Seems like there is subjective evil and objective evil. Subjective evil would be - it’s OK if my side does it, but it’s bad if the other side does it. Objective evil would be evil that everyone, or almost everyone, can agree is wrong.
But even that - objective evil - would be hard to classify. I’m sure there are people in the world who sincerely endorse slavery, even some worse things.
You may very well be right.
Many religious/philosophical attempts at addressing the “problem of evil” (i.e. Why does evil exist? Why does God allow evil? etc.) boil down to something like: It’s impossible to eliminate the possibility of evil without also eliminating something else valuable, like free will or cause-and-effect. But that would be saying that Evil in general is in some sense “necessary,” not that any particular evil is.
Clarke’s Law states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I propose a similar law that states that any sufficiently damaged/broken personalities’ actions become indistinguishable from evil. At some point you have to say “Yeah, I get it that your past has broken you to this point but damn, dawg, you need to be put down for the good of everyone around you.”
It’s possible for something to be objective without everyone agreeing about it. (Look at all the people who have claimed that Coronavirus is a hoax.)
But I do think it’s reasonable to say that Evil can be objective or subjective. And in that sense it’s sort of like Beauty. When we say that a person, or a painting, or a scene, or an action, is beautiful, are we saying something about the person/thing/action itself, or about our reaction to it, or both? I’d say both; but some people argue that Beauty is entirely in the eye of the beholder.
And similarly for Evil. When I say that a person or an action is “evil,” am I saying something objective about the person or action itself, or am I saying something subjective about my reaction to it or my opinion of it?
The thread title asks if there really is such a thing as “Evil”? It’s clear to me that Evil exists at least in a subjective sense. If evil is in the eye of the beholder, then clearly there are some things that we regard as evil. The controversy comes in when we ask whether Evil exists in an objective sense. I believe it does, but not everyone would agree.
Evil is a useful philosophical device, and important to discuss values with having some kind of negative category, which is sufficient to defend its existence. In a ideal world, certain behaviors are ‘evil’, certain actions are ‘evil’ and certain conditions are ‘evil’.
There’s a large gulf between Plato and Machiavelli.
Every philosophical system starts with a key assumption, and even a rodent starts with ‘Do what feels good’, so everyone has one. Mine is ‘Human well-being has value’.
Then, as a direct consequence, you wind up with actions, policies and conditions that are anathema to your philosophy. When those are carefully scrutinized, you can meaningfully decide that Sociopathy is evil. And inside a consistent, coherent framework, you can find the strength to stand on that point and, as much as one can be with philosophy, be right.
Most people don’t spend this much wattage on trying to figure out morality, but even a hollow shell or a criminal are going to have beliefs, and a hardline nihilist starts with a different premise. Evil is socially defined, but inside of everyone is a means to judge. A hollow shell lives strictly under compliance is good; criminals are notorious for attacking pedos and child abusers in prison.
So respectfully, I disagree. And I think diverse cultures around the world drawing broad agreement would suggest that people agree enough that evil is discrete and actionable. I think that Evil is a lot more narrowly defined (people are likely to simply claim things they don’t agree with to be evil) but ultimately, you’d get 80% of the world to agree on a lot of things, and that’s the basis of evil.
Scott Peck has written on evil. I like his terms.
(http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/L001345/$File/left-quote.png) There really are people and institutions made up of people, who respond with hatred in the presence of goodness and would destroy the good insofar as it is in their power to do so. They do this not with conscious malice but blindly, lacking awareness of their own evil – indeed, seeking to avoid any such awareness. As has been described of the devil in religious literature, they hate the light and instinctively will do anything to avoid it, including attempting to extinguish it. They will destroy the light in their own children and in all other beings subject to their power.
Evil people hate the light because it reveals themselves to themselves. They hate goodness because it reveals their badness; they hate love because it reveals their laziness. They will destroy the light, the goodness, the love in order to avoid the pain of such self-awareness. My second conclusion, then, is that evil is laziness carried to its ultimate, extraordinary extreme. As I have defined it, love is the antithesis of laziness. Ordinary laziness is a passive failure to love. Some ordinarily lazy people may not lift a finger to extend themselves unless they are compelled to do so. Their being is a manifestation of nonlove; still, they are not evil.
Truly evil people, on the other hand, actively rather than passively avoid extending themselves. They will take any action in their power to protect their own laziness, to preserve the integrity of their sick self. Rather than nurturing others, they will actually destroy others in this cause. If necessary, they will even kill to escape the pain of their own spiritual growth. As the integrity of their sick self is threatened by the spiritual health of those around them, they will seek by all manner of means to crush and demolish the spiritual health that may exist near them.
I define evil, then, as the exercise of political power – that is, the imposition of one’s will upon others by overt or covert coercion – in order to avoid extending one’s self for the purpose of nurturing spiritual growth. Ordinary laziness is nonlove; evil is antilove. !
Another thing I wanted to bring up in this discussion, is punishment, and what was considered justified at one time.
Just to cite one example (and there are many), in England, it was once considered justifiable to burn gays alive for having sex. Yet even the most ardent conservative today would never suggest that. (And it is worth pointing out, England has long been considered an example of mercy and due process throughout the ages–so there must be even worse examples than this.)
That is why I stopped believing is retribution long ago. I do agree some people can be rehabilitated. And some probably should be locked away, to stop them from harming others (if they can’t be rehabilitated.)
But no, to me there is no evil. Just suffering and tragedy, that I do believe it is our duty to eliminate.
Does that make clear to any of you what I meant in my OP?
I think it’s been shown that sociopaths have no consciences. In other words, no feelings of guilt. Why then would they feel bad about seeing themselves for what they are? I don’t think they feel any pain of self-awareness at all. If they try to “destroy the light” by suppressing the truth, it’s to avoid punishment by others, or to retain their power, not so they won’t feel bad about themselves.
I think Scott Peck is writing about evil through the lens of someone with a healthy conscience.
I’m not sure but I don’t think it was claimed that sociopath = evil.
If you go down that road then all badness in the world would be considered superhuman and beyond study. There are human psychological aspects though for most or many bad acts in the world. Bad families don’t usually consist only of sociopaths who are psychological mysteries. I think these people have a maelstom of guilt, fear, abuse etc which results in who they are. Sociopaths became that by a psychological means even if it’s claimed that they end up with abnormal thought processes. It’s a complicated reality.
Pecks healthy conscience? How else would you look at this?
Personally, I believe true sociopaths are born with a lack of empathy.
(Quote is not by drad_dog but is drad_dog quoting Scott Peck.)
How is he defining laziness? (Link didn’t work well for me.) Because ‘taking any action in one’s power’ seems to me the opposite of laziness.
In order to understand a sociopath’s mindset, you have to ignore your conscience. Truly evil people are not poor tortured souls desperately trying to avoid the truth about themselves. In fact, they’ll use that assessment to manipulate people like Peck into feeling sorry for them and giving them another chance to redeem themselves. And they’ll be thinking what a sucker Peck is for falling for it.
Is that true, though? It is pretty well established that lack of empathy is one of the defining characteristics of sociopathy/psychopathy, but is it literally an entirely congenital/genetic condition that is an inevitable outcome, or might it be merely a tendency/vulnerability toward which an individual’s makeup is likely to converge? (I do not wish to suggest that bad child-rearing produces the pathology inasmuch as we really know of no consistently “right” way to raise a child.)
No doubt there’s a spectrum. A terrible childhood probably contributes to a hardened, jaded view of the world that facilitates evil tendencies. If there’s a genetic component, a parent with evil tendencies may be likelier to be abusive to their own children, and produce a vicious criminal.
But there are examples also of parents who were by all accounts good nurturing parents that still somehow produced monsters. I don’t care to do the research right now, but I’m sure there are plenty of them.
I’m pretty sure drad_dog is referencing Peck’s book People of the Lie.
Peck uses “evil” in a specific sense which he describes in the book. It’s been a long time since I’ve read it, so I tried to find a decent summary on line, and one of the sites that Google gave me was this blog post (about which I know nothing) that says
Whether or not a person is aware of their evildoing being evil is a philosophical argument. Neither one gives a shit about others.
Which goes back to runaway selfishness.
Thanks! I read it months ago and I need to go back into it to be able to say more.
This is a topic where there is a danger of just arguing with folks you agree with based on semantics and other stuff.
Peck came to believe in God and incorporate it into his work, before he wrote “The Lie”. I’m not there with him, but I value his insight and I think that evil is a spiritual concept.
He wrote the book because it was something that he couldn’t address in his first book. It was such a problem for him and humanity that he needed to write a book about it by itself. That alone is a very profound thing.
About Peck: I do recall now that I felt he could have not decided to call it evil in his book. It would have been the same if he had called it narcissism. Since this has a clinical reality I thought he should have stopped there. I don’t think there was a need to call it anything else.
Is there such a thing as evil? Yes.
Putin.
But he’s not evil in a way we haven’t seen before, right?
