I read that Ted Bundy (infamous serial killer) lacked a brain connection that nomrally enables people to create morality instincts. And when I think of child molesters, I wonder if they have their own mis-wiring that create intense affections towards kids instead of adult women.
Are these types of people truly evil? Or just born with a very unfortunate set of circumstances?
Evil as in the bible pounding devil is real version? No. Brain miswired to lack whatever it is that makes us normal? Yes.
Whatever they are, they need to be isolated from society, though treated humanely until their execution.
Is that a quote from Jesus?
Might be. He was treated rather shabbily before his.
That’s what I was thinking. I wonder if the Romans debated whether or not to call him “evil” before they killed him.
I read a letter written by Ted Bundy where he said that he could see no moral difference between killing and eating a pig and raping and murdering a woman. As far as I know there was nothing abnormal about his brain. He was diagnosed with a variety of disorders including antisocial personality disorder, bipolar disorder, multiple personality disorder and a few others but medical experts seemed to change their minds quite often. Given that Bundy was very good at manipulating others this shouldn’t come as a big surprise. By own expert (and by expert I mean I have no qualifications whatsoever) is that Bundy was one of those rare sociopaths who was good at telling people whatever they wanted to hear in order to get what he wanted.
Anyway, to answer the question put forth by the OP: Yes, most people who commit heinous crimes are evil.
A paraphrase of His general attitude in both Testaments, especially when He spoke as Yahweh in the Older one.
To the OP, I think it’s an interesting question. What surprised me during my years defending people accused of crimes (and often guilty of such crimes) is that there didn’t seem to be much of a difference between “criminals” and the rest of us. Most criminals (not all) were leading pretty normal lives, until they weren’t. The truly bad ones were perhaps “evil,” but I’m not sure the label is particularly useful. Even the worst I met had mothers who loved them and friends who were surprised by their actions.
it’s a hard question. even if 2-4% of people are sociopaths that doesn’t explain family regimes of evil. north Korea for example, the idea that the grandfather, father and son could all be genetic sociopaths is really really low. chances are all felt empathy, unlike sociopaths.
I tend to assume it is a mix of bad environment and sociopathy in the truly destructive. I don’t know if I’d consider either truly evil though. to me evil is more when you are indifferent to suffering you cause because you consider your agenda moral. people from bad environments or with misfired brains lack that motivation
To me, evil is cheap morality. You decide this person or group of persons is evil so you can do whatever you like to them, such as kill and imprison them, because they are evil. Now I agree that psychopaths like Ted Bundy should be locked away from society until we understand them well enough to prevent them from committing more evil deeds, but it’s not because he’s evil, it’s because he’s a danger to the rest of us. Just playing the cheap morality card of “evil” does nothing for me.
We’re talking about heinous crimes and whether or not that makes someone evil. So we’re talking about murderers and rapist. Do we label murderers and rapist and evil simply so we can take their stuff or do whatever we want to them? I don’t think so. We label them as evil because their outrageous actions are a danger to the rest of us.
It seems to me that this is essentially a question about the definition of evil. Is it a matter of intent or a matter of result? Is it some defect in brain chemistry, is it learned, is it some sort of taint of the soul (if one believes in that)? Likely, what makes someone evil is some sort of combination of these things.
I recall hearing about research into this from Columbia University and, if I recall the results correctly, overwhelmingly people who commit heinous crimes have three major things in common: sociopathy and/or other disorders, childhood abuse, and brain injury.
This makes sense to me. We look at the people who commit these terrible crimes, and even if they show some predisposition to that sort of behavior, they all have tragic childhoods as well. Hell, even if the likes of Bundy or Dahmer abused animals or attacked their peers as kids, I’m sure we all probably knew someone like that growing up, who probably wasn’t sexually or physically abused or suffered traumatic brain injury, and more or less learned to cope with society as adults.
So, really, what is evil? If a person simply lacks a moral compass, for whatever reason, is it fair to call them evil when they truly can’t see the difference? What about a person who knows that something is wrong, but just doesn’t care, is selfish, believes they can get away with it, or somehow justifies it? If a person commits one or a few truly heinous crimes are they more or less evil than someone who commits more but relatively less heinous crimes? If someone is born with a very serious disorder but otherwise treated well and turns out to do heinous crimes, is he inherently evil? What if someone is horribly mistreated and “made” into a person who does those things?
At least to me, evil is just such a loaded word, carrying religious and social and historical and all sorts of baggage, that it’s really impossible to get any sort of useful meaning out of it. Though I think most of us would consider someone like Bundy to be evil under almost any definition of the word, I feel it’s as much tragic as anything, whether it’s because he truly couldn’t see the difference or because he was made that way through abuse, neither of those possibilities is a conscious choice that a reasonable person can or would make.
So it seems to me that, labeling people who commit heinous acts is the greatest evil, if anything is, because it’s a way of separating us and treating those people as less than human. That is, it’s the “normal” people making a conscious choice and by separating them, many of us can easily justify to ourselves that they’re just the broken outlier, and we can feel comfortable with shoving them in a tiny cell for the rest of their lives or executing them.
Instead, I think it makes the most sense to just label certain acts as evil, based upon just how far outside the rules of morality those acts are. And though we very well may need to protect ourselves from people who commit evil acts, through imprisonment or execution or whatever, it just doesn’t make much sense to me to label the person himself as evil.
We label them as evil because then we don’t have to think about them any more. They’re evil so we don’t have to ask disturbing questions like: What really differentiates them from us? What made them do what they did? Could we prevent people from going down the same path in the future by understanding them better? Are the causes of their behavior personal or is there a social element?
You know, tough questions like that.
Why would Ted Bundy be regarded as more evil than, say, Ken Lay? I would say that the suffering Lay perpetrated affected quite a few more people, it was just a little less icky in its execution. The fact that he never looked one of his victims in the face makes his “evil” that much more heinous.
Even though Ken Lay wasn’t a good person, I’d still say that what he did was not as bad as a serial killer. For any sane person, it is worse to be brutally murdered than to have all your material possessions stolen. Neither is a good situation, but one is clearly worse.
I’d look at it as being a matter of motive and concern.
If you’re mentally ill in some fashion and you really, truly believe that molesting children is ok, then you’re certainly mentally ill and messed up, but not necessarily evil.
On the other hand, if you know it’s wrong, and do it anyway because you don’t care about anyone but yourself, or because you relish in the idea that it’s wrong and hurtful, then yeah, that’s pretty much my definition of evil.
I don’t think there’s any way to objectively judge whether a PERSON is good or evil, only whether acts are good or evil. I’d say in order for a person to be evil, he should know that the acts he is committing are wrong, and that he could stop committing those acts very easily. So someone with a compulsion isn’t evil, just sick. And someone who thinks the acts are justified would not be evil, because he believes he is doing what is right.
The “bwahahaha” type of villain who does evil, knows he does evil, and revels in his own evil, is a pretty rare thing and I’d be hard pressed to prove that any single person is that way.
I’m pretty sure that a legal finding of guilt, I.E. a labeling of murderer and/or rapist etc., is more than enough to “take their stuff or do whatever we want to them”. The label of “evil” on the other hand,
Thanks, and now I don’t have to type all that!
CMC fnord!
Evil is not a thing, or a force. It is an opinion, and a very subjective one.