ABSTRACT
Children are much less likely to commit terrible acts than adults. When they do, the reaction often involves a special kind of shock and anger. Among killers or torturers, child perpetrators will be especially notorious. In public commentary on what they have done, and especially in media coverage, the word evil will often soon be reached for. Is this fitting? Coherent? Fair? Here, full-on philosophical answers are found rather less readily than their “folk” counterparts. Theories of evil, even the fullest and finest-grained in terms of their conceptual graft, tend not to give those questions their own space. This reflects a wider tendency. For the most part, philosophers have neglected children, and preferred to talk about adults. It is the adult who is taken as emblematic of the individual, the subject, the reasoner, the agent, and the human condition in general. Philosophical treatments of evil fit this pattern. So, even through the recent revival of evil as a focal point in philosophy, mentions of childhood are relatively sparse. We are often left to infer how children fit in, or whether references to people in general apply in the same way to them. They are there, but only in the shadows.
