An Evil Index

[tw]

A concept that only forensic scientists and psychologist could appreciate? And Evil Index.

For the Worst of Us, the Diagnosis May Be 'Evil'
Predatory killers often do far more than commit murder. Some have lured their victims into homemade chambers for prolonged torture. Others have exotic tastes - for vivisection, sexual humiliation, burning. Many perform their grisly rituals as much for pleasure as for any other reason.
...
Most psychiatrists assiduously avoid the word evil, contending that its use would precipitate a dangerous slide from clinical to moral judgment that could put people on death row unnecessarily and obscure the understanding of violent criminals.

Still, many career forensic examiners say their work forces them to reflect on the concept of evil, and some acknowledge they can find no other term for certain individuals they have evaluated.

In an effort to standardize what makes a crime particularly heinous, Dr. Michael Welner, an associate professor of psychiatry at New York University, has been developing what he calls a depravity scale, which rates the horror of an act by the sum of its grim details.

[Schrodinger's Cat]

From the article:

"Evil is endemic, it's constant, it is a potential in all of us. Just about everyone has committed evil acts," said Dr. Robert I. Simon, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown Medical School and the author of "Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream."

Now THAT I find as interesting as anything else. I wonder how Simon defines an "evil" act? I'll admit that I have done one or two things in my life that I'm not very proud of, but "evil"? I don't know.

I agree that we all have the capacity for wrong-doing, but I think the majority of people under normal circumstances stop short of "evil."

[zippyt]

"Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream."

If I or any of us ( as enlightened or intelectual as we think we are ) acted on all our impulses , most all of us would be in jail or dead .
You can't tell me that when some asshat cuts you off in trafic, that just for a sec you don't just concider what would happen if you ran said asshat over , then the rational mind kicks in and says " self , thats just an asshat doing what an asshat does , let HIM put his own stupid self in the ditch " .

Impluse controll , and the realsation that fantasy is just that fantasy . Every body has weird thoughts ( don't they ???) ( though we could talk for a LONG time on just what IS normal ) , bad guys from what i have seen don't always get this seperation of thinking and doing .
Though some folks don't have any home training to know right from wrong or they are just fucked up in the head to begain with .

Just my read on things .

[glatt]

Evil is endemic, it's constant, it is a potential in all of us. Just about everyone has committed evil acts," said Dr. Robert I. Simon, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown Medical School and the author of "Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream."

I also question this. I think everyone is capable of committing evil acts, but most people haven't.

Put me into Abu Ghraib prison as a guard, and there is a good chance I would have committed the same evil acts.

This article is really worth the read:
YOU CAN'T BE A SWEET CUCUMBER IN A VINEGAR BARREL

[Happy Monkey]

It depends on where you set the bar for when a bad act becomes evil.

[Troubleshooter]

Originally Posted by glatt

Put me into Abu Ghraib prison as a guard, and there is a good chance I would have committed the same evil acts.

As studied here at the Stanford Prison Experiment.

[tw]

Originally Posted by zippyt

"Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream."

If I or any of us ( as enlightened or intelectual as we think we are ) acted on all our impulses , most all of us would be in jail or dead.

That is a point I made previously. Emotion is a powerful tool. A useful tool when the logical mind remains in control. Those who let their emotions, rather than logic, make decisions are either still children, or indeed dangerous (what we politely call anti-social).

Previously cited specific instances where I won competitions by channeling and empowering my emotions to defeat others who were better athletes. Again, emotions are an essential and powerful tool. But emotions cannot be permitted to be justification for a decision. Nor can emotion - what creates that 'evil' - be permitted to make those decisions.

Where in the evil index do they make such distinctions? Or does such 'evil' instead arise instead from logical thought - not from emotions? In which case, your example of an emotional impulse would not apply as an example of evil.

[zippyt]

I agree with you about my example , but i realy didn't want to get in to an example like some perv seeing a pretty little girl and grabbing her on an impulse , or some body desides to stick up a 7/11 , the clerk laughs at them for being a looser and they rape and exacute the whole store full of folks , now you have to agree that those are evil impulses.
But you also have to agree that these 2 examples could be said to be emotional as well , dude gets wood seeing the little girl and desides to play , and other dude gets dissed so he goes off .
I guess we need to define evil , is it an act, or a whole series of acts , and if so how heinus of an act is considerd evil , or an attatude of total disreguard for human life and the property of others , or what ???

[xoxoxoBruce]

Evil can't be defined. Most everyone would say evil is worse than bad, it is very bad or it is bad to the extreme. But you'll play hell trying to get any two people to agree on the exact boundaries between bad and evil in every area.

There are people who think smoking pot is very evil and many that don't, as one example. Some areas the intent would be called into question and others only the result.

[Troubleshooter]

To paraphrase one of our illustrious leaders...

I can't define evil, but I know it when I see it.

[glatt]

This may not be an all-encompasing definition, but I think that when a person derives pleasure from hurting other people, they are being evil. I've heard Mike Tyson say in interviews that he used to feel good when he hurt people in his youth, before he went into boxing. That's evil.

A lot of people hurt others, but it's usually a secondary thing. They lash out because they feel threatened themselves on some level. For example, a mugger who feels they need to shoot a victim to avoid being caught. I don't think that rises to the level of evil. It's wrong. It's criminal. But it's not evil. But when you go out of your way to hurt someone, when you don't need to, and you enjoy doing it, you are being evil. Torturers are evil if they enjoy what they do.

Consentual S&M sessions don't count, because it's consentual.

[tw]

Originally Posted by glatt

This may not be an all-encompasing definition, but I think that when a person derives pleasure from hurting other people, they are being evil. I've heard Mike Tyson say in interviews that he used to feel good when he hurt people in his youth, before he went into boxing.

The problem is that those guards and CIA interrogators who were just doing their job and were harming innocent people then were not evil? These are people who did not take pleasure in their job but were also not appalled by what they were doing.

A point made by the article: There is no 'black and white', 'true and false', 'yes and no' definition of evil. So-called 'good' people were listed as about 5 on the evil scale. Are they all good or all evil?

Were those prison guards all evil in the Stanford Prison experiment? Was Khrushchev evil when he created the events that caused a Cuban Missile Crisis?

I can appreciate your effort to define a border line between good and evil. But then what happens when a so-called 'good' United States commits so much evil in Iraq? Who is evil? The benchmark does not even take into account perspective. Its metric is subjective.

The one point made by those scientists is that is some people logically perform evil without any emotion. Apparently they neither enjoy nor are appalled by their actions. How then does your definition of evil apply if you define evil in terms of the emotion of joy?

If Captain Kirk beamed into a biblical village, clearly he would be considered a god. Using their perspective, they would assume such a conclusion - since the concept of god is subjective. Again, what is the benchmark upon which we define a god? I suspect the definition if evil is just as subjective. Therefore is a relative concept that exists only in fiction or in speculation. It does not have a real world concept because it cannot be defined against a benchmark. Just as those biblical villagers called Capt Kirk a god, well those scientists (in the news article) suspect there are some people who just are evil. Why? They too do not yet understand nor have definitions that would describe this heinous anti-social behavior. So they too jump to the only definition left: evil. As the article notes, they don't like the definition of evil because it is about as valid as the definition of a god - totally subjective.

[tw]

Originally Posted by zippyt

I agree with you about my example , but i realy didn't want to get in to an example like some perv seeing a pretty little girl and grabbing her on an impulse , or some body desides to stick up a 7/11 , the clerk laughs at them for being a looser and they rape and exacute the whole store full of folks , now you have to agree that those are evil impulses.

I could agree that those are anti-social actions or those are acts inspired by hate. Whether I could call that evil, well, first I need a definition of evil. To paraphrase, "evil is in the eye of the beholder". IOW those who declared something as evil could be just as evil. We call that a lynching.

Maybe that is why we have courts? Because there is no such thing as evil. Even the Bible and Quran are subject to interpretation because they too provide only general and sometimes subjective standards. Instead we use courts to decide guilt using other standards such as fraud, murder, human rights violations, defamation, etc. IOW we use concepts that are defined (limited) by standards. I see no standard for the definition of evil. And this makes that article interesting. They are trying to create an 'evil index'. Why? None exists? Any yet the subjective among us would disagree.

[Troubleshooter]

Good... Bad... I'm the guy with the gun...

[mrnoodle]

Originally Posted by tw

Maybe that is why we have courts? Because there is no such thing as evil. Even the Bible and Quran are subject to interpretation because they too provide only general and sometimes subjective standards...I see no standard for the definition of evil.

A Christian or Muslim will have a different definition of evil than a humanist, I would think. I can't speak for Islam (their book is written backwards - drives me nuts), but Christianity and Judaism hold that any rebellion against the will of God is "evil". Whether you're cheating on your taxes, raping puppies, saying something rude to your mom, murdering, it all falls into the category of "obeying your own sinful desires" instead of obeying God. There aren't levels of sinfulness, something either is or it isn't.

Evil, then, is the outside force manifesting itself in people's desire to do what is wrong in God's eyes. What people DO with evil impulses can range from murder to "taking 5 extra minutes at lunch at the company's expense". Our sense of outrage at a particular misdeed reflects the whims of whatever society/time we are living in, but don't really measure the force called "evil".

Without the subtext of God, there really isn't a standard for the definition of evil. It's all just a matter of doing what feels good and hoping no one gets hurt.