The discussion of an objective evil really warps our self-satisfying moral codes and perpetuates an us vs. them framework. Am I to say that we can't vigorously punish and learn from the identification of various perturbations of evil? No. But I think the capacity for evil is in all of us and that in favourable socio-institutional settings, we are capabale of awesome moral tragedies. Which is why we owe it to ourselves to really *understand* evil. Well beyond the pithy and simplistic attempts in this thread.
My only exhibit of fact is the Stanford Prison Experiment. It's a fascinating read into the real blackness of the human condition. Only until we understand how this capability exists in all of us can we really learn to not be.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
Quote:
On August 20, 1971, Zimbardo announced the end of the experiment to the participants. The results of the experiment have been argued to demonstrate the impressionability and obedience of people when provided with a legitimizing ideology and social and institutional support. The experiment has also been used to illustrate cognitive dissonance theory and the power of authority.
The results of the experiment favor situational attribution of behavior rather than dispositional attribution (a result caused by internal characteristics). In other words, it seemed that the situation, rather than their individual personalities, caused the participants' behavior. Under this interpretation, the results are compatible with the results of the Milgram experiment, in which ordinary people fulfilled orders to administer what appeared to be agonizing and dangerous electric shocks to a confederate of the experimenter.
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