Some think evil is an illusion.
Some think it is real but merely a lack of a good that is missing and should be there.
Some think it is a metaphysical substance.
Take the latter. Human beings have, through their actions and institutions, made it function as if it were a real force. This complicates morality, because we are not merely resisting harm but often shaping, directing, and justifying it. In doing so, wrongdoing is not external to us but becomes part of our character and perception.
The danger is not that morality is false, but that it may conceal the extent to which we participate in what it claims to oppose.
Here are some examples of things that are not metaphysically real, abstract things that we make as good as metaphysically real.
Money is just paper, metal, or digits, but functions as real power because we collectively treat it as value.
National borders and identities that exist because people enforce and believe in them.
Laws are not physical objects, yet they shape behavior through enforcement and shared recognition.
Justice is an ideal with no physical form, yet institutions act in its name. Related to that is the concept of rights (e.g., human rights) which are abstract entitlements that gain reality through legal and social systems.
Honor is a cultural value that can dictate life-and-death decisions.
Reputation exists only in others’ perceptions, yet has real consequences as does status.
One terrifying example is the historical narrative - fearfully, interpretations of the past shape identity, policy and conflict even today.
What unifies these is that they depend on collective intentionality—people acting as if they are real, which in turn produces real-world consequences. In that sense, they occupy a strange middle ground: not metaphysical substances, but not “nothing” either.
The claim that you are not a mere observer of things such as joy and suffering but they really get into who you are - that you somehow are what you experience would suggest that you can make evil effectively real in yourself.
There are arguments that no matter how bad a person is they are still to be treated as a person are based on how a person can cease being evil. And on how even the worst of us still have much good in us.
But that makes no sense if evil is you and you are evil and evil merits violent destruction if necessary. Even if the person is spared the sparing is seen as a necessary evil for he has good side.
And besides, if evil latches unto good the good itself is hardly anything to
praise.