ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the question of whether evil can be an essential quality of a person’s nature, or whether evil is only a description of what a person does. It is possible that a deeply flawed character disorder, such as a malignant narcissist, may behave in an evil way but not be evil at the deepest level of his being. Alternatively, he may have developed his character disorder because he is essentially evil, so that his character expresses his real nature. Such an individual could have an evil character but not be in a situation that allows him to carry out evil acts, in which case actions or the lack of them are not essential criteria for deciding if someone is evil. As Haybron (1999) points out, Hitler would have had an evil character even if he had not been able to do what he did politically. As previous discussions have shown, it is clearly possible that one could do evil without being an essentially evil person.
