Evil in contemporary politics has an important rhetorical dimension. Whenever instances of wrongdoing are contested in the public realm, the relevant actors are liable to call upon a familiar store of resources for persuading audiences to respond in particular ways. These resources can be expected to consist in recognisable rhetorical tropes and figures, a predictable range of ‘commonplaces’, and the manipulation of definitions according to recurring patterns of argument. They can be envisaged to entail, too, the arousal of a characteristic series of emotions. The actors themselves, in the relevant sense, might also be variously composed. They may be perpetrators of the wrongdoing, they may be subjects of the harm either intended or inflicted, or they may be third parties, of varying shades of disinterestedness. In each case, however, the terms in which evil and wrongdoing are excused or exonerated, condemned or vilified, and understood or tolerated will likely share routine inflections.

The aim of this chapter is therefore to begin to establish what it is that is distinctive about the scope and content of the rhetorical repertoire that belongs to wrongdoing. It proposes to do so by focusing consideration upon a specific case: the rhetoric of moral equivalence. An account of a single case, of course, no matter how representative, can only ever hope to provide a partial perspective upon the wider picture.