[Texas Governor Greg Abbott]: “It’s impossible to describe the magnitude of evil here … we need to keep guns out of the hands of those who pose a risk to others.”
To say it’s impossible to describe the magnitude of evil here suggests that it is possible to describe the magnitude of evil in some other instances. I was unaware of the existence of a magnitude of evil scale, however politicians seem to frequently assess evil with some confidence, so presumably such a scale does exist and is perhaps accessible only to politicians and pundits.
What might an evil magnitude scale look like? Is evil measured in deaths? Would it be accurate to say the deaths at the Santa Fe high school were within an order of magnitude of the evil when Palestinians were murdered in Gaza this week? President George Bush spoke of „evil doers“ and frequently referred to Osama bin Laden as „the evil one“. Given civilian deaths as a criteria for evil, might Bush have expanded on his assessment: „Osama bin Laden, evil, however three orders of magnitude less evil than Richard Nixon“?
Politicians and law enforcement are also aware of the presence of „pure evil“, which suggests an inadequacy of the evil magnitude scale currently in use. The purity of evil seems to be related to the proximity of the adversary to his victims. A suicide bomber or school shooter may be „pure evil“, whereas Israeli snipers, at a remove of 300 meters, or Reaper pilots, at a distance of thousands of kilometers, fail to qualify as pure evil.
