I voted yes, because I think we are all born sociopaths. The ability to distinguish between good and evil and choose the good based on empathy for others not just in cases where it’s benefical to us is something that develops over time with training and socialization.
Neither does insisting on using it, unless you include “dehumanize” in your definition of “useful”.
There’s a difference between pre-moral and amoral. Sociopathy isn’t something you can grow out of. It’s the hard-wiring of the brain. If we were all born sociopaths … humanity could not exist!
No. They’re just drawn that way.
I chose Other because there is no “Yes” option.
Yes, of course there are evil people. Some of the folks with anti-social personality disorder who turn to crime are excellent examples of this: Psychopathy - Wikipedia
It is sad that a lot of people out there don’t understand that a true anti-social does not have any compassion or remorse. Some people are fundamentally broken people that will never be “fixed” or reformed. Unfortunately, many people assume that everyone is like them and has some kernel of goodness/remorse/empathy. That is how those people manage to manipulate others.
For examples of people I would consider “evil”:
Good analysis, lavender!
They say the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled on mankind was convincing them he didn’t exist. People who don’t want to acknowledge the evil of their fellow man are dangerously naive. They are in peril.
It’s more that sociopaths, at least the intelligent ones, are very adept at pretending they have normal emotions. It’s not a victim’s fault if they get brainwashed into thinking a clever sociopath has normal emotions. After all, none of us can read minds. We are all dependent on what a person says and does to interpret whether they are good or evil. Except for maybe a highly-trained psychologist, of course. It’s impossible for a layperson to distinguish between an intelligent, closeted sociopath and a genuinely nice, charismatic person.
I would like to expand on my prior comment by saying that most “evil” acts are done by people who’s brains are functioning very differently than most others. They literally are wired differently, think differently, and feel differently. If you choose to call this “evil” so be it, but it’s not entirely useful for rational, intellectual discussion. I think most people who commit truly evil acts are flawed mentally, and are the product of a poorly developed brain. It seems a little unfair to call them “evil” since that implies some objective moral truth to good vs evil, as that seems to be the common definition/understanding.
What, no mention of Hitler? 
But seriously, of course there are evil people. History’s full of them.
There are good people, so why shouldn’t there be evil people? We are born with a capacity to go in either direction, and it’s a choice.
Of course, then we have to define what we mean by “good” and “evil.” But you didn’t ask that.
(bolding mine)
Now it is just a small mention but did you miss it or just not read it before posting?
Did you not notice the smiley? Or do you just not know what it means?
Anyways, of course there are evil people. Now if the question was whether anyone was born evil, I would say no. But an evil person is simply someone who performs evil actions.
There is an objective moral truth to good vs. evil. You’ll know as soon as I wrong you somehow. I find that certain people won’t cop to the whole good/evil thing for fear that it somehow could apply to them. Atheists are like this. They won’t say “evil” unless they’re referring to something related to God or religion.
But that’s just me.
If one is sufficiently damaged, broken or sick you become functionally indistinguishable from what your average person would call “evil.” At that point it becomes a semantic argument. I have no problem labeling a Charles Manson as “evil” - whatever the trauma that created him, genetic or environmental or both, in my mind it is splitting hairs to argue that even though he committed evil acts he wasn’t evil.
And I do not consider evil to be a supernatural or religious condition.
sigh
The Star Wars universe makes this so simple. Red light-sabers are the bad guys. Blue light-sabers are the good guys. Only problem is the Sith lords know how to hide their true nature, in the SWU and in real life.
None of this makes any sense without a consistent definition of evil, as an attribute of people. You can say no one is evil, and/or everyone is evil as long as we don’t know what you mean. To me, evil is only a description of behavior, not an inherent quality of things.
Morality is null in a purely deterministic universe, huh?
Evil is easier to observe than to define. It’s like breakfast and pornography that way.
Yes, definitely, if you accept the definition of evil as the opposite of ‘good’ carried out by people who abide by the socially constructed moral codes of their environment. Of course those acts have to be carried out voluntarily to define the person as being evil. Then you get into the question of whether anything we do is voluntary of hard-wired into our psyche and it all gets very complicated.
Simply put, thought, there’s evil in the Congo by standards set in the EU and US today but those standards would’ve been very different a few centuries ago.