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The notion of moral agency, conceived along these lines, is stated and defended in Alvin Plantinga,The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974) and William Rowe,THomas Reid on Freedom and Morality (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). On libertarian freedom, see Peter Van Inwagen,An Essay on Free Will (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). There are, of course, various refinements of these notions that I do not need to, and so do not, enter into here.
While defining ‘evil’ in a detailed way would require defending and applying an ethical theory, at least this much can be said: an obtaining state of affairs X is evil if and only if a moral agent possessed of the knowledge and power to prevent or eliminate X who knowingly does not do so acts wrongly unless she has a morally sufficient reason for her behavior (or, if you prefer, her non-behavior). I have discussed the general sort of ethical theory that seems to me most defensible inChristianity and Philosophy (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publischin Company, 1984).
Robert M. Adams suggests this sort of view inThe Virtue of Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Richard Swinburne'sThe Evolution of the Soul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) presents the sort of view that I have in mind here. Of course, the theory is ‘materialistic’ only by way of holding that the properties that constitute something as a person are emergent properties that arise in a universe in which traditional mind-body dualism (Platonic, Cartesian, or Jain) is false, not in the sense that matter is asserted to be all that there is.
Alan Donagan,The Theory of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).
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Yandell, K.E. Tragedy and evil. Int J Philos Relig 36, 1–26 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01314198
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01314198