Here is a perfect example of someone unwilling to actually discuss the subject. Considering that people and their reasons that drive is what this discussion is about, I’d say that “who cares what their reasons are” is pretty much a knee-jerk reaction that has no place here. We are trying to determine if there is inherent evil in humanity, and by doing so you must discuss what their motivations were.
So please, I ask you, if you can’t seperate your knee-jerk emotional anger from this debate and it impairs your judgement to such a high level that you would deny the discussion of one side or the other of the argument, please refrain from sharing, as it does not help either side make their case.
In HS debate class “Who cares?” is not a valid standpoint when you are assigned to argue a negative or affirmative case on an issue that you feel strongly one way about. From my understanding Great Debates follows a similar structure.
I don’t understand this either. It seems rather clear that there are possibly millions of people in the mid-east who either directly support or at least approve of the attacks on the United States. There may be a tiny minority willing to actually carry out these attacks but it seems clear that they’re supported by society in general.
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Most people don’t rape, murder, molest children, or engage in large scale corporate fraud.
For the most part I’ve found that people are ok. I don’t typically worry about some stranger on the street bashing my head in with a baseball bat. I don’t worry that someone in a movie theater is going to cut my throat from behind. I don’t think human beings have evil as an innate trait. I don’t buy into the concept of original sin.
As to why so many Dopers, and others, don’t believe in the idea that someone can be evil I can only guess. We live in a society where people who do things wrong are “misguided” or “dysfunctional” so in a way they’re not to blame. I also think many dislike the word evil because it sounds vaguely religious to some. Me, I have no problems with the concept that some people are evil.
Yes.
However oftentimes we say “So and so is good people” and we mean basically that we like and respect So and so. However we wouldn’t categorize someone that we not like or respect as evil in the same way. So in this particular instance good is not the semantic opposite of evil. However as it refers to this particular debate, you are right, there are no good people just good actions.
I don’t agree. I think I can judge people based on the content of their character. Of course since I have no magical device with which to examine their souls I can only make judgements based upon their actions. If someone regularly engages in evil activities then I’ll judge them to be evil people. If someone regularly engages in good activities I’ll judge them to be good people.
I suppose it sounds a bit simplistic. But it seems to work just fine for me.
For the purposes of this discussion, let’s define “evil” as the impulse to do harm to others in the absence of any external compulsion or punishment. Say I leave a wallet on the Metro; it seems to me much more likely that it will be filched by an opportunist rather than returned to me. If I were to post my Social Security number and my address here, it seems likely that someone would use that info to defraud me.
It seems to me that the common run of humanity, with a few exceptions here and there, is evil. People in general cannot be trusted to do right by others. The reason we have laws and prisons is to deter people from from doing evil.
Those are extreme actions with grave consequences for the offender, who would be easily caught. bjut what about getting your wallet lifted at a movie theater or having someone steal your ATM number by looking over your shoulder. How about having unprotected sex with someone you’ve dated for a short time?
Isn’t what you judge to be good or evil a cultural issue?
We might even go as far as to say that it is a Judeo-Christian concept.
Do you think any Greek or Roman would have held the opinion that slavery was good or evil? I think the concept would have been alien to them.
Certainly what one regards as an evil act could be regarded by someone else as good. Wasn’t there cheering in several countries after the 911 attack?
So I don’t think that an act itself can be intrinsically evil, it depends, for a large part, from which background you look at it.
If humans are inherently evil, we wouldn’t have lasted this long. Our ancestors would have wiped each other out.
Suppose evil is caused by some kind of gene. This gene would be detrimental to the survival of any individual who carried it, so it would have been eliminated. A group of individuals with these genes not only would attack each other but would attack their neighbours who didn’t have the gene as well. So on one hand, they thinned themselves out. On the other, they would face retaliation from without.
On the contrary, evil is very easy to grasp. Even a child can understand it. In fact, it’s often the explanation we give to children when we don’t want to to delve into actual causes and motivations.
evil is the oversimplification. The problem is that grownups eventually reject oversimplifications because they aren’t very helpful. Or, alternatively, evil is the label we use in place of understanding. Calling something evil tells us to be against it, But it doesn’t reveal anything else about it.
This can be a useful way to avoid critical thinking, or satisy a child without really going into any detail. But it’s not very helpful if you need to solve problems. Much better to understand the motivation behind destructive acts so that you can do something about them.
In the case of the 911 terrorists, they are the product of decades of deliberate misinformation and propaganda by the media and social structures of their home. They aren’t so much evil as massively misinformed and twisted, so that they felt that they were fighting evil.
So you see the problem? If evil is a useful concept, why is it that the destroyers and the destroyed can both use it to refer to each other? On the other hand, if it’s just a label, then such useage is to be expected.
Yes it is possible to say that. However in a discussion of whether or not there is such a thing as inherent evil, saying that it doesn’t matter what a certain group’s motivations were is pretty useless and does not further the conversation at all.
However, I think that killing 3000 people is wrong. Regardless of who does it. I think the US doing it in Afghanistan was wrong. However, I do see our motivations behind it, and to an extent I agree with them. At least to as much an extent as I can justify mass killing. I believe that Al Qaeda has a very rational justification if you view it from where they come from. The US is an oppressor to them that must be stopped, and cannot be stopped through any but the most extreme measures. Imagine that you are 10 years old and there is someone who is 25, a black belt 6’2 200 lbs that imposes his will on you time and time again. You have no real way to resist as he can fend off any blow you can possibly come up with. Even throwing a rock does no good. Would you not eventually want to get a gun? That’s the closest approximation that I can think of in my mind to how these organizations must feel. Entire nations feel trapped by US foreign policy, I cannot possibly imagine how it feels to an individual who believes that a corrupt government in their homeland is supported by some mammoth power overseas.
Therefore, I do understand how someone justify’s an evil act. I do it every day in supporting my county’s bombing of Afghanistan.
Growing up in NM I saw F-117s flying overhead on a pretty regular basis. It looks like a bunch of tiny black arrowheads flying in formation and streaking across the sky. If you lie on your back, you can sometimes catch them on one side of the sky and then watch as they streak to the other side. When they are finally on the alternate horizon you can hear the sound of their jet engines coming from the direction in which you originally saw them. Then as they have disappeared over the horizon you hear the sound of the engines catch up to where you last saw them and then finally five minutes after you saw the first jet, the sound of it disappears off into the distance.
Now I saw this in New Mexico. I had no fear that they were going to bomb me. These were my countrymen. People that I could walk up to and say hi on the street, that were inside these machines. Now imagine; you are in the middle of the desert on the outskirts of a town, and suddenly the town flashes red in many places and you hear explosions rocking it back and forth. You look up afterwards to see these black arrowheads streaking across the sky, and two minutes after that last explosion dies down you begin to hear them just as they fade over the horizon.
You know that these planes are from America and that you have no way to fight back against them. It must be like something out of a myth or a science fiction movie. It’s like Independence Day or some other such Sci Fi movie where the aliens come down with their superior technology and wreak havoc with impunity while we have to devise some minor defense. This defense usually has to do with destroying the mother ship with good old American ingenuity. Well, New York City is America’s mothership, and UBL used good old Saudi ingenuity to bring it down on one knee. It was a long shot that he didn’t even know would work, but it did.
So yes he used evil methods. But for me to believe that his methods were evil, I have to also believe that the methods of my own government were evil no matter how necessary I might take them to be.
Sometimes an evil action is the most rational course of action. That is why I do not believe in innate human evil.
gobear, these are honest questions. Do you consider yourself evil?
If yes, why? Are you sure that those around you feel the same about their friends and neighbors as you do yours?
If no, what puts you in the minority group of “exceptions here and there”? Are you sure that the qualities you attibute to yourself are so rare in the rest of society, or is it possible you watch the news too much?
In short, remember the eye of the beholder. How can you be sure you are not projecting some aspect of your ego (ego in the Freudian sense) on to society as a whole?
Actually, both examples of evil acts that you give are highly UNLIKELY when taken on a person-to-person level. The thing is, though, that if only ONE person takes your wallet or appropriates your SSN, then the evil has been done to you. However, though evil has affected you, the evil you experience only reveals the nature of THE SINGLE PERSON who did the evil to you.
Consider this: you leave your wallet on the Metro, 50 people walk on by and don’t see it while person 51 picks it up and steals your cash, ID & and credit cards.
How many people are “evil” here – one, or fifty-one? Do the actions of the thief tell us anything about the characters of the other 50 people?
Then the question of “innateness” is begged. Any rigid definition of human behavior which can be meaningfully expressed (and thus be identifiable) will, when codified as “evil”, turn out to demonstrate tautologically that people are innately evil.
Yes, there are some bad things. I think so, too. But I do not suppose that the guy who would not seek to return someone’s wallet is the moral equivalent of a rapist, murder, or genocidal maniac. Even if they guy will, always and forever, never return a single wallet he ever finds… even then I would not call the man inherently evil.
Evil is biologically meaningless, and is a completely political distinction which is begged by the definition of good in a classical sense.
Then perhaps you are the only evil one alive: someone who expects something completely unreasonable from humanity, and then condemns it when your unrealistic goal cannot be reached. You are a vengeful god, gobear.
Conveniently you are siding with law? What about those of us who feel that the government’s prison system is not good? Are we intristically evil by definition?
In the definition I provided, yes, I’d say I’m evil. For instance, Ihave no wish to harm people and would, if the situation called for it, defend others from harm at risk to myself. But if there were a situation which demanded that I kill someone for my self-preservation or the preservation of my property, I’d do it. I know that societal mores say that I should feel some compunction or remorse, but I doubt that I would. I am no altruist.
I lack charity. I never give money to the homeless guys on the street because I work for my money and don’t want to subsidize junkies and losers. That definitely marks me as evil.
Well, if they don’t see the wallet, there’s no temptation. I believe that 49 would take it if they had the opportunity, and maybe one person would return it.
Not at all. In fact, such a view would mean that you are better informed than most.
Perhaps, yes. But does that individual take your wallet to hurt you, or because they would like the money?
If you say that is evil, what if the person who takes it is in grave need for money? Does that make it less evil, or does it stay the same?
What if the money is needed for something not of a selfish nature (like paying for a relative’s operation or to feed your starving kids). Does that make it less evil, or maybe not evil at all?
Yes, it is tempting to get something for free. However, I think your 1 in 50 odds are quite low. If people are so selfish, why are there so many charities? Why do people give a damn about their family or friends?
Why? Because they commit acts that are selfish sometimes but try to be good (as you define yourself)? I do not see how one act of evil among many acts of good makes you evil. This is a Christian view but one that I find nonsensical. Why doesn’t one act of good among many acts of evil make you good, instead? If a cruel dictator is really nice to his cats, for example?
I don’t think human beings are inherently good or evil – rather, these terms are oversimplifications. Besides which, the pessimism you show gives us very little reason to try to be good and kind people.
I disagree. Most people give a certain amount of trust to others. While nobody is going to leave $5,000 in their front yard, we nevertheless have honor systems, stores accept personal checks, and people are even taken in by con men because of this trust.
No, you can’t trust ‘people in general’. There are always a few bad apples out there. Yet, we still have a great deal of trust in others, and I tend to think that trust is not all that often misplaced. We simply remember when it is more than when it is not.
I disagree here, also. We have laws for all kinds of reasons. There are a lot of nasty things that are quite legal and lots of things that hurt nobody and yet are illegal. However, we are supposed to have laws to protect the rights of individuals. Laws that ‘prevent evil’ are (at least in America) pretty much unconstitutional (though a few get through) – this is because ‘evil’ is really a very subjective term.
I’ve never had my wallet lifted at a movie theatre or my ATM number stolen, yet I have existed on this planet for this long. If everyone is so evil, why didn’t my friends and family constantly try to screw me in every legal way possible/
This strikes me as irresponsibility more than evil. Assuming it’s consensual sex, both individuals know the risks involve and do what they do anyway – risking STDs (or pregancy). Taking risks isn’t evil.
By that definition, using an atomic bomb to destroy a country is good, because that is what it was made to do. Alternatively, declining to do so is not good, so it is evil. I have a problem with this.
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Reader’s digest did a little experiment a while back where they tested this thing out. They took a number of wallets and dropped them in random locations in large cities, smaller cities, and rural areas. Each wallet had $50 in it and a name as to who the wallet belonged. There were 10 wallets dropped in each municipality. IIRC, the distribution was 5 large cities, 5 small cities, and 5 rural areas for a total of 150 wallets.
The results were rather interesting, and not what people expected.
The conventional wisdom (revealed from interviews with those who returned the wallets and other people as well) was that there was going to be a higher incident of wallets returned in rural areas than cities, and that adults were more likely to return the wallet than children. It was also believed that Reader’s Digest was lucky if they managed to get more than half their wallets returned.
Well, the conventional wisdom proved utterly wrong. On the whole 7 out of 10 wallets were returned (with the finders getting the nice bonus of keeping the $50 anyway). The lowest number (5 out of 10) came from one of the middle sized cities. The largest number (9 out of 10) came from one of the large cities. The results actually were just slightly higher than 7 out of 10 when averaged, but 7 was basically median, mode and mean. And the stats were the same for children/teens and adults. Implying that children basically inherit similar moral codes as their parents. Honesty isn’t something one simply acquires as one gets older. There also was no statistical difference between men and women.
One guy even refused to accept the reward, saying he shouldn’t get a reward for doing something he would expect someone else to do. (Well I myself might not accept a reward if it was another person, being that this is a business and no doubt are making money through readership and advertisement brought about by this story, I would have no problems pocketing the $50 reward myself.) Another guy refused the award out of guilt, because he admitted that he wasn’t going to turn it in originally.
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With thousands of people who might see it, sure.
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Actually prisons are built to keep the degenerates separated from society. If it truly was a deterrant, there would be a lot less crimes committed.
I personally do not believe humans are inherently good or evil. I belive we try to do what we percieve as best most of the time, but often times fail ourselves and others. Also good and evil tend to be relative as Douglas Adams said in Last Chance to See