Kant

In contemporary English, we commonly distinguish between merely bad or wrong actions on the one hand and evil actions on the other, where the attribute “evil” is understood to apply only to the worst kind of wrongdoing and the worst kind of wrongdoers. In keeping with this distinction, the prototypes of evil that readily come to mind are the serial killer, the mass murderer, the terrorist, the child molester, and the rapist. Contemporary accounts of evil try to capture the distinction between wrong and evil present in ordinary language by specifying additional conditions that make an “ordinary” wrong action evil: evil actions are morally wrong actions that are extremely wrong, incomprehensible, or performed from particularly base motives. On these accounts, evil is essentially “wrongdoing plus.”