What if criminals aren’t evil?

I often contrast everyday criminal evil with societal-level evil. But there’s a case to be made that criminal evil isn’t really “evil” at all.

Criminals know what they did was wrong. They hide it. They feel shame when exposed. Their motives are petty—greed, rage, impulse. They don’t preach their wrongdoing, they don’t celebrate it, and they don’t try to convert others to it.

Real evil thinks it’s doing good. It moralizes harm. It proselytizes. It recruits. It inverts morality and calls its violence righteous.

So maybe criminals aren’t “evil” so much as villainous—vicious, depraved, base, corrupt. Ugly, yes. Dangerous, yes. But still sharing society’s notion of the good, and therefore fundamentally different.

Which leaves evil in the only place it truly belongs: societal-level evil—the collective, righteous kind behind democides and totalitarianism.