Since 9/11, American politicians, preachers, journalists, and academics have all invoked the word “evil” with a frequency that has not been seen since the Holocaust. Philosophers too have contributed to this phenomenon in their customary way, issuing a small spate of monographs and anthologies on the topic. Most of these recent books do not devote serious attention to Kant's account of radical evil, in part because of the authors' shared belief, as one critic puts it, that “when faced with the question of evil,” Kant, “the quintessential modern Enlightenment philosopher,” is “confused, … eventually confesses defeat,” and offers only “confused chatter about the rooting of radical evil in human nature.”

My own view is that we still have much to learn from Kant's account of radical evil. While no author will ever have the last word on such a perplexing and pervasive feature of human existence, Kant's discussion of radical evil is still very much relevant today.