My Lion King Forum

Can someone be inherently evil?

First, evil must be defined.

I believe so

Desirous of harm to others for no rational reason, perhaps? What do you think?

Re: Can someone be inherently evil?

I think a person's core instincts, perception of reality, and habitual reactions can together run SO counter to general/average human behavior, common decency, and psychological empathy that it would seem so to all intents & purposes.

Keep in mind that some instincts are still built into us that prevent us from being "evil" without proper training. The most obvious is that for the most part, we want to avoid hurting other people. This is why armies have to train their soldiers to attack others, and even up to WWII, still managed to flunk it quite badly. Even today, soldiers find it easier to attack a retreating enemy, because it avoids having to look at their faces, and therefore having to override the instinct not to kill fellow humans.

Or to put it this way: If it was possible to be inherently evil, we as a species would not have survived to get this far.

The key word I used there in that sentance was "together". Competition and anger/fight response are also instinctive. Combine those instincts *together* with a perception that is unrealistic, such as everyone's out to get you or that you're somehow invincible, together with a habit of reacting to things by beating animals or cutting off social contact, can lead a person to be so counter and dangerous and dysfunctional that whether evil exists or not, they are a workable example of it.

I'm not talking about soldiers, who are essentially employees whatever their motivation for persuing their line of work, nor humanity in a broad sense. The question isn't if humanity is inherently evil, but if some one person can be.

And I think for as much as it matters, when significant criteria align/occur together a given individual might as well be, inherent or not.

Maybe a better question is, can someone be evil at all? What makes someone 'evil'?

Woeler wrote:[Morality] ... is otherwise without universal or even relative truth in any sense.

Isn't it?

There's a simple algorithm to determining whether or not something is right or wrong.

Would you want someone to [action] to you, given [list of circumstances that apply to the specific action]?

If no, then [action] is wrong.

If yes, then [action] is right.

As long as every possible term and condition is accounted for, this cannot possibly fail.

Ethics is nothing but logic. That's why what is called right and wrong, is called right and wrong.

Azdgari wrote:Maybe a better question is, can someone be evil at all? What makes someone 'evil'?

Theoretically no, but in response to Woeler, I think denying the existence of morality- or value-driven judgments in favor of essential absolutes because it was constructed and a relative truth isn't completely accurate, either. Yeah, there are no absolutes, serial killers are beloved parents and Hitler helped Germany recover, but there ARE dangerous and/or deranged people who should be recognized as such that decisions and appraisals must needs be made of. It's a difference of if you're involved enough to make a judgment, if you were the person getting murdered, you wouldn't be thinking "there's no value in this action they are taking because it is subjective". Regardless of any other details. If you are getting killed, the person killing you is evil. That really is universal.

I personally don't like the word evil, it implies a black and white dualism that IS imaginary and a bit simplistic, but it serves a function to a person so it's also real. If someone's thought/language complex supplies the word evil to a fact pattern that is habitual and intrinsic to another person that is more dangerous than their concept of "bad", then they are evil because that's what gets applied to the accumulation of things present in another person.

Concepts don't exist in creatures that aren't capable of having them. Because we have them it's never absolute to say they don't exist because they're intangible, either.

But I'm sure y'all have danced around that bush a thousand times already in other threads I wasn't eyeballing.

That said, I like other words a lot better when commenting on things I find repulsive/reprehensible/horrible

< / two cents from the cubicle. >