Just wondering - what does anybody think a precise definition of evil is?
Is it purely human? Is it a necessary component of our existence?
Is there any validity in the Judeo-Christian doctrine of the “fall”?
I have no idea - I consider this the toughest question in philosophy.
I am not even sure it exists.
If you equate evil with suffering you have to say then that animals are involved in make each other suffer and hence are evil. This means that evil is not a consequence of rational thought, and could indicate that it is a necessary component of existence.
The only way of avoiding this is to invoke reincarnation of human souls saying that animals are human souls being punished.
If this is so, then evil is definitely a human thing, being the name for (and this is my tentative description for evil) “acting out of any motive other than all-embracing love”. Any such actions in the traditional religions are punished in kind.
But the real puzzling questions are: what drives someone to act out of non-loving motives? And why would God punish someone who is evil? Doesn’t this only cause more suffering?
I think that “evil” is just a subjective term used to frighten small children and people with weak minds. It is just an amorphous guilt trip layed on people to contol them. Nothing is inherently “good” or “evil” ,every thing simply just is. Look at our views on killing. If you kill in the name of your countrie then you are a hero. If you kill just for the heck of it , then you are considered “evil”. Killing is still killing. Only humanitys subjective morality allows for one to be acceptable and the other not.
Then I guess you wouldn’t mind mind weighing out a quarter pound of evil for me and putting it in a to-go bag. Evil is an abstract concept no matter how palpable it seems to you. That does not preclude its existence, but it does make it necessarily subjective. His example might not hold for all cases but he is hardly comparing “apples and oranges.”
No matter how subjective morality is, there are clear and objective differences between the two situations.
What if your people will be killed or enslaved if you do not kill somebody? If we had allowed Nazis to live, we would have also allowed a lot more jews to die. That moral counterweight makes killing in a war very different from killing somebody for fun and profit.
Is it moral to play god and decide who lives? That’s a different, interesting question, but in a situation like WWII either action or inaction is choosing who dies - you got that kind of power, sometimes there is no way not to use it.
So yeah - there is a difference, and no discussion about the nature of evil can be complete without acknowledging that difference.
Evil, for me, is being given the choice between doing something destructive and doing something beneficial, and consciously deciding to do the destructive thing.
It does not make it subjective, although how one percieves it is. For most people, air is subjective. It is all around us, it has an unnoticable weight. We only become aware of it in its absence, in fact. Yet it is real and measuravble, with the proper tools. I happen to believe those tools are spiritual ones.
Evil is when the ratio of concern for yourself / the concern for others approaches infinity. If you rob blind beggars to feed your crack habit, that’s large / small, or close to infinity. If you give your own money to said beggars, that’s small / large, or good.
I dont see the nazis as evil. The soldiers simply did what they were told to do. What makes the English,French and Russians the heros of WW2 , but the Germans the demons of WW2?? Both sides just did what they were instructed to. Had Hitler won the war I doubt any of us would consider him evil today.
The Soldiers who served Germany were not normally Nazi party members. In fact, party members usually had political jobs.
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What makes the English,French and Russians the heros of WW2 , but the Germans the demons of WW2?? Both sides just did what they were instructed to.
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The English and the French and the Americans didn’t slaughter civilians en masse because they wanted to. They did use pretty brutal tactics because they had no choice but do so or die. The English, in particula, had compelling reasons not to get involved with WWII. Hitler was ready at one point to sign an armistice with some favor toward England. They stod on principle, not orders.
Yes, just like people in Russia all loved Stalin while he as alive, right?
However, all of your post boils down to a single idea: that being told to do something makes it correct. I don’t believe so. If God told me to murder my child, I would not do it. I’ve often wondered if Abraham didn’t fail his test by God…
I define evil as the rejection of love. I define love as the faciliation of goodness. I define goodness as the aesthetic most valued by God. I use God and love as synonyms.
I didn’t say the German soldiers (which I should have said instead of Nazis, I guess) were all evil. I believe there are good men on both sides of every war. But is it not an odd, and possibly dangerous, morality to say that it is only morally acceptable to kill evil people?
It’s a sad (evil?) fact of the world that a good man can cause great suffering. And that the only way to prevent this suffering is to kill these good men. Is it a better thing to allow these men to live, or to end a holocaust? I don’t have an answer to that question for you. But that’s what I’m trying to get across.
Had Hitler won the war I doubt any of us would consider him evil today.
Maybe so. Different people would have died. Different choices of who would die would have prevailed. It turned out to be our choice. That a choice was made might be evil, but it’s also unavoidable.
Air is hardly subjective. We breath it, we feel it in the wind, we can describe it in terms of immutable physical laws and can make measurements of it with physical tools. Our understanding of “air” across cultures and across time has changed in a subjective fashion much as our conception of “evil” has, but while “air” is an actual physical phenomenom, “evil” exists only in the interpretations of those who use the term. Your analogy does not hold, it gives itself away when your talk turns to “spiritual tools.”
At the point where you enter the realm of the spiritual the “tools” you speak of transcend any meaningful analysis of their properties and/or usefulness. The tools themselves become subjective and are prey to personal interpretations and rationalizations.
Take the fledgling debate on whether the Nazi’s were “evil” for instance. It is correctly noted that had the war gone the other way it might just as easily be said that the Americans were undeniably evil. Had the Communists taken over the world our capitalist mode of existence would be trotted out daily as a textbook example of evil. The “spiritual tools” that militant Islamic terrorists claim to employ quite obviously judge us as evil.
Even the trade-offs that Engywook implies…
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Does such a case exonerate Palestinian terrorists? Does it exonerate the Nazi soldier with a head filled with anti-semitic propaganda to the point where Zionism seems like a direct attack on his own people? To the point where “good” is Nazi domination of the world and “evil” is personified by the Jew? I am sure that according to their own beliefs their actions actually represent “goodness.” The moral counterweight argument cuts both ways and unfortunately it isn’t always clear what weights are even valid.
In any event, the extent of the Holocaust was only made apparent after the defeat of Germany. Given the prevalence of anti-semitism prior to WWII, I doubt that historians seriously contend that any country entered the war with the express intent of “saving the Jews.” I would concede however that more than a few individuals likely did have such an intent in mind.
I have a personal distaste for the term “evil” simply because it is too vague and too easily bent to serve ideology. Its very implication is that there is nothing at all subjective about it and for me that is why it is so dangerous.
That said, I believe Soup_du_jour is on the right track:
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The trouble is that the boundary between destructive and beneficial isn’t always clear, nor is the proper identity of either. That is the trouble with defining evil from the outside. On the inside however, a willful choice to do the “wrong” thing cannot be anything but evil.
Evil is pretty much impossible to define. For any definition you can come up with, I can come up with some situation that serves as an exception. However, I don’t think “evil”, as a concept is all that subjective. Some things are more evil than others, and how “evil” something is is subjective to some extent, but there exist things that are unequivocably evil. Hitler was evil. Saddam is evil. Whoever invented Teletubbies is evil.
That being said, evil does have some qualities that can be pointed out as absolutes:
Evil causes harm, or at least tries to
Evil is a conscious and deliberate thing.
Evil requires intelligence.
Evil possesses a modicum of rationale, and a grasp of morality. Animals can’t be evil, because they lack both. Someone who commits murder because the voices in his head tell him to isn’t evil, just insane.
Evil is an extreme thing. Tripping someone is mean, but not evil. Kicking them in the shin is mean, but not evil.
Like Lord Ashtar said: I can’t define evil, but I know it when I see it.
Jeff
This can’t be right - it would make all animals evil. Even if you take animals out of the argument, you would be saying that people who cannot empathise (perhaps because of neurological damage such as autism) are evil. Can anybody or anything be said to be “evil” if they cannot help doing the thing that is labelled evil? Is a schizophrenic serial killer “evil” if he genuinely believed God told him to do the murders? (I don’t know the answer to this, by the way!)
The trouble is that evil is such a vague category. It helps if you can break it down in to subcategories. Sadism and malice for example - the deliberate infliction of pain and suffering. Interestingly, empathy is necessary in order to be sadistic or malicious, because you need some understanding of the effects of your action on another - you have to be able to put yourself in the other person’s shoes.
So evil seems to imply some sort of deliberate intention to commit harm. On the other hand, you could argue that most of the evils of the world arise because of apathy, conformity and laziness - eg ordinary citizens who turned a blind eye to the Holocaust because their own concerns seemed more important, people who ignore an injured person in the street, or buy clothes made by child slaves etc etc. None of them consciously ill-wished anyone else.
I think I’d conclude by saying there are many forms of evil, and so it is probably not a very useful word. Better to define exactly what sort of evil you mean, and go on from there.
