Soylent Green makes everyone potentially useful to society.
It’s good for you, and probably isn’t anyone you know 
Not everyone is capable of being good. Charlie Manson comes to mind. It just isn’t in his nature to be good, as it is for a certain subset of the population.
For some, it isn’t even their own predisposition. If you’re born in the worst shithole on earth and don’t have a prayer of improving your life, then I don’t think you have the capability of doing good. You may have the best of intentions, but no capability to carry them out.
See, I wasn’t assuming that. I figured the question was the reverse or a warm-up to the question “should society care for, support, and find a use for everyone?” And everyone is everyone, or society isn’t ready to deal, because eventually, it will have to deal with everyone, including folks in vegetative states, harlequin babies*, and folks with frontotemporal dementia.
This is not to say that some use could not be made of everybody, just that it sometimes takes a lot of work from a lot of other people to arrange and maintain that use.
*I’m pleased to see that there’s now a treatment for Harlequin ichthyosis, and that people with the condition now live to adulthood in relatively good health. Whatever work went into developing the treatment was worth it. Untreated, it’s a nasty way to die young.
This was my thinking, too, and I’ve never yet heard of any society that doesn’t have some way of ostracizing/marginalizing/degrading people it has no use for.
I actually used to work for a consulting firm whose corporate restructuring practice was if not the national leader, one of the top few in the country.
They weren’t evil or anything like that, they just had a job to do. Sometimes they weren’t as competent as you’d think for the amount of money being spent.
Generally they were hired by the major creditor groups to see what they could do with the company to keep it solvent. Often this did include large layoffs and/or fairly rough restructuring in other ways.
But keep in mind this wasn’t so some fat-cat CEOs could twiddle their mustaches, but rather so the company could remain in business at all. 99% of the companies that those guys worked for were either bankrupt, or a quarter or so away. Without their efforts, EVERYONE at those companies would be out of a job.
Looking at them as evil is almost like looking at firemen for being assholes because they jacked up a bunch of stuff with axes and crowbars in your flaming house in order to put the fire out.
For the OP; I think people are inherently good, but that can get twisted and obscured such that people end up evil. I think that there are lots of people who aren’t of any real utility to society due to various disabilities, impaired thinking, skewed ideas of self-worth, etc… That’s not to say that they’re worthless and should be eliminated or anything crazy like that, but just that they’re not really making contributions to society and are using resources.
Evil exists in & of itself.
Evil = bad = useless = dangerous to society as a whole or to individuals.
Until genetic test at conception or sometime early that can reliably predict those things society deems bad & can be fixed, then there will be some who can not be made to be acceptable and/or useful.
Some evil has costs that are too great to be worth using as an example.
Hitler
Stalin
Pol Pot
for example.
All things may be doable but some things are not worth doing due to their costs.
YMMV
I would like to think that everyone has the potential to be “good,” but there’s absolutely no way I could believe that. My feeling is that some people are just “damaged goods” on a basic physical level, that is, their brains are just wired differently. I do think that most “evil” is environmental and experiential in nature, but not all of it. I can’t see how with the 7 billion people on earth (or whatever the number there is), there isn’t some small sliver that is simply by matters of genetics or physical abnormalities or whatnot not impaired in a manner that would be generally described as “evil.”
Your friend thinks that Charles Manson has a good layer somewhere down there. Well maybe if you stripped him all the way down by lobotomizing him. Same with Paul Bernardo (q.g.).
I think that all people can be a good and useful to society, in a society that’s correctly organized. Obviously some people have a tendency to be anti-social and violent. 150 years ago, such a person might have gone out to the frontier and lived as a hunter and trapper, rarely interacting with any other human being. Today such options are much more limited, to the point where it’s not really an option for most. Hence the violent and anti-social are likely to end up in prison one way or another.
It’s also certain the case that some societies are more strict and others more permissive, and this shapes the character of the people who live in those societies.
I don’t think people who are profoundly retarded or in the end stages of dementia have the capacity to be either useful or good. It doesn’t necessarily mean they should be drowned, but they are not being useful, and I doubt they are moral agents either, and therefore can’t be good (or evil).
Regards,
Shodan
If we limit it to people of average or better IQ and no dementia (I agree with those exceptions):
I question the assumption that even evil people (Hitler, Stalin, etc.) were never, ever good or useful to society. True, their evils greatly outweighed their good, but, as they say, Hitler was a hell of a motivational speaker, and Stalin got overburdened peasants organized and inspired to make their lives better.
Even serial killers love their mamas. Rapists can clean up trash. Everyone is *capable *of being/doing good to someone, sometime. It just may not nearly balance out their evil, and they may not ever chose to try to balance the scales.
I will admit, I don’t know a single good thing Charles Manson ever did. He was broken pretty young. But I have faith there was something, even if very small, or there could have been, if he’d had a better support system.
If you were to stretch things a bit you could say that they are catalysts for bringing out the good in others.
And suffering. Life is not sunshine and kittens for their caregivers: if it was, my workplace wouldn’t exist.
That’s sort of what I was thinking.
I’ve worked with people so disabled you can’t really say they’re useful to society, in the ant-colony-sense.
But perhaps their contribution is actually in allowing society to better itself by caring for them?
When I first went to Romania, years ago, they kept a big building where they threw away the people they saw no use for, like a rubbish bin for people. And it was one of the symptoms of a sick society. Turning that around heals society itself, in my experience. Their use to society is not a direct contribution, but perhaps rather the way in which a healthy society can express its compassion and learn more.
But real evil, I don’t know. I’ve seen some real evil and I can’t tell if there was any potential for good there. I also can’t see any use to society, no learning moment or anything. I guess it’s just a question of what might have been, an unknown unknown, and for a large part just dependent on belief.
ETA: and what Quartz said. Sorry, was gonna quote you too, but forgot to click the button!
And we have a WINNER! 
Give the man a cigar! 
Huh. I’ve gone with the least popular option: “Everyone is potentially good but not useful to society”.
Reason being there are some people with severe mental and physical disabilities where there is no obvious job they could perform at this time. Of course there may be something they could do if only we knew about it and could unlock it, but I think that stretches the idea of “potential” too far.
In terms of “good” I think it is sufficient for people to behave well, not necessarily be predisposed that way. And it is pretty clear that societies can shape behaviours even if they cannot change our genes.