Billy Beck asks what is the difference between depravity and evil. I answer him this way…
Like it or not, the judeo-christian ethic is at the root of most of Western philosophy. It seems reasonable to draw from that then to answer your question…
“The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).
Rather than get into the religious aspects of the quote, I point out by using this quote two things;
1: the evil that every human heart contains has been known for many millennia. The quote in fact is at least five thousand years before Christ…. Who, himself, defines the answer this way;
, “It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come… and they defile a person” (Mark 7:20-23).
2; Depravity, then, is giving into that evil.
Which by the way is the core concept behind the idea of limited government… Limiting the investment of governmental power in individual men, thereby Limiting evil.