Philosophers have spent the past 300 years trying to come up with a better definition of evil than the one religion seems to offer, or so one philosopher, Susan Neiman, says in a new book, "Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy" (Princeton University Press).
His definition of evil was "the corruption of people to behave in an inhuman way".
Even now, most people consider human will indispensable for any muscular definition of evil.
The Holocaust was, after all, a thing of terror and dread, a new definition of evil, a rupture in human experience.
The company still lives by its slogan of "Don't be evil", but larger numbers of people and more legal systems appear to be questioning whether Google has a broad enough definition of evil.
According to this definition of evil, there is nothing real that stands in need of explanation – although Augustine does give an account of our deviation from the good by elucidating the concept of original sin.
As Clark Kerr, who designed the Californian higher-education system in the 1960s, wrote: "The call for effectiveness in the use of resources will be perceived by many inside the university world as the best current definition of evil".
The idea that we judge evil men by their actions, not by the content or intensity of their beliefs, may be postmodern in the sense that it succeeds the modern Enlightenment definition of evil, but it does not lead to moral relativism.
You might argue with their definition of evil – pornography is so wicked that a company may only make 3% of its profits from there, whereas it is permissible to make 10% of the profits from the sale of arms and 25% from tobacco, gambling, alcoholic drinks or high-interest-rate lending.
Many Americans would reject the definition of evil implied by the Jewish and Christian Scriptures -- not to mention the Koran -- since those books accept as good things we now view with horror: genocide, for example (the Israelites' slaughter of the Amalekites), and natural catastrophe (the Flood).
