It made me wonder, hearing from certain people who faced discrimination and harassment. They were hurt every single day intentionally and some of them had PTSD caused by their harm and became incredibly jumpy and traumatized.
Would that make the person who caused the harm evil?
Hurt people hurt people
I think good and evil both are things you do more than things that you are.
I have a parent who will intentionally set his children up against each other to make them dislike each other. Why? Because he finds it entertaining.
He would take or break something you had, and blame one of the other siblings. When he got called out for it, he’d threaten with a beating. Physical abuse happened, but not nearly as often as psychological. And it was all so he could gain trust, power or just be entertained.
To me, that’s an evil person. Intentionally hurting others and taking joy from it, is pretty bad. But it’s a whole new level of evil when it’s your kids.
This “evil/not evil” metaphysical dichotomy is a moral framework. There are no intrinsically ”evil” people, and I would drop that moral framework.
Philosophy professor and YouTuber Hans-Georg Moeller:
I don’t necessarily think people can be evil.
I know of some of my abusers that they were abused themselves. They knew what they were doing to me wasn’t right but it gave them feelings of power in a world where they otherwise felt powerless.
For others, bullying me was a social sport, just something you did to “belong” to a certain group.
I think what they did was evil, but I don’t think they were evil people. They were normal people with inadequate upbringing put into painful situations that resulted in bullying/abusing me being the only perceived “good” outcome for them. For almost all people who do evil things, this is the case.
I think we all possess the ability to do evil acts in response to certain stimuli, many are just lucky enough never to receive the set of stimuli that causes them to be evil, so they can allow themselves to think they are different, i.e. “good”, and start labeling other people a certain way, i.e. “evil”.
Conversely, I also think all the people who do evil acts are also able to do good acts in certain situations.
What we then call a “good” or an “evil person” is just a person where we perceive a larger share of behaviors attributed to that adjective. But are they evil or good people, is that a quality inherent to them? Or is the environment they grew up in evil or good? Or are humans in general evil or good? Is our perception of the share of each set of behaviors even right?
I think no one deserves for their whole self to be called evil. I think you can call actions evil, and some people may have a lot of these actions, and they’re worthy of being avoided because of that, but I believe they’re the same kind of person than everyone else, just put into terrible situations. So no, I don’t think people can be evil.
Depends if they did it on purpose
The bourgeois are not human.
Not ontologically so. People are made evil by latching themselves onto systems that unperson others. That’s not to say they’re ever entitled to receive the respect of those they’ve victimised, or that anyone should shed any tears over their stock portfolio cratering
To me, evil is the absence of empathy. Or more broadly, the absence of a filter that would prevent someone from harming equals and the disadvantaged.
In my opinion, in order for an action to be evil, the actor must know what is good or what is right behavior. While sometimes the actor acts with intent to cause harm, sometimes, the actor is ignorant of such things.
What if they acknowledge it’s wrong, but it’s not when they do it
It is not about acknowledgement, it’s about understanding the morality of the action. Most of the time, only they know the answer to that question.
“evil” is usually reserved for people whose actions and/or beliefs reach such an extreme immoral high that they become impossible to defend. morality is a spectrum where objective and subjective lie on opposite ends and everything we do to ourselves, others, and the world can be placed along the spectrum. for example, nobody reasonable would argue against rape being objectively evil.
it seems you are asking if abusers are evil because of the trauma they cause their victims. this doesn’t have a direct and clear answer, because it’s ultimately up to each person who suffered abuse to make that call. of course you are welcome to your own opinion on how you see the abuser, but if the victim thinks differently then perhaps their perspective should hold more weight than yours. or does that matter? victims may forgive their abusers - does that mean society should? it’s complicated.
personally, i think it depends on the abuse and trauma caused. some things feel worse than others. i’ll always feel the way i do regardless of how a victim interprets the event but i wouldn’t make them adopt my view of themselves or how i see their abuser. they have every right to enforce their morality within their own experiences.
I was evil, it was from trauma. I left and I miss her.
