One of the assumptions I have found absolutely mystifying in many of the post 9/11 threads is the idea that violence and hatred are necessarily embraced only by a tiny minority of a given ethnic group, and that the majority wish only peace and harmony. It seems to me that in that last decade we have seen ample evidence to the contrary–Serbs vs. Croats, Hutu vs. Tutsi, Israelis vs. Arabs. Sure, a given Palestinian may say that he wants peace, but if you ask him if he’ll accept peace in exchange for recognizing the right of Israel to exist, he’ll say, “Hell, no!”
Outside the realm of politics, we see evidence of human depravity–rape, murder, child molestation, large-scale corporate fraud. A friend of mine caught HIV from a trick–“He said he was negative!” We have seen the human damage from the Catholic Church shielding pedophiles and allowing them to harm children unchecked.
Why do you trust people? Why do you believe that people are basically good? Why do so many Dopers refuse to believe in the pervasive existence of evil?
I believe in the concept of innate human self-centredness and selfishness. As a result of this I believe in the ability of human beings to do incredibly evil things. However, I also believe in the ability of humans to do much, much good and in the power of God to change people’s lives for the better - that is why I haven’t yet thrown myself under a train, which I would be tempted to do if the world were as innately evil as the picture you have painted.
Well, I think there’s a bit of rose-colored glasses on most people. But try this thought chain…
Evil can be defined as say, self-centeredness to the point of destruction. That is to say, evil is, by it’s nature, destructive and not constructive when place in a societal context.
However, the human race has consistently improved it’s condition and society and acheivements over the 50,000 years or so that we’ve been at it.
Doesn’t it mean, therefore, that, on the whole, people are not overly evil? Wouldn’t a society, the majority of which are self-motivated to the exclusion of all else, work against itself?
Don’t get me wrong. As I’ve argued here before I think that most people are argumentative, unreasoning and selfish. But they don’t necessarily become evil until they let those parts of themselves spiral unchecked.
One of the reasons I’m such a fan of capitalism is that it’s a form of society that not only allows for this natural selfishness but requires it. You gotta work with what you got.
Most people on this board (and in the world as a whole) like to think of themselves as good. Most people on this board also like to think of other people as being fundimentally like themselves.
Actually, I’m a little tired of the insistance that this battle with the Taliban and al qaida is one of good vs. evil. Certainly I recognized early on that the Taliban must go and that the works of Al Qaida were horrible. But I think setting up a situation in which the U.S. represents “good” and the TRUE “god” is on our side is quite over the top. (See this http://www.skepdic.com/refuge/bunk.html about 3/4 of the way down for some information about flip-flopping regarding the true representatives of evil.)
Humans have a tendency to behave in this manner with regard to any “monstrous” activity. Rather than recognizing monstrous acts as part of human nature and treating them as such, we label the perpetrators monsters, thus separating them from the rest of us…the humans.
L
Unfortunately, the 9/11 hijackers were human. As was John Wayne Gacy. Understanding why these things happen and how to stop them can only be accomplished by recognizing this. In some cases, the only difference between “us and them” is that THEY acted on their impulses and we held ours in check. Figuring out why some human beings cross that line would go much farther toward solving the problem than simply labelling them monsters.
I don’t think that many people could deal with a world that was necessarily evil. We could not live our daily lives if we just knew that the person who we have to rely on for simple services was out to get us. In the “totally evil world” there would not be any bit of love, compassion, or peace. Not even on a small scale.
I can see these things on a small scale, if not on a large one. Sure, there are people who are killing each other for stupid reasons, but there are also many, many people who are not killing other people. This would not occur in the “totally evil world.”
Of course there is some evil in the world and in people, but i think that it is outweighed in most cases be the “good” in people. Indviduals only become truely evil when they choose to allow the evil in them to be expressed over the good.
One of the reasons I fail to see the point of a strong belief in human evil is that it does not help the cause of love and compassion. This, in turn, makes it much easier to commit evil. If you view other people as people – with real (albeit not always rational) reasons for doing what they do, instead of just an amorphous “they’re bad” feeling – it’s a lot harder to justify atrocities.
After all, didn’t the 9/11 terrorists view the US as evil?
Haven’t Jews been persecuted because they were portrayed as evil (with horns, rumors of blood-drinking and sacrifice)?
These are just two examples. Thus it seems to me that the very act of labeling people as evil lends itself to “evil” acts! After all, people are loath to defend “evil” people’s rights. Labels that become synonymous for “evil” – like “terrorist”, “communist”, or “Jew” – are powerful things to sway the hearts of men.
Compassion, on the other hand, is much harder to misplace (though not impossible). Compassion for our enemies does not mean we do not defend ourselves, because that would mean we have no compassion for our allies. However, trying to understand why people do the things they do is a lot more constructive than slapping an easy “evil” label on them. It’s no more right to kill a person in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, or North Korea today because powerful people label them evil. We are just as fallible to injustice and cruelty as anyone else.
I guess I’ve been called evil too many times – by conservative Christians, by those who hate Americans, by those who hate liberalism and vegetarianism – to take labels of ‘evil’ too seriously.
No question that Americans can be cruel and inhumane; that’s part of being a human. But do you think that america would just kill North Koreans for no reason? Did America invade Afghanistan for no reason?
Ceratianly trying to figure out the enemy’s psychology is useful, but if you refuse to label any acts or nations evil, then what do you make of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, Stalin, Mao, Hitler?
I’m currently reading “A Problem From Hell,” a book on the lack of US response to genocide in the last 50 years. Our government supported the Khmer Rouge, refused to bomb the train tracks that led to Auchwitz, did nothing to stop the slaughter in Rwanda. How can the men responsible call themselves “good”?
But this thread isn’t about politics. What about trusting your child with a Catholic priest on a camping trip? Would you?
How do you know your spouse isn’t cheating on you? How do you know your accountant isn’t defrauding you? Why do you trust anyone?
Usax
Sure, there are people who are killing each other for stupid reasons, but there are also many, many people who are not killing other people. This would not occur in the “totally evil world.”
[/quote]
Sure, it would. If you kill someone, you can be arrested and imprisoned. If there were no fear of punishment, do you think that would change?
Speaking just for myself, it’s because I’ve never met anyone who was evil.
I’ve met people who were misguided, self-centered, hateful, even hatable. Aren’t I the same way sometimes?
The concept of evil is very useful when you go to war. Make it Us vs. Them and it’s OK to kill them, torture them, deprive them of rights, because “they’re evil”.
From my experience humans everywhere are basically the same, basically trustworthy (most of them), and so I choose to believe that of strangers until I am proved wrong.
What’s contradictory about evil being innately and pervasively present in humans, and with humans being basically good?
No, realli!
Hey, I’m a mathematician; I can believe six impossible things before breakfast. And one of the pleasant things about mathematics is that, in its myriad tangles and complications, it provides models for all sorts of possibilities.
Take the rational numbers - the set of numbers that can be represented as one integer divided by another. The rationals are pervasively present in the reals. (The way we’d phrase that mathematically is that they’re dense in the reals - every open subset of the reals, that is any open interval (a,b), a<b, contains rational numbers.) But they’re by far the smaller part of the reals - the irrationals make up essentially all of the real numbers. (If somehow you were able to choose real numbers at random - much tougher than it sounds! - you’d pick irrationals every time.)
So is it possible that that’s what humans are like, only with ‘evil’ and ‘good’ instead of ‘rationals’ and ‘irrationals’? Sure.
Is it the way we actually are? The hell if I know. How would you test it?
Still, I kinda like the idea of both good and evil being dense within us, regardless of their relative proportions. YMMV.
Gobear, moral philosophies are inherently political.
If I start with the axiom that people are innately evil (or that some of them may be), I can propose the following political system, or give my support to one like this proposed by a politician seeking office:
• People should be monitored and controlled, because left to their own devices they will do evil things. Given the opportunity to do evil, they will do it. Therefore, the behavior of individuals should be subject to close scrutiny, and officials on a local level should be in a position to apply corrections, using coercive powers and the potential for using them as a means of intimidation.
• People occupying offices of this nature, being human themselves, are also innately evil and will abuse the powers and privileges of their position for evil purposes if given the opportunity to do so. Therefore a tightly maintained hierarchy in which the behavior of every official is itself closely monitored and controlled by another in charge over them is a good idea. Officials shall be subject to the same proscriptions on conduct as other citizens plus some that apply to their conduct as officials per se.
• Since the nature of such hierarchies is that there is always a top level which cannot be subject to control by people above them, and people occupying this top level, being human themselves, are also innately evil, it is necessary to have a means of controlling their behavior as well. Therefore continued occupation of the top level of officialdom shall depend on a clean record as determined by the collective counsel of that level and the level immediately below it from which top-level officials shall be drawn. Any individual occupying the top level who violate the codes and rules for moral conduct should be stripped of their position and punished according to rules for punishing misbehavior. Any individual occupying the top level or that immediately below it who is aware of illicit conduct on the part of a top-level official, and who fails to make an official report of it, shall be considered guilty of a punishable infraction.
Meanwhile, if we start off with the axiom that people do evil things but are not innately evil, the following proposed political system makes much more sense:
• People should be left to their own devices and trusted to regulate their own conduct in a moral fashion until and unless they individually demonstrate otherwise. Therefore individual behavior shall not be subject to scrutiny and review except insofar as it generates social disruption or generates complaints from an offended citizen. Rules for dealing with disruptive conduct will proceed from the assumption that people do disruptive things due not to inherent evil but to confusion over the best way to do what they are trying to accomplish and/or lack of awareness of other means of doing things – and shall therefore focus on reeducation, arbitration, negotiated agreements between dissenting parties, and only as a final solution coercive prevention of the disruptive behavior.
• Rules governing acceptable public conduct shall be flexible and shall reflect the needs, opinions, and desires of the general community in an attempt to negotiate a balance between the needs of the hypothetical offending individual and the needs of the other individuals who have been offended. A predisposition shall exist within the structure of laws that govern laws themselves that prefers individual freedom over the rights of the community to regulate it unless the community members can show that they are damaged as individuals by the conduct in question.
• Because systems of hierchical power of people over others inherently interferes with maximal personal freedom, all structures of authority and mechanisms for enforcing laws shall be set up so as to maximize general community participation in the selection of officials and so as to ensure rotation of responsibilities in a way that favors no persons or groups of persons over others over any prolonged period of time.
Since you mentioned “9/11”, I’ll have to ask if you recognize, in the above descriptions, any rough parallels between the principal players?
I do not believe in innate goodness or evil. whether or not a persons action is correct depends on their personal situation. Good or evil is a societal construct and therefore should be treated as such.
Labelling any one person or system as good or evil is just marketing. You are trying to market your system as inherently better or at the very least that their’s is recognizably worse.
In other words it’s an easy cop-out to get someone to agree with you lest they appear evil in their complicity. People like Jack Chick, Fred Phelps, Osama bin Laden, etc… use this cheap ploy to maximum effectiveness.
I agree with this POV, but draw different conclusions. Labeling a person or system as evil is a useful means of thinking. The world is far too complex for us to think fully about every detail. Thinking about Pol Pot or UBL as “evil” facilitates making reasonable judgements and decisions.
No to both. Do you think that the 911 terrorists killed 3,000 civilians for no reason? I’m not sure what you mean.
I can accept certain acts to be considered evil, yes; that is not the same thing as labeling an individual, let alone an entire nation, as evil – particularly innately evil. This is basic tribalism at its worst. Because they are the “enemy”, they are “evil”. We are “good” because we are fighting “evil”. This is not the way I think that rational people should think.
For example, take World War II. I do think Hitler needed to be removed from power and his conquests of European nations certainly needed to stop. He is one of the rare individuals whose actions are so heinous today – now that they have been brought to light – that I might extend a definition of evil to him (though grudgingly). However, you mentioned a nation. Was every German evil? How does that make sense? Certainly you don’t believe that every German today is evil. How does innate evil just go away? Further, does that mean that any actions are justified to combat evil (like firebombing)?
Perhaps you mean that we should consider the acts of the government the acts of the nation, and thus a corrupt or evil government implies a corrupt or evil nation. I am extremely uncomfortable with this idea. I have some, but not much, control over what my government does. People living in fascist states and dictatorships do not even have that. I am loathe to put responsibility on people simply based on where they live and their ethnicity.
One more thing: “innate evil” seems to be something that cannot be helped. Wouldn’t that absolve people of some responsibility for their actions? Isn’t it just more reasonable to examine that people can do awful and cruel things while thinking that they are furthering the side of good as well as just out of plain nastiness? Isn’t it possible that what you consider evil is just selfishness taken to an extreme, not something innate?
I don’t know. I don’t know how President Bush can get up and turn a complicated war with broad political, racial, and religious undertones into a “war on evil”, either. People tend to see things differently when they are up close. It’s a lot easier to judge somebody else than to judge yourself and your own actions.
No more or less so than any other adult. Why should I judge this person based on their choice of a (legal and socially acceptable) career? Do you think it is acceptable to categorize groups as evil? Surely you do not believe it was so for the abovementioned Jews persecuted by the Nazis. Why is this OK for Catholic priests?
Just because I do not declare people evil does not mean I trust everyone. People can be – as I have said – cruel, not to mention selfish and deceitful at times. This does not prove the existence of innate evil in some persons or groups of individuals.
We come to trust individuals over time. Trust can be broken. I’m not sure what this has to do with innate evil, though.
Gobear, I respect your opinion and I enjoy your posts (honestly), but I’m not clear here on what you’re trying to say. I would really like to see you flesh out exactly what it is you expect me to accept. What is innate evil? Why is it ‘pervasive’ and why is it pervasive, do you think?
The classical Christian understanding is that evil is “that which isn’t good.”
:eek:
Well, really…the idea is that “the good” is “that which is in accord with that for which the thing was made.” In other words, things were made to do certain things, and when they don’t do them, that’s not good.
Illustration: gasoline powers a car. If you put gasoline in your car, the car will run. Environmentalist concerns notwithstanding, that’s good, because the car is doing what it’s supposed to. If you put sugar in the gas tank, the car won’t run, and likely never will. That’s not good.
“Evil” in particular comes about in relation to moral actions…that is, when a specific moral choice is made in relation to an action. People qua people have inherent goodness, because they were made by God and God can only do good. (Objections will come to that statement, but it’s a separate issue.) However, people can make bad moral choices, which are therefore evil.
Illustration: pilots fly people and things from one location to another in record time. When a pilot flies people from Boston to California, that’s good. When a pilot flies people into the World Trade Center, that’s evil.
I think this pretty much mirrors what everyone’s been saying. For more information, try Augustine’s “On Free Choice of the Will” at your local library.
I don’t agree with that. I think it is still possible to look at Pol Pot, UBL, or even Hitler and say that they chose to make evil choices and that they must be stopped because their choices are causing destruction and harm on a level that is just unacceptable without ever trying to judge them as innately evil or not. In each case, they thought they were doing good. While these are extreme examples, how many times in history have things been the accepted norm by the bulk of society but in modern times ideas sway toward it not being inherently good. Things like this include the death penalty and beating your child. At one point beating your child was considered the proper way to keep them from becoming a bad person. However most people in our society see it as just the opposite today. That does not make the person who was beating his child with a wooden switch evil, because he sincerely thought that he was doing right by his child. Pol Pot, UBL and Hitler all went through similar thought processes, though to a much more extreme level, one where we would more likely classify it as insane. However, I do not necessarily believe that we can classify it as evil. What they did was wrong and they needed to be stop. I do not see how making it less complicated by saying they are evil does society any good at all, except maybe that it clears the conciensce of the person pulling the trigger on any of those people.
