This is an excellent essay by Theodore Dalrymple. In my opinion man is inherently evil, but society is not. Each new outbreak of evil is met with rejigged notions of virtue, new stigmas and taboos while older ones are discarded. Under these new constraints men behave humanely untill some new form of wickedness catches on. The more alike an individual's notion of goodness is to that of society the less evil he is.
This is why there is no invariant definition of evil. For example if we take a good man from the 19th century and set him in a contemporary society he would quickly be outcast for mistreating women and children. May be in the future after being severely deprived of natural resources and suffering from ubiquitous pollution, even lighting a fire, the fire that is hailed to have started human civilization and is sometimes worshipped, will be considered a vice.
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