Quote:
Originally Posted by Tinordi
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.
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One experiment does not prove that humans are evil. There are other studies that suggest that humans are ultimately good, when drafted soldiers often shoot to miss because they don't want to kill other humans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killology#cite_note-Slam-4
Marshall, S. L. A. (Samuel Lyman Atwood) (2000). Men against fire: the problem of battle command. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 978-0-8061-3280-8.
I can safely say putting me in the role of a guard there's no circumstance where I could be abusive to a prisoner. There's nothing they could have done, including pedophilia or rape, that would make me abuse someone. So there's atleast one exception to your everyone has evil in them theory and documented evidence of human unwillingness to kill.