:smack:
Yes, I missed it. :o Sorry 'bout that.
I bet you’ve encountered some psychopaths. Have you ever done an “Ask the…” kind of thread? I’d love to hear more about your job and such.
Ever watched The Wire? That show did an amazing job of illustrating the shades of gray when it comes to the “good guys” and the “bad guys.” I found it very realistic in that regard.
When we declare that a person or an act is evil, we are voicing a reaction of moral disgust, a sub-category of a basic emotion hard-wired into our brains by evolutionary imperative. A person who commits acts of evil is a danger to ourselves, personally, and our tribe (and by extension, our society, our culture, our nation, and even our species). There is some flexibility to this, in that some acts you or I might perceive as evil (the forced marriage and rape of a 12 year old girl, for instance) are acceptable, necessary, and even lauded as imperative to the preservation of another’s social/cultural group.
There are those who commit acts of evil when in a context that prioritizes group identity or obedience to authority over personal morality - the Lucifer project, the Holocaust, the Milgram experiment. In those circumstances, evil becomes the standard, and resistance to evil the exception. All of us are vulnerable to the impulse to define people outside our group as Other and therefore Less Than, and when that dehumanization occurs, it becomes very easy for an otherwise “good” person to do evil. Torturers go home and care for their children with love and compassion. Officers of the law judge the human value of a victim by their life circumstances. People with power take short cuts and justify the human cost as “collateral damage”.
That is the vast majority of evil in our world.
In our prisons and secure mental facilities, there are some who lack the ability to view any other person as human or otherwise deserving of consideration. Sociopaths, psychopaths, and other labels are put on them, and most of us feel that visceral reaction of disgust, fear, and revulsion. Functional MRI scans have shown that these individuals have brains which do not work the same as our own. They lack the ability to feel the same emotions we do to the same depth, and while they have a Theory of Mind, they assign no importance to what others experience, think, or feel.
So, yes, evil exists, all people are capable of evil, and some people are, by nature, evil. But to simply leave it at that is a terrible error. If we wish to make the world a better place, to promote compassion and kindness, to ensure that others as well as ourselves are safe, healthy, and happy, it behooves us to understand what causes evil, what pushes people towards acts of evil, and what makes some individuals innately evil. Once we understand evil, we can take steps to combat evil, ameliorate evil, and perhaps even prevent evil.
I voted “No” because it’s an anachronistic and unscientific terminology that offers nothing in terms of understanding why someone behaves that way or what could have been done to prevent it.
Are there evil animals? Evil hurricanes? Evil boulders?
Of course not. Humans are no different.
Eh. If by “truly evil” you mean “in the 99th percentile of evil,” they’re rare. But if you line up all humans from best to worst, half of them are below the median point. So if you can rate moral behavior at all, and I think you can, I’d argue there’s more evil in the world than most people admit.
That’s what I’ve always said. The so-called Golden Rule seems simplistic to some people, but it’s a useful moral guidepost outside of philosophers quibbling to entertain themselves.
Really? :dubious: Atheists won’t say evil?
I know tons of nonreligious people, atheists and agnostics alike, who have very strong moral senses and are quite aware of “secular” evil. I do frequently see (allegedly) religious people assert “atheists won’t say/admit/believe in evil,” but that seems like a strawman argument against atheists.
Which is allowed in the criminal’s rule book. Again, the only rules the criminal breaks are other people’s rules.
Personally? No. Insurance guy is all about loss-mitigation. If re-offense is likely then detention, preferably with an aim toward reformation, is reasonable. I’m just playing at philosopher with respect to whether it is fair to hold someone to a set of standards they didn’t paticipate in setting. And it’s not just an academic pursuit. There are numerous cultures alive in the world today with legal standards we consider barbaric–who has the right to say which is wrong/evil? It’s a matter of aesthetics.
Didn’t vote in your poll / don’t understand your poll options.
By “evil people” do you mean “inherently evil people” i.e., people who were somehow born evil? I don’t believe in that. Evil only exists in a context.
I believe everyone’s behaviors would make sense to us if we walked not just the proverbial mile in their shoes but experienced their entire lifestory start to finish like a long long movie. I believe evil is fixed by fixing the world-context in which we all live (mostly meaning fixing how we ARE to EACH OTHER, inasmuch as the birds mountains fishes etc aren’t in need of significant modification). Not by isolating the “evil people” and ridding ourselves of them. (Not that there do not exist people whose experiences up to this point have formed them as dangerous people that the rest of us would best be rid of; just that the root of the problem doesn’t lie with their nature).
Definitely not! Sometimes my own behaviors don’t even make sense to me.
That’s OK. I know that partial information can be misleading. It can be quite amusing watching other people wonder what the poll means. 
I don’t even understand my poll options either, and I also didn’t vote in my own poll. 
I can’t agree with this assessment though. Everyone commits immoral acts from time to time, some of them are more damaging than others, but I think what makes someone evil isn’t as much what they do but why they do it. Obviously, there’s going to be a high correlation between what people do and what their motivations are, and there’s certainly some sets of acts that are extremely difficult to understand as being influenced by anything other than evil intentions, but there’s plenty of things that are done wrong and have huge ripples, but don’t that I don’t think means that person is evil.
This is why I raised the politician point. Sure, there are some who are just out for power, and they may or may not be evil, but because their decisions affect large numbers of people, at least some of whom are probably affected negatively, it’s easily to see those decisions as wrong and paint those individuals as evil. Admittedly, their intentions may not be pure, but I think exceedingly few of them are actually making these decisions with evil intentions. That is, if their motivation is “how can I cause harm to group X”, I think most people would say that is an evil intention, but rather they’re thinking “how can I help group Y”, which may not be the most pure motivation and it may negatively affect group X, but that’s not their intention, so I have trouble classing them as evil for that reason when there are those of the first type.
I also think to simply throw people on a curve and label the top half as good and the bottom half as evil more or less makes the terms useless. I think if we look at people, the vast majority are moral and not actually motivated to be evil and cause harm to others. There are plenty of people who do immoral things, but not because they’re motivated by evil. But then there are those who, in the words of Alfred, just want to watch the world burn. There are some people who are commited to a cause, and we respect it when it’s a cause we believe in, like fighting injustice or helping the disadvantaged, but when it’s a cause like tearing down society, enacting deranged fantasies, or simply just destroying things, they’re evil. I don’t think that’s something that we can just throw an arbitrary threshold on of some percentage of the population. We need to actually see what people’s motivations are before we can label them.
Yes, because I’ve met many of them. There are people who enjoy hurting other people and do it by choice for their own pleasure. I can’t see any way to describe this behavior other than evil.
There’s a phrase for this: “moral relativism”. And I find it disturbing. Most people use it as an excuse to commit evil.
You’re right to find it disturbing. And it is indeed moral relavitism.
I disagree.
Some portion of (what I consider) evil is innate. Yes, you can make it such that a person ends up doing bad things by a combination of environmental factors. But there’s genetic/psychological/brain chemistry factors at work too. So “walking a mile in their shoes” won’t cut it, we just wouldn’t react the same way to the same situations.
Many people also call it empathy and use it as a tool for understanding behaviors that strike them as odd.
I think empathy for the person should not always mean acceptance of the behaviour.
Now that’s just evil. 
See, that’s one thing we differ on. I don’t consider “evil” to be at all related to motivation, reasoning, or excuses given afterward. IMHO evil is action. I have zero moral qualms describing as evil someone who willfully inflicts harm on others for the most banal human reason: personal gain.
Whether it’s a petty crook murdering someone at an ATM for $20, a terrorist killing because his politics aren’t winning people over as fast as he wants, or a CEO deliberately sabotaging a promising underling’s career so he won’t compete for the CEO’s position, knowingly inflicting avoidable harm on others for your own benefit is bad.
Inasmuch as that person is defined by that act, I would call him evil. Now, if that CEO were to go on and donate big bucks to charities, or that terrorist were to emerge from prison decades later as a respected statesman for his oppressed minority, does that mean I’m wrong and these people are good people who “did wrong” but are not “evil?” Well, now you’re defining them by different acts. If you’re looking at the totality of someone’s life, all acts, you have to balance the evil against the good to determine how to categorize that person, if you want to pigeonhole him at all.
I think it’s pointless to consider someone’s motivation, as we cannot know what it was in any objective sense. Particularly in cases where the person materially gains from the act but says he or she did it for other reasons. A classic example is Susan Smith. When her case was in the news, everyone said she HAD to be insane / delusional because no mother would kill her own children. But it turns out that she wanted a relationship with a wealthy man who did not want a woman with children – a strong financial motivation to do away with her kids.
Did she in fact kill them for perceived profit, and not out of delusion? We cannot know; we can only speculate. But in her case, the “personal benefit” motive is always there, lurking, regardless what we think about her lawyers’ claims of mental illness or her apparently having been abused when she was younger.
Did the abuse contribute to her ability to make the decision to kill her children? Sure, possibly. But I’d say at that point we’re arguing about what made her evil, how she got that way, whether being evil is her fault, not whether she is evil or not.
Not really true. Almost all prisoners have no problem with the practices of imprisonment being applied to all those other guys. Just because a guy’s a criminal doesn’t mean he wants to be a crime victim. Murderers don’t want to be killed. Rapists don’t want to be raped. Thieves don’t want other thieves stealing the things they stole. They’re all perfectly happy with society stopping everyone else from committing any crimes. They just don’t like it when society applies those measures against them.