Evil isn't doing bad things, it's feeling bad about them afterward

The aphorism "Evil isn't doing bad things, it's feeling bad about them afterward" is uttered by Avaric, the Margreave of Tenmeadows, during a dinner party at his town house in Shiz, shortly after Elphaba has claimed to have murdered Madame Morrible. The remark crystallizes a moral relativism that pervades the evening's conversation and stands as one of the novel's most direct challenges to conventional ethics.

Context and Utterance

The dinner party, hosted by Avaric and his wife, brings together a wealthy, cynical circle—a copper magnate, an agony aunt, an artist, and others—who debate the nature of evil with the self-conscious cleverness of the privileged. Elphaba, fresh from her assault on Madame Morrible, sits among them as a self-confessed murderer, playing the part of the Wicked Witch with sardonic relish. When the conversation turns to whether evil is an absence of good, a primitive stage of development, or an incarnate other, Avaric interjects with his definition: "Evil isn't doing bad things, it's feeling bad about them afterward. There's no absolute value to behavior." The remark is delivered with the casual authority of a man who has never had to answer for his actions, and it draws no serious challenge from the assembled guests.

Philosophical Implications

Avaric's formulation inverts the traditional moral calculus: it relocates evil from the deed itself to the emotional response of the doer. In this view, a person who commits murder without remorse is not evil; the evil lies in the guilty conscience of one who regrets. This logic absolves the powerful of responsibility for their acts as long as they can suppress or avoid guilt. It also makes a mockery of the very concept of moral absolutes, reducing ethics to a matter of psychological comfort. The novel, through its long examination of Elphaba's life, consistently rejects this easy relativism: Elphaba is tormented by guilt for Fiyero's death, yet the narrative insists that the harm she caused was real regardless of her feelings. Avaric's aphorism is thus exposed as a self-serving philosophy of the comfortable, a way to dismiss the suffering of others by denying that suffering has any moral weight.

Thematic Significance

The expression functions as a foil to the novel's central question: what makes a person wicked? Elphaba, who has spent her life fighting against injustice and who feels profound remorse for her failures, is branded a Wicked Witch by the Wizard's propaganda. Avaric, who has done nothing to oppose tyranny and feels no guilt, pronounces himself innocent. The aphorism reveals the hollowness of a morality that depends entirely on subjective feeling, and it underscores the novel's argument that evil is not a matter of personal sentiment but of objective harm. The dinner guests applaud Elphaba's story of murder as entertainment, and Avaric's definition allows them to enjoy the frisson of danger without moral discomfort. In this way, the aphorism becomes a critique of the very society that produces and consumes tales of wickedness while absolving itself of any complicity.