ABSTRACT
The rebirth or revival of academic philosophical interest in the problem of evil has a precise date: September 11, 2001. The terrorist assaults of that day, notably the attacks against the World Trade Center in New York, which claimed the lives of an estimated 3,000 civilians, have come to trigger, or dominate, many a subsequent philosophical discussion of evil. 1 In the Western popular imagination, contemporary evil also has a face. In the early twenty-first century, Osama bin Laden, the man generally seen as the mastermind behind the attacks, has become almost as defining of evil as Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust were for an earlier generation.
