ABSTRACT
If, as Claudia Card has suggested, “To call someone evil without qualification is to imply that the person’s character is evil” (Card 2002: 22), understanding what makes a person evil demands understanding evil character. A person’s character is composed primarily of her character traits and the relationships between them and character traits are largely made up of clusters of interrelated mental state dispositions (Miller 2014). A character trait like compassion, for example, will involve a disposition to form the belief that one should help people in need, a disposition to form a desire to help another person for their own sake, and so forth. What sort of mental state dispositions are constitutive of evil character? Different answers are offered by proponents of (1) action-based, (2) absence-based, (3) affective, (4) hybrid, and (5) extremity accounts of evil character.
