Is Attributing Evil a Cognitive Bias?

[Philosophy Now]

Aner Govrin argues that a common perception of evil is mistaken.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/133/Is_Attributing_Evil_a_Cognitive_Bias

[Veritas Aequitas]

I agree with the recommendation of looking into the internal cognitive process of the perpetrators of evil acts. However I do agree with the author's rejection of the concept of or the term 'evil' since he argued the term 'evil' promoting more evil.
If we do not use the term 'evil' then how many 'very' should we use preceding 'bad' to represent certain very bad acts that are negative to the well being of humans.

Here is a more practical point re the Concept of Evil;
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concept-evil/

Since World War II, moral, political, and legal philosophers have become increasingly interested in the concept of evil. This interest has been partly motivated by ascriptions of ‘evil’ by laymen, social scientists, journalists, and politicians as they try to understand and respond to various atrocities and horrors, such as genocides, terrorist attacks, mass murders, and tortures and killing sprees by psychopathic serial killers. It seems that we cannot capture the moral significance of these actions and their perpetrators by calling them ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’ or even ‘very very wrong’ or ‘very very bad.’ We need the concept of evil.

1.4 Arguments in Favor of the Concept of Evil
Some people believe that we should not abandon the concept of evil because only the concept of evil can capture the moral significance of acts, characters, and events such as sadistic torture, serial killers, Hitler, and the Holocaust. As Daniel Haybron puts it “Prefix your adjectives [such as ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’] with as many ‘very’s as you like; you still fall short. Only ‘evil’, it seems, will do” (Haybron 2002b, 260). According to this line of argument, it is hard to deny that evil exists; and if evil exists, we need a concept to capture this immoral extreme. Eve Garrard and David McNaughton argue similarly that the concept of evil captures a distinct part of our moral phenomenology, specifically, “collect[ing] together those wrongful actions to which we have ... a response of moral horror” (Garrard and McNaughton 2012, 13–17).

A second argument in favour of the concept of evil is that it is only by facing evil, i.e., by becoming clear about its nature and origins, that we can hope to prevent future evils from occurring and live good lives (Kekes 1990, Card 2010).

A third reason to keep the concept of evil is that categorizing actions and practices as evil helps to focus our limited energy and resources. If evils are the worst sorts of moral wrongs, we should prioritize the reduction of evil over the reduction of other wrongs such as unjust inequalities. For instance, Card believes that it is more important to prevent the evils of domestic violence than it is to ensure that women and men are paid equal wages for equal work (Card 2002, 96–117).

A fourth reason not to abandon the concept of evil is that by categorizing actions and practices as evil we are better able to set limits to legitimate responses to evil. By having a greater understanding of the nature of evil we are better able to guard against responding to evil with further evils (Card 2010, 7–8).