What do we really mean when saying that someone is evil? Or that an act is evil? Is it the intentions or the outcome that count? Let’s not think too much about the meaning of good and bad, because it’s not the point of this post. After all, anyone can easily tell if they are momentarily feeling good or bad, so there’s little ambiguity here.

The point is the meaning of evil in relation to good and bad as two anchors of reality. Of course nothing is purely one way or the other, and life is moving back and forth between good and bad. But evil is mostly bad, right? Well, maybe.
Generally, when it comes to life I think we can consider 2 cases, one when the outcome matches the intention, and the other when it doesn’t. Due to inherent limitations in our intelligence, most of the times the outcome doesn’t match exactly the intention, and sometimes it’s just opposite of what was intended. The first case is trivial - if the intention is bad and the outcome is bad then it’s clearly evil. The second case is more interesting, because we know of atrocious events that were caused by noble intentions. Everyone is aware of the fact that good intentions can lead to bad outcomes.

But the focus seems far too less on the complementary fact - that bad intentions can also lead to good outcomes. For example, injuring someone in a fight will send them to the hospital where they make an early discovery of cancer. Waging war will accelerate technologies that can eventually become useful in sustaining day to day life. This is already sort of embedded in a well known saying - “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger”. The problem is that in a complex enough society, it is hard to figure out the causation and connect the (usually hidden) intention with the outcome. Many events take years to propagate and in the meantime they get mixed with other events.

We tend to think that our own intentions about ourselves are good. And unless we suffer from a mental disorder, they most certainly are. Our intentions about others are surely more diverse, depending on our empathy, if they are family and other temporary circumstances. But how do we know that we are not evil?