It would appear that evil is becoming more, not less, conspicuous in contemporary social discourses as a conceptual resource for explaining the derivation of social harms emanating from human (in)action and exculpating the failures of institutional or regulatory agencies to prevent them. Metaphysical evil is increasingly cited in a range of popular and official explanations of social harms resulting from moral failures at the individual and collective level. By ‘metaphysical evil’ I mean evil of a transcendent, demonic nature reflecting the seductive, cruel and wicked aspects of pure malice directed at ‘innocent’, unsuspecting or hapless humans that has been traditionally personified in a monstrous or Satanic figure of myth and/or the presence of a seducer implied by the Gnostic traditions and the theodicy, as well as within rationalist Cartesian epistemology. This type of evil is to be distinguished from the physical evil unleashed by, for instance, disease or natural disasters, or the humanist designation of moral evil delimited to the observation of socio-ethical-legal codes of behaviour as represented in the deontological ethics of Kant, specifically his concept of ‘radical evil’ ([1793] 1960). Kant’s reconceptualisation of evil as ‘radical’, that is as ‘rooted’ in the human character and the result of the failure of all human beings to live up to their duties according to the norms of moral law, was intended among other things to do away with what he considered the failure of theodicy in general and its notional acceptance of evil as a metaphysical reality in particular. In his view, evil as a metaphysical entity encouraged a