do you think people are intrinsically evil? do their beliefs merely fit their personality, as if they were destined to commit intentional acts causing suffering?

or do you think evil is based in genes, mental problems and things such as social setting and childhood?

... or are you unsure? an agnostic on the issue?

an underlying question here is this: do you believe humans have the ability to advance morally, lessening suffering in the world?

If they do it's rarely utilized

There are two opposite viewpoints in this one statement.

Genes would suggest predestined, yet social setting and childhood suggests that it is something that is formed as you grow and not a permanent thing. Mental problems I'm not sure where to place. If it is a genuine mental problem then that person is sick, not really evil.

I'm not really a fan of the word evil. Behavior is pretty much learned through what we experience when we're young, which I guess is what you're talking about here.

How do you define evil? Is it all things that do not benefit man? Does it require intent?

Does evil exist if free will doesn't exist? Can we know what good is without evil?

How do we recognize what is evil?

You cannot possibly quantify good and evil. They are just terms created to describe subjective behavior, which is completely relative. "Good and evil" only exists as a sociological construct of the mind. Like lines on a map, people imagine they are there and react to it, but it does not exist.

i'd say look them in the eyes:

So evil does exist outside the context of mass murder.

A lot of great minds have come to this conclusion, but others have disagreed. C.S. Lewis has argued that the fact that many moral standards are consistent from culture to culture, no matter how different the cultures may be hints at the existence of moral absolutes that are hard-wired within individuals. All of these may arise from the intrinsic imperative to preserve the species:

The idea that, without appealing to any court higher than the instincts themselves, we can yet find grounds for preferring one instinct above its fellows dies very hard. We grasp at useless words: we call it the 'basic', or 'fundamental', or 'primal', or 'deepest' instinct. It is of no avail. Either these words conceal a value judgement passed upon the instinct and therefore not derivable from it, or else they merely record its felt intensity, the frequency of its operation and its wide distribution. If the former, the whole attempt to base value upon instinct has been abandoned: if the latter, these observations about the quantitative aspects of a psychological event lead to no practical conclusion. It is the old dilemma. Either the premisses already concealed an imperative or the conclusion remains merely in the indicative.

C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/ar ... ition2.htm

yes, it requires intent. certain acts are meant to be good and turn out horribly. and i do not equate poor planning or stupidity with evil.



interesting question. evil can still exist without free will. it would just be predetermined.



this is an argument i come across often. the one thing i can say is that if god exists, and is picking his spots on where to throw down evil, he is one evil guy himself.



i think what we're talking about here gets back down to morals, and i think moral questions are questions of pain and suffering.

lewis was on the right track. we do seem to have a hard-wired moral sense within us across the globe. mark hauser has done some great work on this. lewis, however, postulated this was evidence for god.

Except that many of the basic moral consistencies are also behavior sets that are necessary for a culture to thrive, if not survive. This could be used to argue that these sets develop within communities because cultures have a natural drive to continue and, perhaps, even spread.

Yup, and the question is always, "Where does that drive originate?"

well, in the case that 'digm just laid out, it'd be something developed through evolution.

Serial killers and mass-murderers aren't really evil. They're just pathetic, maladjusted pieces of shit.

Antisocial Personality Disorder, not pure evil?

Maybe they're really the next evolution of humans. Like the cockroach, the ones who'll survive all the global climate change disasters because they are wired to make hard choices that put their own interests first.

Realpolitik, not pure evil?

Evolution happens so slowly that we'd never notice it for what it is. We'd just point and go freak of nature, scientific anomoly, etc.... Maybe we are seeing the rise of a new better breed of humans, not constrained by morals. Because they are different than us we say they are wrong, we kill them and lock them up.