The bad, the evil, and the monstrous

Abstract

This thesis focuses on defending the conceptual distinction between evil persons and irredeemable monsters. I argue that applying the comparative methodology to borderline cases can make sense of the intuition that evil persons are the worst sorts of people because they are worse than those who are merely bad without being forced into too narrow a definition of evil persons as monstrously terrible. Using this methodology, I show that a hybrid motive act based regularity account is the most satisfying theory of evil personhood because it can make sense of the distinction between merely bad persons, evil persons, and monsters. One practical consequence of this view is that we can consider both theoretical and practical conditions of reformation and redemption for evil persons.