Are people who commit heinous crimes "evil"?

I might not believe an evildoer who said “I just can’t help myself.” Bad guys lie. A lot. Remember I said only an all-knowing mindreader can sort out this mess and be sure they’re right? Also, please notice I didn’t say there is no free will; that would mean no one is ever good or bad. I said free will has limits.

Ok. You just lost the debate, you know. By your own admission, what you’re saying has nothing to do with justice or logic or evidence or even faith; it’s just this noise that comes out of you, willy-nilly.

Of course I remember; that’s why you can’t sort out the truth vis-a-vis me Not Being Able To Help Myself, since you’re not an all-knowing mindreader.

[QUOTE=coffeecat]
Ok. You just lost the debate, you know. By your own admission, what you’re saying has nothing to do with justice or logic or evidence or even faith; it’s just this noise that comes out of you, willy-nilly.
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And by your own admission, you can’t sort out the mess and be sure you’re right about whether folks Just Can’t Help Themselves – as you noted before then flatly asserting that you didn’t believe my claim. So you say I lose this debate by my own admission, and I say you already lost the debate by offering a claim you just got through admitting you couldn’t back up; what’s accomplished?

[QUOTE=Evil Captor]
History shows that just calling people ‘evil’ and putting them in prison does little to reduce the incidence of heinous crimes, other than preventing that individual from repeating them.
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But I never said just call them evil and put them in prison. You add that you “oppose the death penalty, mainly because it’s so irrevocable and we kill so many innocent men” – but I haven’t said Thing One in this thread about calling them evil and applying the death penalty, either. You keep drawing a line between us that I haven’t said is there; for all you know, I agree 100% with the policies you propose – except that I Can’t Help But see such people as evil.

[QUOTE=Evil Captor]
And satisfying your sentiments, however nobly couched, is a lesser goal, in terms of human happiness and safety, than mine.
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So sayeth your sentiments?

Again, it’s entirely possible that your goals – and desired policies – match mine, minus the fillip of good-versus-evil call-'em-as-I-see-'em-ism. (After all, why else are you touting human happiness and safety, except that you figure such an appeal will of course matter to me?)

Yes, it’s that time again, for Maastrichts Theory of evil!

Based on god knows how much books I read, I came up with the following statistic on everyday evil. On the whole, I don’t really find “evil” a helpful term when it comes to preventing evil instead of condemning it. It is such an unscientific term. :slight_smile:

In any given situation, your odds of interacting with another person who will act reasonable and kind, is about 85 %. I’m not making that up, that number appears in many studies on how many people will, not try to cheat the system in unstaffed self-checkouts in supermarkets.

Your odds of running into the opposite, an unpleasant person, commonly known as “asshole” is 15 %.

Two-thirds of those 15 % people are the ordinary kind people described above who just have a bad day. They cut you off in traffic, or snark at the telephone because they are themselves stressed, tired, victimized, annoyed, etc. Just like you do when you have such bad days yourself. We are all temporarily assholes to other people.
This is the category where a firm remark: “Stop acting like an asshole”, may help, at least after the asshole has cooled down a bit. It is also the category where changing the circumstances (group standards, chance of being caught) has a large impact.

The last 5 % percent are people who make life consistently difficult for most people around them and for themselves. Many, if not all of those people, have a personality disorder. Some hurt mostly themselves (schizophrenics) and some mostly hurt others (narcissisists, and the 2-to 5 % of us who are sociopaths). This category includes the Sadistic or Narcisstic boss, the (paranoid or obsessive compulsive) Neighbourhood Nut, the criminal, and the Crazy Hobo. You can call them assholes, or evil, but it won’t do you much good besides venting. The only thing that is useful to know is that with them, past results are a good indication of future results.

As for pedophiles, I don’t think you can trot them out as an “always evil”- category. It’s just that they’ve become synonymous with evil in the last twenty years or so, and more in the USA then elsewhere.
A small percentage of people are born with a sexual attraction to little kids; most wil never act on that. IMHO, those that don’t act on it are not evil, and instead deal heroically with one of the shittiest cards life could have dealt them.
As for “ordinary” sexual abuse, when it happens to involve children, and incest, those are complicated enough to warrant a whole library in themselves. Evil (not feeling or acting on, empathy) plays a part, as do psychological disorders, as do some aspects of culture (a sense of sexual entitlement, and large modern mainstream cultural condemnation of such, and the dynamic of dysfunctional families and dysfuntional institutions).
Some people are psychopaths as well as pedophiles and, if the opportunity arises, the worst of the worst may happen.

I would say yes and no. The problem for me is that saying they are not evil due to their background and genetics isvery difficult to get past when you visualize their wicked acts.