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Evil is as Evil Does

What is evil? What is the nature of evil?

My first impulse was to say "I may not be able to define it, but I know it when I see it." But I realized that's a cop out.

So let's say Lawrence Krause is right and the universe is a spontaneous creation from nothing. Before consciousness evolves, can evil even exist? I don't think so. If an asteroid crashes into a planet, it's just following its trajectory. If there was no life on the planet, the needle on the Evil-O-Meter(TM) doesn't even twitch. If there was life, and the asteroid's impact killed it all, still no evil. After all, the asteroid was a rock whose trajectory had been determined eons before. It was just a chance meeting in space.

So clearly evil requires life, consciousness, and intent.

Let us stipulate for the purposes of argument that God doesn't exist. Because then we avoid The Big Cop Out. I think a good place to start from here is the intentional infliction of suffering on another. A surgeon does that, but we don't label that as evil because it's an attempt to help. How about war? That is suffering on the grand scale. But is it evil? What if it's two tribes arguing over water rights and it's not clear which is the aggressor or which is "right" or "wrong"?

How about torture. Clearly that's evil, right? But I'm reading Steven Pinker's book right now, "The Angels of our Better Nature", and he describes the gruesome tortures of times past being gleefully relished public spectacles. Clearly the consensus at that time was not that torture is evil. They were inured to it.

Putting a hardened, vicious criminal into solitary confinement is not evil. But that same person, years before, a shy and sweet little boy, we definitely would protest tossing him into chokey like that. Was the man evil? Why not the boy?

What if his warped, deranged, abusive father was entirely responsible for slowly turning the sweet little boy into a vicious killer through cruel treatment, deliberate indoctrination and brain washing? Do you still think the man thrown into solitary was evil? What if, without the brain washing, he would have grown up to make Mother Teresa and Albert Schweitzer look like a couple of selfish, wanton reprobates? How about the abusive father? Was he evil? Can you even make that judgment without knowing his back story?

How about Miss Havisham from Great Expectations? As a revenge against humanity for being callously abandoned at the alter by her dastardly suitor, she adopts an orphan girl and raises her in luxury to grow up to be a cold beauty who can break men's hearts right and left. Miss Havisham was kind to Estella, fawned over her, gave her everything, and raised her to hate men and break their hearts mercilessly. Was Miss Havisham evil? How about the cold and cruel Estella?

What about Nazi soldiers, after spending the day gassing Jews, returning home to a wife and children and lavishing affection on them? Is Fritz evil? He's raising happy, well-adjusted children who will grow up to decry the treatment the previous generation had inflicted on the Jews. Does that compensate for his actions as a soldier?

So after all those hypothetical scenarios, what is evil? Is it the intentional, malicious infliction of harm on an innocent, undeserving person or people? Do we say that actions are evil, but not people? Where does free will enter into this? Why is it, when we know all the facts the picture so often becomes not more, but less clear? Is it valid to retroactively apply our standards on the actions of those that came before us and call their actions evil when they themselves clearly had no evil intent? Are we just a bunch of wishy-washy relativists, hopelessly enmired in our liberal western worldview and unable to tell right from wrong? Does that make us evil other than to conservatives?

This is a quandary for a person who wants to be as unevil as possible. I guess the lessons are: don't be too quick to judge others; things are not always what they seem, so dig deeper; and context is important in determining good and evil.

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