Evil is a vacuum.

Three thousand years in Hell have made this much clear to me: evil is nothing. It's a vacuum. It's a space where something should have been but isn't. Cowardice is the absence of courage. Malice is the absence of love. Falsehood is the absence of truth. And so on. My point is this: the more attached you are to evil, the less you actually are. So I was only half-right when I said we weren't quite dead. The truth is, we weren't quite alive because we had filled our lives with emptiness.

J. Augustine Wetta, The Eighth Arrow