Is there such a thing as evil?

Am I evil?

There isn’t such thing as evil. People like Adolf Hitler and Charles Manson prove this.

No, you’re not.

buster, can you explain exactly what Hitler and Charles Manson proved other than that they were batshit crazy assholes?

There are undesirable things, not evil things. A thing is just a thing in itself, and people decide to call it either bad or good.

There is such a thing as evil and it looks like this.

Oh, did I lol, bluefreedom.

There is a bunch of definitions and philosophies about this subject as im sure you know. A couple that I associate when i think of those guys are “morally reprehensible” and another is “causing harm.” I find the holocaust “morally reprehensible.”

Yes. Wal*Mart is evil.

yes, Lucifer is evil.

Lucifer is imaginary.

Just sayin’

People can and do ‘act in their own interests without concern for their effect on others’. In fact many people do so exclusively. I don’t know if that makes them evil, though. Evil, in my opinion, would involve acting against other’s interests for the explicit purpose of causing them harm. In other words, an evil person would delight in the harm s/he caused.

Ever had a colonoscopy without drugs?

@Austustian: good answer! I agree. I do think there are people in this world who knowingly try to cause other harms, because on a small, simple level, it actually amuses them. We’re talking sociopaths, and they’ve been documented by psychologists. Hitler, Manson and others fit this profile. That’s somewhat scientific proof they exist, as there is a list of personality traits they must possess to be classified as such. http://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/sb.html

See G.W.B.

@Siren,
Great answer. I just have a couple of quibbles with the website you cite. The first list is actually a psychopathy checklist. The way it is used diagnostically is that the individual is scored 0, 1 or 2 on each item, where 0 means the person doesn’t have the trait; 1 means they have a little of it; and 2 means they have a lot of it. You add up the items and if the person has a score of 19 or more, they meet the diagnostic criteria of psychopathy. The reason psychologists score the checklist in this way is to get around the natural human tendency to pick out a few salient traits and leap to a conclusion, which can be a very real danger if your emotions are in play.

Anti-social Personality Disorder (APD) is significantly different from psychopathy. In APD, the person is basically an asshole who has a long history of impulsive violence. Psychopaths are much more difficult to detect because they aren’t necessarily thugs. Rather, they lack the ability to understand the emotions and interior lives of others because their own emotions is strictly limited to those involved in the exercise of power. Being without conscience, empathy or remorse, they tend to rely more on manipulation than violence to achieve their aims. For more, check out this book.

The TV series Dexter presents an interesting insight into the psychological life of a psychopath. Of course, they have had to give him a few atypical characteristics to make him both interesting and sympathetic enough for people to relate to. First, most psychopaths are not killers, much less serial killers. Second, the existing diagnostic criteria tend to make impulsiveness a more central characteristic of the pathology. However, this may be due to the fact that the psychologists who developed the criteria did so mainly on prisoners. (Impulsiveness tends to get you caught.) Its been hypothesized that had the criteria been developed on a more representative sample, impulsiveness might not weigh so heavily.

Dexter Morgan strictly adheres to Harry’s code. And while to us this appears to be a moral code, this is a necessary fiction which enables us to relate to Dexter. For Dexter, the morality in Harry’s code is entirely incidental to its true purpose, which is to provide a formula for not getting caught. In fact, the way Harry gets Dexter to adopt it, is to show him an execution. What actually drives Dexter is the consummate feeling of power he gets from killing—which he ritualises both for practical reasons (i.e., not getting sloppy and not getting caught) and in order to savor the crucial moment.

If Dexter did not have Harry’s code, and lived purely to satisfy his own need for power (as psychopaths are prone to do) he would be too evil for us to contemplate. In a criminal profiling course I once took I saw several interviews with psychopaths, most of them quite chilling. I saw one where a psychopath was openly bragging about how he had systematically terrorized his step-child into becoming his sex slave. I also saw a tape left behind by Leonard Lake documenting how he would abduct women and condition them to cooperate in their own captivity and eventual murder.

Fortunately, these cases are quite rare, despite the impression you get from Fox News and TV crime dramas that evil is lurking everywhere. Of more concern are systemic evils like official policies sanctioning torture. There has been some recent brain research showing that the pleasure centers of the brain light up when you inflict pain on another. This explains why the behavior is so addictive to the perpetrator, and how, once it gets started, it can sweep through penal institutions like an epidemic.

Unfortunately, torture can radicalize a person to such a degree that it submerges his capacity for empathy, conscience and remorse. For example, Al Zawari, Osama Bin Laden’s second in command, was tortured in an Egyptian prison for an unimaginable three years. So, in this respect, evil does not appear suddenly and inexplicably out of nothing. But, rather, it is often a ripple effect of conscious political decisions.

There is a controversy among psychologists as to whether psychopathy is congenital, or whether it can be induced in a person by extremely aversive childhood abuse. No doubt both are involved. If a child is neurologically predisposed toward psychopathy, severe early childhood abuse may cause it to manifest in extremely anti-social ways. And, once started, it can sweep through populations, especially during times of war and civil disorder.

It would therefore behoove us to reconsider our policies of mass incarceration over minor things like drugs. Prisons may create more evil than they contain.

@MontyZuma: I didn’t fully check out that site – my apologies. I should simply have cited Dr. Martha Stout’s The Sociopath Next Door. In it, she describes, through her decades-long experiences with patients, traits she has compiled to diagnose an individual with a “sociopathic personality”. I personally believe her theory and believe there are people out there who are deliberately mean and cruel to others, regardless of whether they have been brought up with all the benefits of a good home and loving family. Some people are just plain cruel and it’s because they choose to do so. It’s hard for the rest of us to swallow that someone can decide to become this way (as opposed to environmental/genetic factors), but my belief is that we ALL have a choice to make and some of us make choices to benefit and amuse ourselves without care for how it will affect others. Sometimes because it will affect others. And that’s creepy.

I fully back you, seVen. Lucifer is the epitome of evil. He created it. Evil isn’t simply the “lack of good” like darkness is the “lack of light”. One can possess actual knowledge of good and evil, and this is what determines his actions.

I highly recommend a book called “The Sociopath Next Door” by Martha Stout Ph.D.

She covers these topics as they relate to sociopaths and basically states that yes, certain people are well…basically, clinically immoral (and perhaps some- by order of their actions are ‘evil’).

Isn’t moral relativism interesting though?