We already have a clinical terms for evil people: malignant narcissist or psychopath. If you want to understand the definition of "evil" just get to know such individuals.
Dern, I forget where the tutorial for the devil's advocate tags are.
As an exercise, I'm going to attempt to chip away at this.
Let's start in prison, with the classic psychopaths. How many have brain damage? According to the pop neurology I read sometimes, frontal lobe damage can be quite subtle to pick up--Antonio Damasio describes people who can converse normally, even wittily, but who no longer function responsibly. Add some temptation, and some prior abuse in the mix, and such people might act as psychopaths are supposed to act--outwardly charming, but amoral.
I've even seen some psychiatrists argue that *most* criminal activity is a result of abuse and factors which cause poor impulse control.
We don't say that snakes or feral dogs are evil.
Also, there are the famous Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments. One seemed to show that a majority of people would do Bad things if told to do so by an authority figure, the other seemed to show that dehumanizing conditions would cause people to abuse each other.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
eta: Technological mediation is a very common way that people don't act humanely toward one another--examples being anything from cars to the Internet to the technology of modern warfare.
The definition of
sociopath or
psychopath is notoriously slippery. It's a checklist. Most people who would be considered to meet the criteria don't display all the features described on the checklist. Social mores have changed over time.
It used to be that most beatniks and rock musicians would have been considered sociopaths (Robert Hare uses the two words "sociopath" and "psychopath" differently). Now Keith Richards is considered sort of lovable by many.
One culture might prize bravery, boldness, strength, and skill. But things are different here in service-industry America in the 21st century.
The 9/11 terrorists weren't psychopaths by any definition, but most of us in America consider their actions evil.
But from their own perspectives, they were heroes.
I'm suggesting that most of what we consider evil is not the doing of people we would consider psychopaths, and that some high percentage of people we would consider psychopaths have some kind of brain damage because of accidents, parental abuse, or drug and alcohol abuse.
However, taking off my devil's advocate horns, for a second, I'm thinking of how even someone like Robert Hare speaks with a kind of awe at how he was fooled by charming, manipulative, incorrigible prison inmates.
Evil are the people who fail entirely to play by our rules, who seem outwardly normal, but the French have that saying: "To understand is to forgive."
Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner. Only God is capable of this, apparently.
What was my point? Not sure I had one, after all. Oh, yes. It's squishy.
