Sharif Digital Repository

The confrontation of living beings with evil, and the difficulties that naturally ensue from it, is as old as life itself. Among these evils, some lie outside the sphere of agents’ actions, while others (at least in the case of humans, and as appears at first glance) arise from their voluntary acts. As a rule, this second category is significant even for those who do not subscribe to belief in a divinity. Conventional approaches to this category, until roughly a century ago, examined it exclusively within domains such as ethics and theology. Subsequently, fields including social psychology, biological criminology (with an emphasis on aspects of evolutionary ethics), and the cognitive...