[benkahuna]

It's cool that a James Woods interview spurred some thinking. He's obviously very bright and very talented. And Salvador, what a performance that was.

I see your thesis here as tautological.

It sounds like you're saying no one can truly act in an evil manner unless they're insane, so therefore there are no truly evil people as insane people cannot be evil. That makes for a semantically annoying situation. You've basically defined evil in a such a way that you cannot be wrong if we use your definition.

So, you've proven nothing and you haven't made an argument, but you have expressed a thought.

Another problem with this whole discussion is that good/evil is a binary concept that, like I believe David said before, requires some omnipotent force to define it for you. The idea has been so culturally filtered through Western religion that it's hard to have a solid discussion about it and avoid the assumptions everyone has about what good/evil means.

I disagree with your assumptions here. I think someone can certainly be evil without being insane. And I don't think all of these people rationalize what they are doing as in some way being morally good. Some people just seek out various goals such as money, power, sex, love, or fame. They may not care how they get it. I feel that people willing to violate their own sense of ethics to achieve these goals can be evil. That doesn't mean I don't sympathize with their humanity.

My sense of evil obviously involves my ethics so I guess I'm not actually disagreeing on anything except the definion of evil. I'm against destruction and causing pain, misery, or death without strong side benefits. Is that vague? You bet.

I would characterize people that have engaged in a pattern of violating their sense of ethics for some other goal as evil. There is a major issue here drawing the line between evil and just really, really bad.

Was Pete Wilson evil for promoting prop 187 (the California proposition which in part sought to deny illegal immigrants emergency medical care--for me it's ironic that this amendment had the same number as the police code for murder) when he almost certainly knew that illegal immigrants in California keep the farming industry going and (according to a professor of mine) pay more in taxes than they receive in services? He did so, in part because the economy was doing poorly and, as in Nazi Germany, a convenient scapegoat was illegal immigrants. He was a fairly big name governor at the time and considered a possible candidate for president in the next election. Maybe he knew the California Supreme Court would strike down that provision of the proposition. Never mind, bad example. Had this amendment passed in its complete form into law, it would have certainly killed a number of people (some of whom were scared to go to emergency rooms and died just due to the very existence of the proposition, even before it passed) had it passed as well as being incredibly irresponsible from a public health perspective (contagious diseases). His indirect influence probably caused the deaths of a few people. Occupational hazard.

I would say Stalin, Hitler, Eichmann, and Polpot were almost certainly evil. Eichmann almost certainly knew he was planning a broad scale extermination and according to the writer mentioned earlier in the thread (if you trust wikipedia's entry) he was neither anti-Semitic nor insane. So, he just acted a bureaucrat in the killing of millions of Jews, gypsys, gays, communists, criminals and political dissidents. Sounds like a strong case for evil in my book.

I tend to feel that people that are evil in the absense of coercive circumstances are insane, but that some people will engage in evil given the right motivation. They know it's wrong and would say they believe what they did was wrong if you asked them. Some are often guilty people who probably "don't sleep well at night." W.E.B. Du Bois feels such people deserve sympathy and have their own psychological scars with which to deal. I think for such people there is redemption, but feeling guilty is not enough. I think you can be evil in the sense I've defined it, but can change so that you are no longer evil.


As for movie roles, I think unless you inject some more complex humanity into a character, you're just a caricature. Caricatures and good films generally don't mix.