1. This via negativa argument has also been sketched regarding the specific case of guilt as a necessary condition for the possibility of morality in Sami Pihlström, Transcendental Guilt: Reflections on Ethical Finitude (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books / Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2011).
2. See, for example, Richard Bernstein, Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002)
3. Mark Johnston, Surviving Death (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
4. Or, perhaps, ‘philosophy of the human condition,’ if the phrase ‘philosophical anthropology’ sounds problematic. Cf. here Sami Pihlström, ‘On the Possibility of Philosophical Anthropology,’ Journal of Philosophical Research 28 (2003b), 259–85.
5. If we were phrasing this in terms of the distinction between the good and the bad, there would be more room for quantitative differences along one and the same scale. However, speaking about evil (in contrast to the merely ‘bad’) indicates a move to a qualitatively different level. In brief, we may allow that ‘bad’ is a quantitative concept whereas the concept of evil refers to something that challenges, or even threatens to destroy, the moral universe altogether, with whatever scales of good vs. bad it includes. In a way, we might say that it moves in the same conceptual space as the notion of ‘moral perfectionism’ made famous by Stanley Cavell in his readings of Emerson and Thoreau: see Cavell, The Senses of Walden, rev. edn (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992