ABSTRACT
Are our pre-cognitive reactions to evildoing and evil persons, those very widely experienced emotional and intuitive responses, useful for understanding the concept of evil? Do such experiences provide an insight into why a notion of evil is needed as part of our moral vocabulary and, second, why it is qualitatively different from mere moral wrongdoing? To ask these questions another way, does the phenomenology of our moral experiences when facing evildoing and/or evil persons and institutions provide valuable data for resolving two difficult problems facing contemporary secular accounts of evil? I argue that our pre-cognitive reactions, such as the experience of moral horror, are indeed important data for understanding a concept of evil, which in turn gives this concept explanatory power and insight into why it is qualitatively different from the concept of ordinary wrongdoing.
