Question comes as a kind of addition to one I asked awhile back. It was about having met a truly evil person. I can tell the story again if anyone is interested but as a young teen I interacted with a guy in the Aryan brotherhood from California several times.
I want to agree. I really do. But labeling people as evil is detrimental to the evolution of humanity, because it fosters hatred. My point of view is that there are malicious actions, not evil people.
This is just the classic “let’s leave it up in the air so nobody gets judged because I wouldn’t like it either!” Western laissez-faire mentality that stops any thorough moral analysis. I’ll only accept it if it’s coming from a Cartesian “I think therefore I am and I can’t say anything else about anything with certainty”, if not it’s just moral permissiveness/intellectual laziness. Not everyone can just be “talked into sanity” and prosociality, many people have chosen their paths and as such can only go one way, in this world or the next. Can we make that final judgment, unbiasedly and accurately? No, but that’s reality, we can still acknowledge they’ve crossed enough thresholds and seem unrepentant enough that, for all intents and purposes, we can reasonably consider this person “evil” and, more importantly, just antisocial and dangerous enough to either lock up and ostracise.
In the real world with real means, do you think you could talk Trump out of touching kids and gambling the lives of many for the sake of personal profit? Satanyahu to stop colonizing West Asia? Do you think you could stop a rapist while he’s at it with the words of Jesus or Muhammad? Come on, now.
I don’t remember saying that my distinction between evil people versus harmful deeds has anything to do with my stance on punitive consequences. We have to work together to protect each other from people that would harm us, whether that is through correctional programs with no incarceration or locking them up for the rest of their lives. Justice and punishment is not black and white. I wish for both of those evildoers to drop dead immediately. But that doesn’t change my opinion on how detrimental to society I believe labeling people as “evil” is. Our actions define whether we are “good” or “evil”. There is no inherent morality. We should punish people for their harmful actions, not for whatever made-up imaginary persona we label them as.
We are who we choose to be, and if you have been nothing but sociopathically antisocial all this time, I’m not gonna expect you to randomly change your mind… and I can safely call you an “evil person”. Evil because they decided to be so, and I’m just labelling this person’s most salient characteristic, not saying they were born that way or whatever, ofc not. People are malleable on paper but for pragmatic reasons at some point (specially if you’re old) I assume you’re stuck in your ways and no words will make you turn it around, and as such you can warrant the static “evil” label.
I guess I could go as far as to say, that it’s a pragmatic oversimplification for the masses and for our criminal justice system.
Hard agree
What about (the thankfully deceased) Ian Watkins?