The problem of Evil -they know not what they do - or do they?

Luke tells us that Jesus issued from the Cross the words 'forgive them they know not what they do.'
Pliny the Younger for his and  the Romans complete bafflement of the Christian thought process. Perhaps just as your would view people who believe in little green men.

So the claim that wrongdoers misidentify what is good relies on there being a gap between my perceptions of things’ value, and their real value. The Roman crucifying Jesus may have believed they were doing good by ridding this usurper of their values,  this rebel who was causing civic unrest.
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Yet there are people who sometimes choose what they know to be worse.

So explaining away evildoing by way of a basic psychology seems
unpersuasive. Some people do indeed seem to seek evil as such.

A number of writers have been drawn by the thought that evil must be its
own intentional object: the evildoer intends to do the deed just because it is evil.
i.e 'I can do  something evil now, that will show  them!'

Evil is not merely doing bad, even very bad, things in the pursuit of a presumptively worthy ulterior goal, as in instrumental evil; you might term the triumphvirate of tyrants in the following
wasy, Hitler with his deatth camps, Stalin with his purges, and Mao with his
enforced famins, may not qualify as evil if their intention, horribly ignorant as they were,
were done in the belief by the perpetrators that what they were doing was 'good'

Terry Eagleton argues (reference) that launching a war on evil sounds, if anything,
yet more quixotic than that other jihad waged on abstraction, George W. Bush’s war against terror. The trouble with a war on evil is that it has an air of pragmatic contradiction.
 Making war to end war-making may, making war against evil may be deemed as pragmatic
an as a just war, but the contradiction is making war aginst those making war.
 You could argue this is doing evil in order to stop what is evil?

Is evil a quest for annihilation, the wish that there be nothing rather than something.
Eagleton quotes Kierkegaard on ‘the dreadful emptiness and contentlessness of evil’;
evil seeks nothingness because ‘being is itself a kind of good.’ look up the word 'nihilism'       

which
crows over the absence of absence, over the pointless splurge of being. Evil is
literally about the quest for nothingness, the wilful negating of what is, in favour of
what is not. In this,   Plotinus, the Roman philosopher, (referring knowledge of the Romans and the Greeks always helps) for Plotinus,  'evil' was literally nothing.

Yet to identify evil with nothing, would be to deny its existence. Nor should nothing be
 reified (made real) into a pseudo-thing. Is a packet of crisps nothing or
 a jammy dodger  nothing.
Plentitiude (something) is better than privation (nothing) but to say that there is nothing is to, it cold be argued, is to deny us of privation.


I do evil by kicking the cat. Is this evil?   One could say that I display a lack of concern
for the cat, or a lack of kindness. or mere lack of consideration, or   thoughtlessness. To show a lack of kindness, moreover, seems a failure of supererogation (knowledge) rather than the gross violation of a moral duty.
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Is evil all about nothing, anyway? The claim itself needs shaking out. There is a clear sense in which evil acts are destructive, as Eagleton’s richly suggestive account implies. But to commit evil is a productive feat of a kind. Designing, building and running an extermination camp could be seen as creative acts. Creativity can be bad, just as destruction can be good – for instance, destroying the death camp. In that case, though, the act may have a good ulterior end, like ending suffering. Evil may share not only the creativity of art, but also its pointlessness: evil, as Eagleton says, for evil’s sake. His idea is rather that evil seeks to bring about a void. It wills vacuity where there is strength, kindness, beauty; or, at the limit, where there is something rather than nothing.

Is the sole alternative to this to discern not just the invisible hand, but the real presence of the Maker in the existence of the Ebola virus? No; or at least, a long argument would be needed to show that the only defence against it is God hic et ubique.

Eagleton seems sometimes to say that evil itself is vacancy, but suggests elsewhere that the evildoer is trying to quash the vacancy within. The latter idea is the more suggestive, and dodges the pitfall of effacing evil by identifying it with nothing. If evil is literally nothing, it is also harder to make sense of the claim that it is done for its own sake. But if the evildoer has a specific motivation, to externalise the bad, it can be understood not just symbolically but literally. His urge is to shunt the inner hollowness over to the unhollow, persecutory other.

In what Eagleton may see as a development of the same thought, he suggests that evil lies in the triumph of the death drive, the vanquishing of Eros by Thanatos – compare the old Francoist slogan, ¡Viva la muerte! That drive, as Freud identified it, amounts to an impulse towards obliteration, or at least towards nothing. As Eagleton says, for evildoers like the Nazis, the ‘obscene enjoyment of annihilating the Other becomes the only way of convincing yourself that you still exist’. This is not simple self-assertion. It is a way to cull, by casting it outwards, the dread of being nothing; or nothingness, nullity seen as an object of awareness. In Heideggerian terms, evil exhibits a radical evasion of being-towards-death, the acceptance that Dasein achieves when it shrugs off inauthenticity.

 So evil, as willed nothingness, constitutes ‘a kind of cosmic sulking’, taking one’s ball home in protest at the affront of having to exist. If evil is about escaping a sense of nothingness, this suggests that the violent murder perpetrated by the suicide – self-slaughter, as Hamlet calls it – is quite often evil. This is one of the points where the Roman roots of the theory show up.

. Suicide becomes an identification with the other as a prelude to annihilating that other, and therewith oneself. As such it falls prey to pragmatic contradiction: it tries to get away from nothingness by annihilating it. But are all suicides quite so lacking in joie de vivre? Some Dignitas clients seem to deny not that life has value, but that they can enjoy it.

 Evildoers may have a more nuanced relation to value than simple nihilism, or a wish to displace their own nothingness. Eagleton sees them as wretched, despairing of the very idea of value. But some people find they can do bad and continue to function, even to flourish. Sometimes evil negates nothingness itself. It can be less about nullifying value, than wanting to grab it. Evildoers may value things, such as their own thriving, and the things they want in order to thrive