A Relational Reconstruction of Evil

Traditional accounts of evil have usually explained it in terms of virtue, will, desire, or the character of the agent. Such approaches remain indispensable for attributing responsibility, yet they are less well equipped to explain why one and the same action may generate divergent effects across different recipients, temporal horizons, and normative levels. Without denying the moral significance of character and intention, this article moves the primary unit of analysis forward from the "evil person" to the "evil-related relational event." Methodologically, it distinguishes a descriptive level—"adverse relational effects," i.e., effects that impose significant disadvantages on a particular subject within a specified relation—from the normative level, at which "moral evil" is attributed only after examination by reasons, rights, proportionality, and common norms. On this basis, the article constructs a four-quadrant matrix along the axes of "other-directed/self-directed" and "beneficial/adverse," and reformulates the intuition of a "symbiosis of good and evil" as a structural coupling thesis under conditions of resource scarcity, conflicting interests, and order maintenance. It further distinguishes involuntary affective responses, reflectable antagonistic thought, adopted maxims of action, and their external consequences through a five-stage chain of "trigger–adverse awareness–antagonistic thought–action–consequence." Frame-dependence in judgments of good and evil should therefore be understood as a plurality of descriptive perspectives, not as moral relativism. The significance of the relational approach lies not in abolishing personal responsibility, but in advancing the question of ethics from "Who is the evil person?" to "How are adverse effects generated, transmitted, justified, or restrained?"