We live in an age that has become strangely embarrassed by the existence of evil.
Consider Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother who does not deny killing her three children.
She claims she was suffering from postpartum psychosis.
Now, I'm not saying mental illness isn't real. I'm not saying courts shouldn't take mental illness into account.
But something rather peculiar has happened outside the court where Lindsay Clancy is on trial.
Clancy has become, in some circles, a feminist symbol -- a kind of patron saint of the oppressed mother.
And every day, crowds of women dressed in pink have gathered outside the court to yell support for the mum who killed her kids.
Cora, aged 5, Dawson, aged 3 and little 8-month-old Callen were strangled to death by their mum... and yet this perverse display of compassion finds perfectly sane women rooting for the woman who killed them.
This is what happens when a civilisation loses the vocabulary of evil.
We stop asking, Who did what? and start asking, What social forces made them do it? The perpetrator becomes a patient.
Then a victim.
Then, if the political conditions are right, an icon.
And once evil has been sufficiently contextualised, there is nothing left to condemn.
Which brings us to Britain's A66 tragedy in the early hours of Saturday...
Two police officers, Matthew Blades and Tom Clough, were killed when a Volkswagen Passat travelling on the wrong side of a dual carriageway collided head-on with their marked police vehicle.
All five occupants of the Passat also died. Oh, and all five had extensive criminal histories -- 37 convictions between them.
You might expect the Government to distinguish between the people enforcing the law and those whose criminal behaviour killed them.
But that would be SO old-fashioned.
Home Office Minister Anna Turley released a statement saying:
"This morning I went down to South Bank to lay flowers and pay my respects, on behalf of our whole community, to the seven people whose lives were so tragically cut short yesterday."
Meanwhile, people released balloons to mourn the deaths... of the joyriders.
And there, in miniature, is the problem.
A society that can't distinguish between policeman and criminal, victim and perpetrator, innocence and guilt, eventually becomes incapable of defending the innocent.
Compassion is a virtue. Understanding is a virtue. Mental-health treatment is a virtue.
But compassion without moral judgment is sloppy sentimentality.
And sentimentality is a remarkably poor defence against evil.
Evil doesn't disappear because we stop calling it evil.
It just becomes harder to stop.