How James Woods Helped Me Collect My Thoughts on Morality.

[FredJones888]

"As for Hitler I only said he MIGHT not be evil. I would have to know his real motives to be sure."

you are pretending you don't know the motivies of hitler ? And because you don't know his motives, you can't be SURE that hitler was evil ?

That is moral relativism at its absolute worst. Somebody cold bloodedly murders over 6 million people ( not including the people that died in combat ) and you aren't SURE that he's evil ?

That is almost unbelievable.

[lehighguy]

There are also many people that match BluffThis definition of evil and construct moral believe systems to justify thier actions. Perhaps they even trick themselves after awhile. Consider, maybe Osama Bin Laden may not actually believe anything he says. Maybe he is just suffering from existential angst and his Jihad gives him a sense of meaning. The way doing charity work might bring purpose to someones life Jihad may do the same for him. I don't know. However, killing thousands so that you feel good about yourself and have a sense of purpose could be just as "evil" via BluffThis explanation.

Morals, good, and evil are human creations. Each individual can therefore decide for himself what he considers "evil". In my own framework, I don't think the fact that Hitler had good intentions matters in terms of wether or not he was evil. What matters is what he was trying to do and how he did it. Those things will, now and forever, remain evil. Just as Osama will forever be evil even if we consider his intentions pure (disregarding the idea posited in paragraph one).

[brick]

You see david, you've almost made it around the circle.
You've pointed out that everyone thinks they are good, but are actually not.
Including you. You are bad. So am I.

[NotReady]

Tell Mr. Woods I think he's a great actor. Probably the best all time slimeball on screen (that's a compliment). The only better portrayal of pure evil I can think of is Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs, a role Woods could have done well, I think.

Your first two paragraphs are good. One thing all humans do well is rationalize. Even when we admit we did something wrong, we find an excuse. It started with Adam and Eve when they tried to blame God for their sin. The rest is history.

The third paragraph is dead wrong for reasons I've given many times.

[PairTheBoard]

[ QUOTE ]
PTB --
<font color="white"> ,, </font>
The last person to get into heaven will be the last person who insists that someone must go to hell

[/ QUOTE ]

Someday you will be able to google that quote.

PairTheBoard

[Georgia Avenue]

Nice Quote! It seems like the David's point could be taken to be: the only true crime is self-righteousness...or, more plausibly: self-righteousness is the root of all evil. Have you ever met a person without doubts and self-scrutiny who WASN’T a wacko/jerkwad? I can’t say that I have. The unexamined life is usually pretty destructive.

I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean this, but, that’s my personal deliberate misinterpretation of the Word from On High!

[Jordan Olsommer]

[ QUOTE ]
Because he realized that except possibly for the truly insane, everybody basically thinks they are a generally good person. Even career criminals, mobsters and scoundrels justify to themselves that there is a good reason for what they do.

[/ QUOTE ]

He's right - Steven Pinker said in one of his books that no matter what we do, we confabulate and reinterpret events and actions so that one statement is true at all times: "I am a good person, and I am in control."

Anybody who doesn't believe this may feel free to prove it experimentally by going up to some biker at a bar and saying "Hey buddy, you're an a**hole and you don't know what you're doing."

As far as institutionally-widespread evils like Nazism or slavery go, the responsibility for said evils diminishes with each new person to jump on board (given that the pressure for acquiescing to the 'norm' increases as well). So for example with slavery, some idiot on vacation in Africa gets the bright idea of bringing a black guy home with him in chains as a souvenir, and makes him a slave on his plantation. Now his company, Douchebag Cotton Co., can lower prices because they've got themselves some "free labor". From here it's quite clear how even something as horrible as slavery can be established as an institution - after Douchebag Cotton does it, then previously-respectable Acme Cotton joins in to compete, all the way on down the line until Mom and Pop Cotton feels they have to buy slaves or else they won't be able to feed their children (plus you get the ancillary idiocies like preachers searching for passages in the bible that they can make sound like a divine mandate to own slaves). So in this case, as in most cases in life, evil (to what extent that it exists) and the responsibility for it lie primarily with the Douchebags.

[hmkpoker]

I agree with most if not all of what you wrote. I also don't believe in good or evil as useful concepts.

Let's take a fellow who's had a rotten upbringing, riddled himself mad with psychedelic drugs, and is now a crazed serial killer lurking in the shadows. He inflicts harm for his own pleasure. However, he views life in a very feral, LaVeyan sort of way, that human beings are all, at their core, feral, competitive animals, and by indulging in vicious acts, he lives out his existence in the highest and best way a human being can, and thereby, considers it "good."

What's the verdict?

I'm curious to hear what you think makes an evil person.


-hmk

[Jordan Olsommer]

[ QUOTE ]

I'm curious to hear what you think makes an evil person.

[/ QUOTE ]

I suppose a rough sketch would be simply someone who willfully causes a greater-than-average amount of harm. But if we want to be honest, I think almost all of us define evil in the same way that the Supreme Court justice (I think it might have been Scalia*, but don't quote me on that) defined pornography: "I don't know what it is exactly, but I know it when I see it."

Discussion of the fact that there is no such thing as pure, unadulterated, twitching-your-mustache-in-your-secret-lair evil does not in any way absolve Hitler or slaveowners or Idi Amin or what have you (off-topic slightly, for an excellent view of the life of a malicious dictator - a "behind-the-psychopathy" if you will - check out Barbet Schroeder's movie "General Idi Amin Dada". The scenes showing him doing mundane, completely innocuous things are incredibly frightening simply because of who he is.)

I don't want to overuse Steven Pinker as a source, but he also said something pithy apropos your comment - basically, he said it really doesn't matter whether we do everything for good reasons or we do everything because we are at heart nothing more than selfish sex-gremlins - Mother Theresa is good and Gordon Gekko is bad, and that's all there is to it.

The main problem in this thread that many people can easily get hung up on is differentiating between "evil" and the concept of "Pure Evil", or "Evil with a capital 'E'", the latter meaning the mustache-twitching insanity bit. The former (people who do significantly more harm than can be expected from an average human) is certainly present on this planet, and anyone who tries to argue otherwise would do best to prove his position by bunking with a convicted felon, because otherwise I don't believe him for a second.

*edit: I was way off - it was Potter Stewart. Oh well - Scalia seemed like the kind of guy who knows his way around pornography [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

[hmkpoker]

With reference to "Mother Theresa is good and Gordon Gekko is bad, and that's all there is to it."...

Madagascar is located in the Indian ocean, and Brazil along the edge of the Atlantic. No debate there. But when we look at the tip of South Africa, it becomes a little harder to tell.

Despite not knowing either of them, I'd be willing to bet that Mother Teresa is a good person, by any definition, and Gordon Gekko, (not sure who he is, but I'll assume Charles Manson will work as well) is a bad person. We kind of use these people as archetypes though. They are epitomes, and pure, idealistic exemplaries of these concepts of good and evil, much like every Disney hero and villian.

While these archetypes do speak to us on a fundamental level, real people don't work that way. And often, when someone does something that most people would consider evil, when you get to know the reasoning behind the act and understand the context on an intimate level, you usually relate to it, and wouldn't consider it to be "evil."

For example, I know someone who is doing a very poor job of raising her kid. Her daughter is overly stressed, and when the mother found out she was cutting herself, she slapped her and threatened her. On the surface, this seems like black and white evil, but when I got to understand how the mother was raised and how resultantly the gears in her head work, I understand why she did what she did.

...this does NOT excuse such behavior, by any means, obviously, and she SHOULD take steps to rectify it. But I think her actions stem more from ignorance than "evil," and when you get down to it, most "evil" actions do too.

-hmk