The phrase "avoiding evil" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used in contexts discussing moral choices, ethical behavior, or strategies for personal conduct.
Example: "In his quest for a virtuous life, he focused on avoiding evil in all its forms."
Alternatives: "steering clear of wrongdoing" or "shunning malevolence.".
Avoiding evil suggested a pretty low bar, but the vow itself — along with the founders' boast that "our business practices are beyond reproach" — was an invitation to find contrary examples.
Today the Timothy Plan (so named for a verse in the book of Timothy that deals with avoiding evil and providing for family) is a family of eight funds with 15,000 investors.
To be wise, however, is not only to have true opinions about things, but also to translate this knowledge into action by desiring honorable things and avoiding evil (I, 2).
Being a good person would mean not just avoiding evil, but working every day to do as much as you possibly could to take away other peoples' pain, some of them strangers you will never even meet.
Google's motto is to avoid evil.
But those passages regularly link the duty to avoid evil to a positive duty to do good: "The moral imperative to respond to the needs of our neighbors — basic needs such as food, shelter, health care, education and meaningful work — is universally binding on our consciences".
Examples are "Do good and avoid evil" and "Obey God".
This has often been truncated to (i) "Good is to be done, and evil avoided" or even, more drastically, (iia) "Do good and avoid evil" or yet more drastically (iib) "Avoid evil and seek the good".
The specific dictate of synderesis which refers to the eternal law is that one must obey God; the primary imperative with respect to the natural law is that one should avoid evil and seek the good.
The moral sense theorists (Shaftesbury and Hutcheson) and Butler see all requirements to pursue goodness and avoid evil as consequent upon human nature, which is so structured that a particular feature of our consciousness (whether moral sense or conscience) evaluates the rest.
Prudence, which is the ability to choose good and avoid evil, intellectual contemplation, moral and political virtue, friendship, education and character (all essential elements in Aristotle's ethics) are subsumed in Augustine's moral theology under the command to love God.
