On being wicked

By Matthew Parish

Saturday 24 October 2026

There is an important distinction in the moral life between being a flawed human being and being a wicked one. We are all flawed. We are vain, jealous, selfish, cowardly, dishonest and occasionally absurd. We disappoint those who love us, make promises we cannot keep and sometimes behave in ways that would appal us were we to observe them in somebody else. These are the ordinary imperfections of the human condition, and civilisation consists partly in learning to accommodate them. Wickedness, however, belongs to an altogether different category. It is not simply a greater accumulation of ordinary human weaknesses. It represents something qualitatively different in the relationship between a person and the moral universe he inhabits.

The wicked person is not merely somebody who does wrong. He is somebody who understands, at some level, that what he is doing is wrong and proceeds nevertheless, often because the suffering, humiliation or destruction of another human being serves some purpose of his own. Sometimes that purpose is financial gain or political advancement. Sometimes it is the exercise of power, the satisfaction of revenge or the gratification of a grotesquely inflated ego. At its most disturbing, wickedness appears to require no intelligible purpose whatsoever. The knowledge that another person is suffering becomes an end in itself, a source of satisfaction that the ordinary moral imagination finds almost impossible to comprehend.

This distinction matters because modern societies have developed an extraordinary capacity for explaining away wickedness as a collection of psychological difficulties, social disadvantages or unfortunate misunderstandings. We are encouraged to discover the traumatic childhood behind the cruelty, the insecurity behind the bullying and the intellectual limitations behind the dishonesty. Such explanations may be perfectly accurate. Nevertheless they do not necessarily diminish moral responsibility, and sometimes they obscure the central fact that an individual has deliberately chosen to inflict suffering upon another. To understand the origins of wickedness is not to excuse it, any more than understanding the chemistry of an explosive renders its detonation morally innocent.

The history of philosophy has wrestled with this problem for millennia. Socrates famously maintained that wrongdoing arose from ignorance, because nobody who genuinely understood the good could willingly choose its opposite. There is something deeply attractive about this proposition. It suggests that moral education might ultimately liberate humanity from cruelty, and that the wicked are merely people who have misunderstood the requirements of living well. Yet ordinary experience furnishes us with countless examples of people who understand perfectly well that their conduct is reprehensible, and who possess sufficient intelligence to conceal it precisely because they know how others would judge them.

Saint Augustine offered a darker account of human motivation. In his Confessions, he recalled stealing pears as a young man, not because he needed them or particularly wanted to eat them, but because the very act of stealing possessed an attraction. What fascinated Augustine was the possibility that human beings might sometimes choose wrongdoing simply because it is wrongdoing. The incident was trivial in its material consequences, but philosophically profound. It suggested that evil could arise not merely from the pursuit of some otherwise legitimate advantage, but from the corruption of the will itself.

Immanuel Kant, in turn, recognised the possibility of radical evil in human nature: the deliberate subordination of moral principle to self-interest. This was not necessarily the wickedness of the theatrical villain, complete with sinister laughter and extravagant gestures. It was the much more familiar phenomenon of people who understood their moral obligations but decided that those obligations should yield whenever they became inconvenient. Kant’s insight remains uncomfortable because it locates the possibility of wickedness not in a small collection of monsters but in the moral architecture of ordinary human beings.

Nevertheless we should resist the temptation to conclude that all wrongdoing is essentially wicked. There is an enormous difference between telling a lie because one is frightened of the consequences of telling the truth and constructing an elaborate falsehood for the purpose of destroying another person’s reputation. Both involve dishonesty, but the moral structures of the two acts are different. The first may be cowardly, regrettable and deserving of criticism. The second reveals a willingness to treat another human being’s life as expendable material in the service of one’s own ambitions.

Likewise, there is a difference between losing one’s temper and systematically cultivating another person’s fear. An angry outburst may expose a deficiency of self-control, but sustained intimidation requires the repeated exercise of choice. The bully must decide, again and again, that the humiliation of his victim is preferable to the abandonment of his own sense of superiority. He is not merely surrendering to a momentary weakness. He is organising his character around the subjugation of somebody else.

One of the most distinctive characteristics of wickedness is therefore its relationship with power. The wicked person frequently seeks circumstances in which he can exercise authority without accountability, because the absence of consequences permits him to indulge impulses that the presence of equals would otherwise restrain. This explains why wickedness flourishes in certain bureaucracies, authoritarian institutions, abusive domestic relationships and organisations governed by personal loyalty rather than transparent rules. The wicked are not always powerful, but they are often fascinated by power because it enables them to convert their private moral corruption into somebody else’s public misfortune.

There is something particularly disturbing about the wicked person who presents himself as virtuous. History is full of persecutors who believed themselves to be defenders of civilisation, interrogators who imagined that they were protecting national security and political opportunists who wrapped their ambitions in the language of public service. The vocabulary of virtue can become the most effective disguise for vice. Indeed the more exalted the moral language, the more carefully we should sometimes examine the behaviour concealed beneath it.

This phenomenon is especially apparent in wartime, when distinctions between necessity, expediency and cruelty become dangerously blurred. Here in Ukraine, we have witnessed the consequences of a political system in which the suffering of innocent people has repeatedly been treated as a legitimate instrument of state policy. There is a profound difference between the tragic killing of civilians during military operations despite precautions and the deliberate targeting of civilian life for the purpose of terrorising a population into submission. The former raises grave questions of law, responsibility and military judgment. The latter, where intent is established, is wickedness elevated into a doctrine of government.

Yet we should not imagine that wickedness is confined to dictators, torturers or those responsible for spectacular acts of violence. Its manifestations in ordinary life are often smaller, more intimate and less visible. A person may devote years to undermining a colleague whose abilities inspire envy, or manipulate a vulnerable friend through a carefully cultivated sense of obligation. Someone may knowingly make false allegations against an innocent person, calculating that the resulting damage will be impossible to repair even after the truth emerges. These acts may never appear in a history book, but they can destroy lives with a thoroughness that deserves serious moral attention.

An especially revealing characteristic of wicked conduct is the absence of remorse. Ordinary people who behave badly may attempt to rationalise their actions, but they often experience an uncomfortable awareness that they have fallen short of their own standards. They apologise, sometimes inadequately. They remember their failures with embarrassment, or attempt to make amends. The wicked person, by contrast, may regard his victim’s distress as evidence of his own success. If confronted with the consequences of his conduct, he may express indignation at having been challenged rather than regret for the harm he has inflicted.

Even here, however, we must be cautious. Some wicked people are perfectly capable of displaying remorse when it serves their interests. Tears may be summoned as readily as threats, and apologies may become instruments of manipulation. Conversely, an emotionally inarticulate person may feel genuine remorse without possessing the capacity to express it convincingly. The moral distinction lies less in outward displays of sentiment than in whether an individual accepts responsibility and changes his conduct when circumstances no longer compel him to do so.

Wickedness also has a parasitic relationship with trust. Civilised life depends upon a vast network of assumptions about the conduct of strangers. We assume that a doctor intends to heal us, that a lawyer will not knowingly betray our confidences and that a friend who offers assistance does not secretly intend to exploit our vulnerability. These assumptions are not always justified, but without them society would become intolerably suspicious and inefficient. The wicked person exploits precisely this willingness to believe in the good faith of others, taking advantage of moral expectations that he does not himself respect.

This asymmetry provides wickedness with one of its most formidable advantages. Decent people often struggle to recognise calculated cruelty because they instinctively interpret other people’s conduct through the framework of their own motivations. They search for misunderstandings where none exist, attribute malice to incompetence and imagine that reasoned explanation will eventually produce reconciliation. Their difficulty is not necessarily intellectual stupidity. It is an excess of moral imagination applied to somebody who has chosen not to reciprocate it.

There comes a point at which continued charitable interpretation ceases to be a virtue and becomes an invitation to further injury. To recognise wickedness is not to abandon compassion but to acknowledge that compassion must be accompanied by judgment. It is possible to understand that another person has suffered, to recognise the psychological origins of his conduct and even to wish him eventual happiness, while nevertheless concluding that he must no longer be permitted to exercise power over other people’s lives.

This brings us to the question of whether wicked people can change. The theological traditions of Christianity have generally insisted upon the possibility of redemption, however grave the sin. This is a morally attractive position, because to deny altogether the possibility of repentance would be to consign certain individuals permanently outside the community of humanity. Nevertheless redemption requires something more substantial than a convenient declaration of regret. It demands an honest confrontation with the wrong committed, a willingness to accept its consequences and a sustained effort to become a different sort of person.

Forgiveness, moreover, is not an obligation that victims owe their persecutors. There is something grotesque about demanding that those who have suffered deliberate cruelty demonstrate their moral superiority by absolving its perpetrators. Forgiveness may be admirable when freely given, but it loses its moral significance when imposed as a social expectation. Sometimes the most appropriate response to wickedness is neither hatred nor forgiveness, but the establishment of a permanent and inviolable distance.

We must also distinguish wickedness from madness, eccentricity and simple unpleasantness. A disagreeable person may nevertheless possess an impeccable moral conscience, while an exceedingly charming individual may be capable of extraordinary cruelty. Social manners are a notoriously unreliable guide to moral character. Some of the most honourable people are irritable, difficult and incapable of agreeable conversation, while some of the most destructive possess impeccable manners and an apparently unlimited capacity for superficial warmth.

Indeed wickedness frequently thrives beneath the appearance of conventional respectability. It is easier to recognise cruelty when it arrives shouting obscenities than when it appears in an expensive suit, speaks softly and assures everybody that it is acting for the best. The bureaucratic language of procedure, compliance and necessity can conceal decisions whose human consequences are devastating. Hannah Arendt’s reflections upon the banality of evil remain relevant precisely because they compel us to recognise that moral catastrophe need not be accompanied by a dramatic consciousness of villainy. At times it is produced by individuals who have made the abdication of moral judgment into a professional habit.

This is an important qualification to any account that defines wickedness entirely through conscious delight in the suffering of others. Some individuals commit terrible acts not because they actively desire suffering but because they have decided that the suffering of others is morally irrelevant. There is a difference between cruelty and callousness, but the latter can become no less wicked when it is cultivated deliberately and maintained in the face of unmistakable evidence. A person who knowingly destroys innocent lives for the sake of convenience cannot escape moral condemnation merely by insisting that he never particularly enjoyed doing so.

The most unsettling possibility is that wickedness may become habitual. Just as virtues are strengthened by their repeated exercise, the conscience may be progressively weakened by repeated decisions to disregard it. The first act of deliberate cruelty may require substantial effort and elaborate self-justification. The tenth becomes easier, while the hundredth may scarcely register as a moral event. A person may gradually construct an entire identity around his capacity to dominate, deceive or injure others, until abandoning wickedness would require abandoning much of what he has come to understand as himself.

Yet this does not mean that wickedness is an immutable personality type or that human beings can be divided neatly into saints and villains. Such an assumption would itself be dangerous, because it would encourage us to attribute wickedness exclusively to other people while regarding our own conduct as an innocent collection of understandable mistakes. Moral seriousness requires the uncomfortable recognition that we possess the capacity for deliberate cruelty ourselves. The distinction between ordinary weakness and wickedness is real, but it is not guaranteed by birth, education, intelligence or social class.

Indeed one of the most reliable protections against becoming wicked may be the willingness to subject one’s own motivations to scrutiny. When we find ourselves enjoying another person’s humiliation, inventing justifications for an act of revenge or becoming indifferent to suffering that we have caused, we should recognise these reactions as warnings. They do not necessarily establish that we are wicked. They suggest that we are approaching moral territory in which the distinction between fallibility and malice may depend upon the next decision we make.

There is a fashionable reluctance in contemporary intellectual life to employ words such as evil and wickedness. They are considered unsophisticated, too closely associated with religious absolutism or insufficiently sensitive to the complexities of human psychology. We prefer the language of dysfunctional behaviour, maladaptive responses and adverse social conditioning. These concepts have their legitimate uses, but they can also sanitise conduct that deserves an unequivocal moral judgment. There are occasions when the language of pathology becomes an elaborate means of avoiding the language of responsibility.

The fact that human beings are complex does not mean that their actions are beyond moral classification. Indeed moral judgment would be pointless were it reserved exclusively for circumstances in which every conceivable ambiguity had been eliminated. We must distinguish between accusations supported by evidence and those driven by personal resentment, but the impossibility of absolute certainty does not require perpetual neutrality. A civilised society must retain the intellectual confidence to identify deliberate cruelty for what it is.

Nor should we allow righteous condemnation of wickedness to corrupt our own character. There is a temptation, when confronted with someone who has behaved abominably, to wish upon him precisely the suffering he has inflicted upon others. That impulse is understandable, but it contains the seeds of the same moral disorder we seek to condemn. Justice requires accountability and sometimes punishment. It does not require us to cultivate pleasure in another person’s degradation.

Ultimately the distinction between human fallibility and wickedness is a distinction about the moral significance we assign to other people. The fallible person may fail to live up to his recognition of another’s humanity. The wicked person, whether through deliberate cruelty or cultivated indifference, acts as though that humanity imposes no meaningful restraint upon his desires. He does not merely disappoint the moral expectations of civilisation. He repudiates their authority whenever they obstruct his purposes.

There is no reason to expect a world without human weakness. We shall continue to be jealous, frightened, foolish and occasionally spectacularly dishonest, because these deficiencies are woven into the complicated fabric of our nature. A decent society does not demand perfection, and a decent individual should not expect it from others. What civilisation can reasonably demand is that we recognise limits upon the harm we are prepared to inflict in pursuit of our interests, and that we acknowledge the equal moral standing of those whose lives intersect with our own.

To be human is to be imperfect. To be wicked is to make another person’s suffering an acceptable price for the satisfaction of one’s own desires, or worse still, to regard that suffering as a reward. The former condition calls for patience, understanding and sometimes forgiveness. The latter requires judgment, resistance and the courage to refuse the comfortable fiction that every act of human cruelty is merely an unfortunate misunderstanding.

We should forgive human weakness generously, because we all share in it. But we should never become so sophisticated in our understanding of human nature that we forget how to recognise wickedness when it stands before us.