what is evil?

[andyandy]

ok...apologies for the double post - i first put this question in the politics forum....but i think it belongs here.....

What is evil?

We have considerations of what it means to describe an individual as "evil".....

Darat provides the following Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn sig......

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various stages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.

So there are certinly questions as to whether or not "evil" is a valid term of description of an individual due to its religious, political and social baggage.....

but Marshall Rosenberg takes it one step further, and suggests that "evil" is caused by its own definition....

Psychologist and mediator claims that the root of violence is the very concept of "evil" or "badness." When we label someone as bad or evil, Rosenberg claims, it invokes the desire to punish or inflict pain. It also makes it easy for us to turn off our feelings towards the person we are harming. He cites the use of language in Nazi Germany as being a key to how the German people were able to do things to other human beings that they normally wouldn't do. He links the concept of evil to our judicial system, which seeks to create justice via punishment — "punitive justice" — punishing acts that are seen as bad or wrong. He contrasts this approach with what he found in cultures where the idea of evil was non-existent. In such cultures, when someone harms another person, they are believed to be out of harmony with themselves and their community, they are seen as sick or ill and measures are taken to restore them to a sense of harmonious relations with themselves and others, as opposed to punishing them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil#Is...useful_term.3F

I find this last definition really interesting -

isn't it true that "evil" is committed when perpetrators dehumanize their victims (eg. slavery, Japanese colonial atrocities, the holocaust etc etc)

and isn't the label "evil" itself a dehumanizing tool? Thus, does the use of the term perpetuates the act it defines.....?

so, what is evil? Does it exist? How should it be defined?

 

[kittynh]

hmmm, hard call. Even most religions haven't a clue.

Hitler everyone says was evil. But, he was kind of a sex symbol when he was alive. lots of people, non Germans included (think Charles Lindberg) thought the guy was wonderful. HE didn't really appear evil at the time to most people. I just read a book that claims that most Germans (which I do not believe) think that in the future Hitler will be viewed much as Bonaparte is by the French now.

Mind you, Bonaparte was into freedom to practice your own religion when he took over a new place.

Is evil allowing someone like Hitler to be in power? Is evil doing nothing, when you know it's safest to do nothing? Is evil letting others do what you know is evil, but hey, it's kinda ok with you if the Jews all die, just as long as you don't have to pull the trigger?

I grew up with a neighbor that lost most of her family in a concentration camp. One night her mother shoved her and her brother out under a fence and told them to go to her friends place in a near by town. She was sure her old school friend would take the kids in and hide them. She wrote a note for her friend, telling her how it REALLY was in the camp, and drew a map for the kids. The friend sent the kids back. After the war, she wanted to come to the US to live. She appied to my neighbors mother, who made sure this woman did NOT get into the US. In fact, she made the story of what had happened to her children public (sadly, her son died after coming back).

Who is evil here? Hitler? The woman that sent the children back, as she was only protecting her family - and she didn't KILL the son with her own hands? The mother, for holding a grudge and denying her old friend and chance to come to the US (this was right after the war, and things were quite tough still) and for making the story public (which resulted in a lot of misery for the woman)?

I think evil is a flexible as good. It's degrees.

My Jewish neighbor once challenged me to find one good thing about HItler. I thought, well, he denied his family and routinely hit them, even driving his neice to suicide....he killed millions....he had rages and hatreds and a vengance streak that was really awful....heck, even his taste in women was bad....

but, he was nice to his dogs. He liked dogs.

Mind you he tested out poison on his own dog, but that was at the end.

But he did like dogs.

Even my friend had to admit the dogs. Mind you, humanizing HItler is hard.

 

[ynot]

What is evil?

A stuntman?

 

[l0rca]

Evil is the conscious process of outwardly destroying, manipulating, or preventing consciousness without greater favor to a superior or larger element of consciousness.

Since consciousness produces meaning, we could also say that evil is an outward destruction of meaning.

Futher, since logic is a faculty of meaning: evil destroys logic.

So long as we don't deny any anticedants, and are careful of the limits and specifics here, evil's easy to define. It might not be easy to detect, however.

Many atheists claim evil "does not exist". What they are not doing, though, is coming up with an unsuitable definition of evil, and are rather juxtaposing a conscioussness' intention with the indifference of the universe. Evil then, can not exist without consciousness.

Evil can be logical, in a sense, if the conscious entity is using axioms which lead to the suggestion to destroy. From this we could say that the "root of all evil" is bad axiomatics. But I think that's a little too romantic. There are varied enough causes of evil for there to be no root. Sometimes it is axiomatics. Sometimes it is pure logic. Sometimes it is insanity. The best root we can come up with is that consciousness itself is the "root". But consciousness is also the root of the opposite of evil. So again, I think claiming a root to evil is meaningless, since we have to get too general to do so, and its answer provides us with little anwers for how to prevent it.

 

[qayak]

One important thing you have to remember is that Hitler was not abnormal. All his actions have occured throughout history and are a normal part of human behaviour. The fall on the line between good and evil although some of his actions may even be the definer of what we call evil. There have been studies done that demonstrate how easy it is for a normal person to step over the line into Hitlerish behaviour. We are all human and are all capable to one degree or another of very good behaviour and very bad behaviour.

Richard Feynman recounted an anecdote in his book The Meaning Of It All: "Once in Hawaii, I was taken to see a Buddhist temple. In the temple, a man said: 'I'm going to tell you something that you will never forget.' And then he said, 'To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven. The same keys open the gates of hell.'"

Using ethics, it is very hard to say if an individual is good or evil. You would need an list of every moral action taken throughout their life to decide. If they are already dead, there isn't much point.

Ethics is much better for deciding on individual actions. Was Hitler's elimination of the Jews good or bad? Was his patriotism for his country good or bad? Was the treatment of his dogs good or bad? How much did that change when he tried out his poison on them?

At the end of all that, you will have a pretty good idea of where he fits.

 

[SirPhilip]

Does it exist? How should it be defined?

Evil exists in human nature the same way disorder in nature exists. Two types basically exist, direct and indirect. Discussing the rationale is meaningless, because it always stems from moral relativism being ingrained into someone. Direct evil is rooted in hate or greed, and intentionally done to create disorder, like Bin Ladin's actions. Indirect evil is done under the justification of being constructive, and perpetuated even though the magnitude of suffering, disorder and demoralization created is in stark contrast to the small or nonexistant benefit. Examples include: eugenics, genocide, factory farming, or more disguised forms, like the drug war and hyper-consumerism.

 

[SirPhilip]

Richard Feynman recounted an anecdote in his book The Meaning Of It All: "Once in Hawaii, I was taken to see a Buddhist temple. In the temple, a man said: 'I'm going to tell you something that you will never forget.' And then he said, 'To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven. The same keys open the gates of hell.'"

The man was probably familiar with this quote, which I first read quoted by Carl Sagan in Cosmos at the beginning of the chapter Heaven and Hell; it later became one of my favorites:

"The doors of heaven and hell are adjacent and identical"
- Nikos Kazantzakis The Last Temptation of Christ

It's real meaning is lost on most people though, who see heaven and hell as distinct, which they aren't.

 

[andyandy]

One important thing you have to remember is that Hitler was not abnormal. All his actions have occured throughout history and are a normal part of human behaviour. The fall on the line between good and evil although some of his actions may even be the definer of what we call evil. There have been studies done that demonstrate how easy it is for a normal person to step over the line into Hitlerish behaviour. We are all human and are all capable to one degree or another of very good behaviour and very bad behaviour.

the Milgram experiment is a famous example

The participant and a confederate of the experimenter, who was an actor pretending to be another participant, were told by the experimenter that they would be participating in an experiment to test the effects of punishment on learning.

A slip of paper was then given to the participant and another to the confederate. The participant was led to believe that one of the slips said "learner" and the other said "teacher," and that the participants had been given the slips randomly. In fact, both slips said "teacher," but the actor claimed to have the slip that read "learner," thus guaranteeing that the participant was always the "teacher." At this point, the "teacher" and "learner" were separated into different rooms where they could communicate but not see each other. In one version of the experiment, the confederate was sure to mention to the participant that he had a heart condition.

The "teacher" was given a 45-volt electric shock from the electro-shock generator as a sample of the shock that the "learner" would supposedly receive during the experiment. The "teacher" was then given a list of word pairs which he was to teach the learner. The teacher began by reading the list of word pairs to the learner. The teacher would then read the first word of each pair and read 4 possible answers. The learner would press a button to indicate his response. If the answer was incorrect, the learner would receive a shock, with the voltage increasing with each wrong answer. If correct, the teacher would read the next word pair.

The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual shocks. In reality, there were no shocks. After the confederate was separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level. After a number of voltage level increases, the actor started to bang on the wall that separated him from the subject. After several times banging on the wall and complaining about his heart condition, the learner gave no further responses to questions and no further complaints.

At this point, many people indicated their desire to stop the experiment and check on the learner. Some test subjects paused at 135 volts and began to question the purpose of the experiment. Most continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. A few subjects began to laugh nervously or exhibit other signs of extreme stress once they heard the screams of pain coming from the learner.

If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt the experiment, he was given a succession of verbal prods by the experimenter, in this order:

Please continue.
The experiment requires you to continue, please go on.
It is essential that you continue.
You have no choice, you must continue.
If the subject still wished to stop after all four successive verbal prods, the experiment was halted. Otherwise, it was halted after the subject had given the maximum 450-volt shock three times in succession.

when setting up the experiment Miligram expected that only about 0.1% of the participants would actually go to the maximum 450 volt limit....

but

In Milgram's first set of experiments, 67.5 percent (27 out of 40) of experimental participants administered the experiment's final 450-volt shock, though many were quite uncomfortable in doing so; everyone paused at some point and questioned the experiment, some even saying they would return the check for the money they were paid. No participant steadfastly refused to give further shocks before the 300-volt level. Variants of the experiment were later performed by Milgram himself and other psychologists around the world with similar results. Apart from confirming the original results the variations have tested variables in the experimental setup.

it does seem to show that humans, given the right starting conditions (strong authority figures/social control) can be manipulated relatively easily....and some have drawn parallels between this and the

forms of obedience we so deplored in the Nazi epoch.

it certainly shatters any cosy notion of "good" and "evil" that we might hold....

 

[SirPhilip]

it certainly shatters any cosy notion of "good" and "evil" that we might hold....

Interesting post. A more common example also is domestic abuse, where children grow up with an intact moral compass despite their entire lives being conditioned otherwise by psychological, sexual, or physical violence, while others grow up to be adults whose entire personalities become nothing but portraits of it.