Three Non-Religious Models of Evil: Telos, Law, and Genealogy

This paper develops a non-theological framework for analyzing “evil” by separating three levels that are often conflated in ordinary moral discourse: explanation (mechanisms), norm (impermissibility), and responsibility (attribution of guilt). It proposes a minimal typology of evil as behavior—impulsive, instrumental, and coalitionary—arguing that many philosophical disputes talk past one another because they silently target different behavioral regimes. The paper then tests three classical non-religious grounds of normativity—telos (Aristotle), law (Kant), and genealogy (Nietzsche)—showing that each functions as a distinct optic with characteristic strengths and blind spots across the three behavioral types. A neuro-evolutionary perspective is introduced as a realism-enhancing layer at the level of explanation, without reducing moral prohibition to biology. To avoid the naturalistic fallacy, the paper articulates two explicit normative anchors compatible with equal moral status: (1) evil as the destruction of agency (systematic objectification of persons) and (2) evil as the destruction of the conditions of cooperation (erosion of trust, predictability, reciprocity, and fair risk distribution). The resulting operational scheme treats evil not as a metaphysical essence but as reproducible regimes that can be recognized, constrained, and reduced without converting society into a machine of total control.