evil scales up and embeds itself in the structures of power, it becomes harder to see and even harder to stop. It takes the shape of regimes that demand loyalty over truth and enforce ideology through fear and violence. Think of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot—men who didn’t simply tolerate evil, but built entire societies on it. Their victims were not just those who opposed them; they were anyone who got in the way of the machine they had built. These leaders were not accidents of history. They were architects of destruction, men who used the machinery of the state to turn human lives into statistics, problems to be solved, or obstacles to be eliminated. Stalin’s chilling remark, “The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic,” captures the moral inversion at the heart of such regimes. Once individuals become numbers, empathy dies, and mass murder becomes a bureaucratic function.
But modern institutions don’t need to be overtly totalitarian to enable evil. Bureaucracies can obscure accountability. Corporations can incentivize cruelty in the name of quarterly profits. Political movements can mask their abuses in the language of equity and inclusion while practicing the opposite. In these environments, evil doesn’t just survive—it thrives. And the people who stand for truth, restraint, and decency are often the first to be sidelined, discredited, or silenced. The world rarely celebrates the virtuous; more often, it punishes them for refusing to play along and upsetting the apple carts of all those who profit from evil institutions.
And none of this could happen without the quiet cooperation of the many. Evil depends on a culture of complicity. People need to look away, stay silent, and believe that their small acts of inaction don’t matter. But they do. A few monsters did not carry out history’s worst crimes alone; they were enabled by the thousands of ordinary men and women who convinced themselves that obedience, convenience, or self-preservation mattered more than conscience. When cowardice is normalized and passivity is praised as wisdom, evil meets no resistance, and so it spreads, unchecked and unchallenged.
We need to face the hard truth: we are not born good. We’re born needy, impulsive, and self-focused. This is not evil, it’s human. But if we never grow beyond that, if nobody teaches us to see and care for others, then we remain locked in that early, primitive self-interest for life. That’s what makes moral formation so critical, and why the breakdown of the family has such devastating consequences.
Families were once the training ground for virtue. Children learned right and wrong not from lectures, but from structure, love, and consequences. The presence of strong, consistent parents, especially fathers, was historically one of the most powerful predictors of moral development. Without that, children often grow up emotionally stunted, morally confused, and easy prey for ideologies or systems that promise pleasure, validation, or power without the burden of responsibility.
The slide from bad to evil is rarely dramatic at first. It often begins with laziness. A refusal to try, a willingness to look the other way. But over time, that indifference hardens. Some begin to take pride in their ability to deceive, to dominate, or to cause pain without consequence. They refine their tactics, justify their behavior, and climb through systems that reward ruthlessness while punishing restraint.
That’s why defining these words, good, bad, and evil, isn’t just academic. It’s a matter of survival. Because once those lines blur, we lose the ability to judge clearly. We start calling cowardice “prudence,” neglect “tolerance,” and charisma “character.” And when that happens, we dismantle the moral foundation we depend on, not just for personal integrity, but for a functioning society.
The answer isn’t suspicion toward everyone else; it’s vigilance within ourselves. We must restore moral seriousness in our own lives. Evil must be named. Badness must be confronted. And goodness must be practiced, not admired, not theorized, but lived, deliberately and daily. These are not abstract ideals; they are the choices that determine who we become and what kind of world we build.
If you want to live a good life, you have to see the world with moral clarity. Understand that goodness is not weakness. It is the strength to speak truth when it would be safer to stay silent, the resolve to act when others look away, and the commitment to help others not just when it’s easy, but especially when it’s hard. Goodness means preserving what is right, defending what is just, and lifting up what is broken. Not for attention or reward, but because it’s necessary. And that begins with a single, serious decision: to live by a moral code, even when no one else around you does.