After both the bushfires and the recent explosion on the asylum seekers' boat, Mr Rudd expressed himself with uncharacteristic vehemence. In the first case he spoke of the evil of arson, and in the second he said that people smugglers could rot in hell.
This kind of language echoes the tabloid characterisation of people who have done particularly foul deeds as monsters. Such strong language serves many purposes. It insists that there is a clear difference between right and wrong, and that moral standards are objective, not subjective. It cuts through moral complexities and through arguments that would diffuse or minimise the moral culpability of the perpetrators of monstrous deeds.
It also separates evil-doers from 'people like us', and effectively excommunicates them from society. Arsonists and people smugglers have abandoned themselves to an evil that is alien to the rest of us. By denouncing and excluding them we keep ourselves untainted by their evil.
This view, for all its uses, contrasts with the Christian view of moral evil. The Christian view is more complex and holds together under tension three different insights.
First, it sees sin as pervasive, present in every human heart, and as distorting every relationship and institution of society. Because sin is so pervasive, the crucial line of separation does not lie between monsters and ordinary human beings. It lies between movements of the human heart that are open to God and others, and those that are selfish and possessive. The difference between Hitler and ourselves is one of degree, not of kind.
Of course, simply to insist that sin is ordinary and universal risks domesticating it. If there is a little Hitler in every human being, then what Hitler did could also seem to be of little significance. The second strand of the Christian view of sin is to recognise its destructiveness. When we choose our individual interests over our relationship to God and to others, we incalculably harm both our world and ourselves.
The BrisConnections business illustrates this. The greed of the parties who structured the deal, lured investors into it and served their own interests in resolving its conflicts is ordinary enough. But its drabness may cause us to neglect the potential damage done to society when it leads observers sensibly to decide that neither the parties to the dispute nor similar financial organisations are trustworthy. Such withdrawal of trust led to the Recession and its diminishment of human