I know, I don't usually post here but this question...

That action is wrong, but it is not evil, IMO. If it were evil, then there is evil being perpetrated every single day in every courtroom in the country.

 

Hey Cynthia - it was meant to be a rhetorical question. It's about empathy. We find it much more difficult to ignore that which is front of us than that which occurs far away. The link to evil is that if a person cannot feel empathy then they are most likely a sociopath or a psychopath. Which is 'nature'. If they aren't a socio or psychopath then IMO their evil deeds would laregly come from 'nurture' (or more correctly lack of it/abuse of it).

I also tend to think of a person as committing evil deeds rather than them as being 'evil'. Not in a namby pamby they had a rough childhood kind of way, just because I think if we just dismiss people as 'evil' we'll never really understand why they are that way and what we as a society can try and do to prevent more evil deeds from ocurring.

 

It's still a hard thing for me to define. It's not a term I use. If I did, I think I would apply it to any gratuitous cruelty to anyone or anything. THat is something I don't understand, can't relate to and seems outside the bounds of human decency.

Using the example of the kid who elbowed your kid and pretended he didn't (does football come to mind?) I think aggression is usually an inborn trait but I bet he learned acceptance if not outright encouragement for that behavior at home. I also have known many adults who were very decent people tell of indecent things they did as young people. For some the brain seems to need time to mature and become civilized. For some it never does.

I think it is a hard term to define. I could add a lot of behaviors not unlike some of the questions Henry brought up that qualify as evil in my mind but perhaps not other peoples. Letting people starve would be one. Pretending not to see cruelty is another. The concept of 'collateral damage' is another. To me, the perpetrator of the Nazi atrocities was insane and perhaps evil, those who pretended not to notice to save their own skin or worse to gain material advantage - that was more evil in my mind because without that it couldn't have happened. But those people probably didn't have an evil look in their eye. I don't know what I would have done in that case but I would have been part of an evil machine if I had not stood up. Yet I bet there was no evil look in the eyes of most of those people. I bet they were loving parents.

 

Man I hate those Nazies, but how many of them where forced to join?

Pedophilia, serial rapist, serial murders although there is indeed something twisted in their genetic make up are evil.

Evil incarnate is described as a devil or demon taking over the soul of a new born thus evil incarnate,,,,I think.

I should had not started this thread before the Holiday of thanks and I apologize. We are heading to the camp for the Holiday I will try to respond more in kind when we get settled.

Have a happy and blessed Holiday my friends and lets not think about Evil tomorrow.

 

Have a good holiday. I hope no evil, marginal or otherwise comes anywhere near you and yours for a long time.