What is evil?

Great Debates
1

I’d be amazed if this has not come up in GQ yet, what with all of the amazingly intelligent people here. I don’t pretend to know philosophy or ethics, though I am interested in them. My question is this: what is evil? Is it when a person or group displays total indiffirence and even hatred to another person or group, such as the countless genocidal campaigns throughout history? Or the calculated cruelty of serial killers such as Bundy or Dahmer? If ordered and brainwashed into believing that a certain person or group is “bad”, and killing them is good, who is more evil: the follower who obeys with glee and joy in his/her “holy” work, or the person who taught them?

To sum up: I see the word ** evil ** used often to describe various acts and groups, but what is it?

2

A tough question. And one that isn’t served by absolute definitions. It’s something that has to be judged, on a case-by-case basis.

It has a lot to do with context. The act of taking someone’s life, for instance, can be murder or euthanasia, depending on the circumstances. I think most of the examples you raised would be evil, except for “hatred” against a group. For me, only an action can evil, not an emotion. If that hatred is acted on, then it becomes evil.

The best definition of evil, for me, is an unnecessary act of cruelty. The “unnecessary” part is where things get messy, because anyone who commits an act of cruelty will argue “necessity.” This is where debate and discussion – the lifeblood of sane and conscious society – come in. This is why our societies have juries – the best way to understand if an act of evil was commited, or necessary, is take a group of emotionally-uninvolved strangers, have them hear both sides of the argument, and discuss it.

I believe human beings have an ethical instinct that helps us sort out these questions – most of us, seeing a murder, witnessing a genocide, would know, in our guts, that that is somehow wrong. We have some sense of the pain we create in others. But like any instinct, it can be repressed. We tell ourselves it was necessary, and this is sometimes true (killing someone in self-defence, for example). It may even help us to sleep at night. It’s even easier to rationalize when one does not see one’s victims.

People who commit acts of evil generally think of themselves as good people. Or at least they try to convince themselves of such. Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, discussed the “banality of evil” in the Nazi death camps – by bureaucratizing and systematizing the camps, and making each person who participated such a small part of the process, these people could convince themselves it was not really their fault.

I believe the best possible life is the ethical one. As such, I’ve tried to cultivate awareness of my actions and their results. But anyone can fail in this regard. We are all equally capable of playing our part in an atrocity, or an act of petty cruelty, and pehaps realizing our own potential for evil can help.

Religions and legal systems that try to set evil down into an absolute moral code are setting themselves up for a disaster. Context is so critical that it almost guarantees that someone following the code will commit and act of evil, sooner or later.

3

One thing I’ve learned in life is that none of the interesting answers to interesting questions involve analyzing definitions. Language is a necessary evil for the purpose of understanding what someone means: and just because everyone is stuck using the same language doesn’t imply that that they all mean the same things.

We can discuss till the cows come home what “evil” really is: but even if we could actually all agree on a definition, we wouldn’t come out with any better understanding of the world than we had before, when we already knew what we meant and all we needed to know was whether people understood what we meant when we said “evil,” or whether it might be necessary to use a different word or phrase or even paragraph.

4

The difference between good and evil is if you are eating the chicken or are the chicken.

5

Evil is theft. Or tresspassing.

6

Evil is doing something terrible that you know is wrong. However, doing what you believe is right is not evil. Take Hitler, for example. I am not advocating his policies. I think he had terrible ideas sometimes. But he wasn’t truly evil, because he believed that what he was doing was right. The Taliban is another example. They believed that what they were doing was right. Therefore, while wrong, they are not truly evil. There are countless other examples as well. Take out the history books. Brush off the dust. Find someone who was supposed to be evil. Now, think about their motives. Most of the time, you will find that they thought they were right. Therefore, I don’t think them truly evil.

7

That which advances human suffering, on balance, broadly defined, all things considered.

8

M. Scot Beck in “People of the Lie” defined evil people as people having a self-developed reality that they force on the outside world. A good example would be abusive parents who wish to project an image of “the ideal family”, both within and outside their household. Such people expend tremendous energy to eliminate obstacles or contradictions to their version of reality, often causing tremendous harm to others.

9

For me, there is no universal evil or good. In truth, the only common ethical law is the “eat or be eaten” we have inherited through instinct. We do not have a natural sense of right or wrong, to my knowledge. To my knowledge, ethical spectrums are taught. On almost every ethical spectrum there is good and there is evil. Good is whatever you are supposed to do. Evil is anything opposing such actions or on the other end of the spectrum. For example, if one were raised to believe that decapitating his fellows was “good” and being kind to others “evil” this person would see no problem with chopping off heads, but have a big problem with kindness. So, at its root, it would seem, in one sense, that evil is anything that disagrees with you.

10

That is the most ridiculous thing I have seen in awhile. “Believing you are right” does not make the action more or less evil. Hitler believed he was right. Stalin believed he was right. Ted Bundy and Charles Manson probably believed they were right.

According to your definition, Truman was more evil than Hitler because he KNEW dropping atomic bombs on cities was evil and did it anyway. This is a rediculous assertion if one examines the context of these events instead of just looking at them in an issolated vacuume. Hitler started a war that killed tens of millions in order to feed his own ego and appease some psychotic impulse to have a “racially pure” Europe. Truman dropped several atomic bombs in order to bring that war to a close without killing another million or more people.

One of these men wwas truly evil because of his intentions and actions. The other was forced to perform what could be considered evil actions in order to prevent or lesson a greater evil.

11

" There is no good and there is no evil
Theres just things people do…"

12

Or, better still, the quote I was paraphrasing…

"Maybe there ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue, they’s just what people does. Some things folks do is nice and some ain’t so nice, and that’s all any man’s got a right to say. "
The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck.

13

IMHO human beings are essentially co-operators and pretty peaceful. “Good” and “evil” are one word summaries for social and anti-social behaviour. Evil people don’t care about other people, whether through choice (religious persecutors) or brain disease (psychopaths). Good people extend the principle of caring for their own to people who are not their own – i.e. not members of their family, religion or community. Humans who co-operate are generally more fit in a Darwinian sense than people who don’t – to reproduce you have to co-operate with someone! Evil is therefore the extreme end of the non-co-operator scale. Mind you, evil is a bit like pornography – we all recognise it when we see it but it’s difficult to define in abstract terms without examples (well, it is for me).

For an evolutionary basis for human behaviour (badly and possibly incorrectly summarised above because I read both books some time ago) try Matt Ridley (The Origins of Virtue) and Steven Pinker (How the Mind Works).

14

But what if there is a piece of bread, everyone is on the brink of death, and they have no other food source, do you think they would care about each other then?

15

Like Ernest Shackletons expedition? Or that Uruguayan rugby team that crashed in the Andes? They didn’t just start clubbing each other in the head when the food ran out.

16

The following is the only rational definition of evil.

<b>evil</b>

adj. As used by hackers, implies that some system, program, person, or institution is sufficiently maldesigned as to be not worth the bother of dealing with. Unlike the adjectives in the cretinous/losing/brain-damaged series, `evil’ does not imply incompetence or bad design, but rather a set of goals or design criteria fatally incompatible with the speaker’s. This usage is more an esthetic and engineering judgment than a moral one in the mainstream sense. “We thought about adding a Blue Glue interface but decided it was too evil to deal with.” “TECO is neat, but it can be pretty evil if you’re prone to typos.” Often pronounced with the first syllable lengthened, as /eeee’vil/. Compare evil and rude.

Source: Jargon File 4.2.0

17

One of my favourite books. But there is evil in Grapes of Wrath. It’s impossible to escape the conclusion that turning the farmers out of their land is an evil act, although the banks simply se it as a grim necessity. The revulsion we feel, as the readers, at the avoidable human suffering is what tells us what evil is, and that’s what the younger Tom Joad goes to fight at the end.

18

I don’t know, msmith, I don’t think it is so ridiculous. But I wouldn’t call Truman evil, for I wouldn’t call the dropping of the bomb evil. Nor even a “necessary” evil.

19

One of my favorite thinkers/writers on the subject of evil is St. Augustine.  While I don’t necessarily agree with his conclusions (his stuff is steeped in orthodox Christian doctrine) I do believe that he was on to something special.  At the very least, he recognized that the presence of evil on earth provided certain philosophical problems. It was his investigations into those problems that created the foundation that many great and influential thinkers/writers (Spinoza, Freud, Nietzsche, Jung, Rilke) heavily built upon when they tackled the nature of evil in their own studies/art.
 
Augustine believed that evil is a privation (the deprivation of good) and therefore it is impossible to properly discuss or even prove the existence of evil except as an abstract of good.  Here is how it breaks down.

Augustine had been busy reading the Platonists and had decided that the Platonic realm of ideal forms was actually God.  His argument was that since only God is perfect anything that exists in a state of perfection (as Platonic forms do) must be God.  Augustine was very careful to point out that these forms collectively do not make up God but that God created the forms from God’s own all-encompassing completeness.

That being said, Augustine also believed that God is omnibenevolent. This led him to the conclusion that the nature of all things is good. This is a logical conclusion since all things are basically “copies” of the perfect forms from which they are derived and Augustine had already decided that those forms were God. Since God is all good, and everything that exists is essentially a “copy” of God, evrything must be intinsically good.

Now that that is out of the way it should be said that Augustine also believed that God was not only omnibenevolent but omnipotent. Pretty common beliefs, even today. But this belief caused a big problem for Augustine.  He had witnessed evil first hand and could not understand how a being that was all powerful could allow evil to exist but still be all good.  Likewise, Augustine reasoned, a being that is all good but allows evil to exist must not be all powerful.  You can see the problem. But Augustine solved it with free will.
 
God knows that the ultimate good on earth is freedom of the spirit as it relates to the freedom of choice of will in rational beings.  Free will is the one human trait that most closely resembles the ultimate perfect freedom enjoyed by God. There is no higher good than free will and it supercedes the goodness of all else.

There’s only one hitch. Having free will (which is the ultimate good) means that you have the choice to deprive yourself and others of good. It is this seperation that causes suffering, in Augustine’s mind, for both the victim and the perpetrator due to the punishment of sin.

God could stop suffering by keeping people from depriving themselves of good, but that would mean taking away free will. Since free will is the ultimate good, an all benevolent being cannot reasonably take it away. But by granting free will humans are given the choice to essentially create evil and thus suffering by depriving themselves of good. However, the evil that we know and experience in the world is eclipsed by the all encompassing good of free will. Taken as a whole, the world is a great place so long as free will (the ultimate good) is up and running.

Augustine reasoned that God does not even know evil. God did not create it and couldn’t create it even God wanted to since God is an omnibenevolent being. It exists only as a privation of good.

But how can something exist that God did not create? How can something exist that God doesn’t know about? Isn’t God omnipotent? The original form of evil cannot exist in the “realm of forms” that is God because God is all-good and evil is the denial of good. So how can evil exist? The answer that Augustine came up with is that…

…it doesn’t exist. Evil in an illusion.

I wonder if any of the above makes any sense at all.

20

This is from an essay I read recently by someone called Jennifer Szalai.
"We can try to say that 3,000 office workers were incinerated “because” of American hegemony in the Middle East or Israeli barbarism in Palestine; we can try to say that 800,000 Tutsis were butchered “because” of the legacy of Belgian imperialism; we can try to say that six million Jews were murdered “because” of the Treaty of Versailles, or “because” Hitler was an illegitimate child. All of these factors surely helped to create grievances, and these grievances surely helped to create the events that followed. After a certain point, however they ceased to contribute anything, as what was to follow exceeded any sense of necessity that characterizes the casual relationships we desperately seek.

This dark space – this gap between what would conceivably constitute a necessary response and what could only be considered a horrifying excess - deserves a name."

What she is talking about of, course, is evil.

To me, if evil is about anything it’s about negation of reponsibility and the Christian concept of original sin is not about children being born intrinsically bad. It’s a “buck stop here” sort of thing. It tries to address the fact that at some point you cannot attribute blame for personal hurt to anyone but yourself because if you do the accused will, in turn, say someone else made them do it. It’s just an endless chain of copouts. People are born with original responsibility and a failure to exercise it pretty much covers what evil is and isn’t.

The writer talks about a gap or a space. That’s where the choice is. That’s when, no matter how much personal grievance a person may have or how right they think they may be, they still have time to walk away, to just let go. If they do suffering has to become less.