I advise you to go there and marvel at the elegant takedown by Norm of the quote below (Terry Eagleton):
What happened on both occasions [September 11 1973 in Chile and September 11 2001 in the US] was a moral obscenity and wicked, but it was not, in a technical sense, evil. There is a distinction between evil and wickedness. It is wicked to destroy innocent people for one's political ends, as Al Qaeda did that day in New York and the United States has done in Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and countless other places around the world. For an act to be evil, however, means that the destruction must be done simply for the hell of it - for the sheer obscene pleasure of the thing, rather than for some functional end.Meanwhile I'll stay here in the dark, wondering why Norm's decided to skip some fishy moral equivalence points. I guess he had his reasons.
P.S. I would still have to see an act of destruction where the perpetrator didn't have any "functional end" to present. Even a lunatic "functional end" counts, I dare say. Because to judge lunacy is a whole other domain.
P.P.S. My ever-present World Web dictionary (version 5.5.2 if you absolutely have to know) defines "wickedness" as one of the synonyms for "evil". Oh well.
