What is evil?

1. What is evil? • Evil is the intention or effect of causing harm or destruction, usually specifically from the perception of deliberately violating some moral code. Evil is usually seen as the opposite of good. The philosophical question of whether morality is absolute or relative leads to questions about the nature of evil, with views falling into one of four opposed camps: moral absolutism, amoralism, moral relativism, and moral universalism.

2. Types • Moral Evil (harms perpetrated by some agent) • Natural Evil (harms resulting from natural disasters, disease, or other agentless causes)

3. What are evil acts? • Rape • Murder • Slavery? – US History • Genocide? – Nazi Germany • Massacre? – Native Americans

4. Nature of Evil (p1) • Moral absolutism holds that good and evil are fixed concepts established by a deity or deities, nature, morality, common sense, or some other source.[6] • Amoralism claims that good and evil are meaningless, that there is no moral ingredient in nature.

5. Nature of Evil (p2) • Moral relativism holds that standards of good and evil are only products of local culture, custom, or prejudice. • Moral universalism is the attempt to find a compromise between the absolutist sense of morality, and the relativist view; universalism claims that morality is only flexible to a degree, and that what is truly good or evil can be determined by examining what is commonly considered to be evil amongst all humans. Author Sam Harris notes that universal morality can be understood using measurable (i.e. quantifiable) metrics of happiness and suffering, both physical and mental, rooted in how the biology of the brain processes stimuli.

6. Characteristics of an Evil Person (p1) • Is consistently self-deceiving, with the intent of avoiding guilt and maintaining a self-image of perfection • Deceives others as a consequence of their own self-deception • Projects his or her evils and sins onto very specific targets, scapegoating others while appearing normal with everyone else ("their insensitivity toward him was selective") [10] • Commonly hates with the pretense of love, for the purposes of self-deception as much as deception of others

7. Characteristics … (p2) • Abuses political (emotional) power ("the imposition of one's will upon others by overt or covert coercion") [11] • Maintains a high level of respectability and lies incessantly in order to do so • Is consistent in his or her sins. Evil persons are characterized not so much by the magnitude of their sins, but by their consistency (of destructiveness) • Is unable to think from the viewpoint of their victim • Has a covert intolerance to criticism and other forms of narcissistic injury

8. Problem of Evil • Can true free will exist without the possibility of evil? • Secular Ethics? • Evolutionary Ethics? • Epicurus says ~ Theological arguement • If an all-powerful and perfectly good god exists, then evil does not. • There is evil in the world. • Therefore, an all-powerful and perfectly good god does not exist.

9. So how do we describe evil? • Difference between good and evil? • Universal acceptance of each? • Plato says ~ • “…that there are relatively few ways to do good, but there are countless ways to do evil, which can therefore have a much greater impact on our lives, and the lives of other beings capable of suffering. “