The Intentionality of Evil (2005)(aaronsw.com)
aaronsw.com
The Intentionality of Evil (2005)
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/intentionalevil
35 comments
Doesn't this all just come down to the fact that lambs think eagles are evil and eagles think lambs are tasty?
Yes and no. Lambs and eagles do not think, at least not like humans. Evil and taste are not thoughts for them, they are experiences. However evil and taste have their own existence in the human mind, separate from experience. And that's why humans can be manipulated by thoughts only, not just by experience.
Who in their right mind wants to send their offsprings to butchery in war? It can only happen if you first create meaning and justify the war (e.g. a clear danger worse than war) if you expect people to follow.
So the real issue here is how easy it is to manipulate humans, to make them act like robots programmed by mainstream media so eager to show us a danger and the difference between "us" and "them".
This does not mean there is no intentionality though. Is it really a coincidence if some weapon manufacturers invest in media companies? Is it a coincidence if the same source of finance feed both sides of a conflict?
Who in their right mind wants to send their offsprings to butchery in war? It can only happen if you first create meaning and justify the war (e.g. a clear danger worse than war) if you expect people to follow.
So the real issue here is how easy it is to manipulate humans, to make them act like robots programmed by mainstream media so eager to show us a danger and the difference between "us" and "them".
This does not mean there is no intentionality though. Is it really a coincidence if some weapon manufacturers invest in media companies? Is it a coincidence if the same source of finance feed both sides of a conflict?
I don't understand what it means to "all just come down to" a metaphor. Metaphors are inherently high level and abstract - the very opposite of what things "come down to", which is used to describe a concrete, pragmatic causation. The specific metaphor also is unhelpful, as it throws away the uniquely human nature of both morality and freedom of choice.
Aaron suggests that is childish to think evil people do evil things intentionality. But isn't actually the notion of good and evil completely childish? Arnt bankers just predators and their victims just prey? The banker isn't even thinking "I'm good" they are just thinking "I'm hungry"
Realistically adults don't think about the morality of their actions much at all.
Realistically adults don't think about the morality of their actions much at all.
> Realistically adults don't think about the morality of their actions much at all.
If you're basing this on personal experience then either you or I are atypical because I think of the morality of my actions all the time (and sometimes makes judgement calls which are different to social norms).
If you're basing this on personal experience then either you or I are atypical because I think of the morality of my actions all the time (and sometimes makes judgement calls which are different to social norms).
I think you're both right here. From the outside, it seems like most people don't consider the morality of their actions, but I believe it's a matter of degrees and instances.
For instance, I've been told by many in my social circle that I tend to think more deeply than most about the morality, direct or implied, of my actions/beliefs, than the average person, but when I speak to people, there's always some code they're holding themselves to, even if they don't articulate it as such, but then there are also people who will have sex with anything in sight, but will engage in extreme handwringing over every food choice and environmental impact. Even if someone isn't weighing the morality of their own actions, they're acutely aware of how others' actions comply or contradict their moral code.
Practically everyone has some common moral code that they abide by, while ignoring other parts because of convenience, desire, etc.
People who are highly morally consistent tend to be seen as ascetics, extremists, idealogues, or the like.
Like intelligence, moral IQ is a spectrum that probably most don't consciously think about until a conundrum comes up, but that generally centers around a mean, and spans multiple areas that overlap across cultures and generations and behaviors.
Like intelligence, moral IQ is a spectrum that probably most don't consciously think about until a conundrum comes up, but that generally centers around a mean, and spans multiple areas that overlap across cultures and generations and behaviors.
In a pyramidal society it all depends where you stand. Most people function from a partial narrative, biased towards some local/invented optimum. The higher you go in the pyramid, the more conscious evil you can find. And usually you can only go high in the pyramid because you have proven yourself capable of evil.
Morality is childish? What?
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Lambs don't think eagles are evil because lambs don't have complex systems of morality. The lamb is just frightened and sad that it's gonna get eaten. It isn't judging the eagle. It knows there's nothing "personal" about getting eaten; the eagle has to eat to survive.
Whereas in our world, we judge each other with our own set of complex rules, and we treat each other based on those rules, rather than just rules of survival. It results in a lot of conflict that has absolutely nothing to do with competing for a mate, finding food, or sheltering. We trick ourselves into believing the complex rules are more real than reality. We think 'evil' is real, when in reality it's an imaginary concept that doesn't exist as a part of nature. There is no such thing as an evil being.
Hell, we think there's an invisible being in the sky that watches our every move and judges us, and based on that belief we kill people. As a species, we're insane.
Whereas in our world, we judge each other with our own set of complex rules, and we treat each other based on those rules, rather than just rules of survival. It results in a lot of conflict that has absolutely nothing to do with competing for a mate, finding food, or sheltering. We trick ourselves into believing the complex rules are more real than reality. We think 'evil' is real, when in reality it's an imaginary concept that doesn't exist as a part of nature. There is no such thing as an evil being.
Hell, we think there's an invisible being in the sky that watches our every move and judges us, and based on that belief we kill people. As a species, we're insane.
This post is similar to the ideas of Hannah Arendt and her concept of "the banality of evil". In her own words:
"I was struck by the manifest shallowness in the doer [ie Eichmann] which made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous."
She set out to research the origins of how high ranking nazis became so evil, only to find that in many cases the roots were innocuous. Her thesis is that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.
Explaining this phenomenon, Edward S. Herman has emphasized the importance of "normalizing the unthinkable." According to him, "doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on 'normalization.' This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as 'the way things are done.'"
"I was struck by the manifest shallowness in the doer [ie Eichmann] which made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous."
She set out to research the origins of how high ranking nazis became so evil, only to find that in many cases the roots were innocuous. Her thesis is that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.
Explaining this phenomenon, Edward S. Herman has emphasized the importance of "normalizing the unthinkable." According to him, "doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on 'normalization.' This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as 'the way things are done.'"
Hannah Arendt’s book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, is mentioned and summarized in the 4th paragraph of the article.
I've been listening a lot to Slavoj Zizek recently and he discusses this often. His argument is that to make good people do horrible things, you need an ideology that basically says that you are an agent of "what must be done" and then the ends justify the means.
He describes how Nazi soldiers, who were instinctively horrified by what they were doing, were instructed to try to dissociate from their bodies and their actions, and identify themselves completely and impersonally with the nationalist cause.
He describes how Nazi soldiers, who were instinctively horrified by what they were doing, were instructed to try to dissociate from their bodies and their actions, and identify themselves completely and impersonally with the nationalist cause.
The Nazis also dosed their soldiers with methamphetamine.
Hannah Arendt was the mistress of Martin Heidegger, a firm Nazi, until his death. Philosophers are still debating about the levels of cognitive dissonance that took.
This reminds me of the show "The Good Place" (sorry spoiler ahead!!!!!!!) Basically part of the premise of the show is that life has become so complex that you can no longer make a moral choice because macroeconomic structures have forced nearly all of our tiny decisions to be grades of evil.
I don't think that's a good summary of the premise of the show. For one thing, consider the exact number of people we are told have made it, in the last 500-something years, which expands the required explanatory power well beyond the complexities of modern life.
CS Lewis' Devil Screwtape describes the evil of today:
"Oh, to get one's teeth again into a Farinata, a Henry VIII, or even a Hitler! There was real crackling there; something to crunch; a rage, an egotism, a cruelty only just less robust than our own. It put up a delicious resistance to being devoured. It warmed your inwards when you'd got it down. Instead of this, what have we had tonight? There was a municipal authority with Graft sauce. But personally I could not detect in him the flavour of a really passionate and brutal avarice such as delighted one in the great tycoons of the last century. Was he not unmistakably a Little Man — a creature of the petty rake-off pocketed with a petty joke in private and denied with the stalest platitudes in his public utterances — a grubby little nonentity who had drifted into corruption, only just realizing that he was corrupt, and chiefly be-cause everyone else did it? ..."
... "The difficulty lay in their very smallness and flabbiness. Here were vermin so muddled in mind, so passively responsive to environment, that it was very hard to raise them to that level of clarity and deliberateness at which mortal sin becomes possible. To raise them just enough; but not that fatal millimetre of “too much.”" [1]
Which is to say the quality of a "banal evil" is kind of a product of our modern bureaucratic capitalist society.
[1] http://www.samizdat.qc.ca/arts/lit/Toast_CSL.pdf
"Oh, to get one's teeth again into a Farinata, a Henry VIII, or even a Hitler! There was real crackling there; something to crunch; a rage, an egotism, a cruelty only just less robust than our own. It put up a delicious resistance to being devoured. It warmed your inwards when you'd got it down. Instead of this, what have we had tonight? There was a municipal authority with Graft sauce. But personally I could not detect in him the flavour of a really passionate and brutal avarice such as delighted one in the great tycoons of the last century. Was he not unmistakably a Little Man — a creature of the petty rake-off pocketed with a petty joke in private and denied with the stalest platitudes in his public utterances — a grubby little nonentity who had drifted into corruption, only just realizing that he was corrupt, and chiefly be-cause everyone else did it? ..."
... "The difficulty lay in their very smallness and flabbiness. Here were vermin so muddled in mind, so passively responsive to environment, that it was very hard to raise them to that level of clarity and deliberateness at which mortal sin becomes possible. To raise them just enough; but not that fatal millimetre of “too much.”" [1]
Which is to say the quality of a "banal evil" is kind of a product of our modern bureaucratic capitalist society.
[1] http://www.samizdat.qc.ca/arts/lit/Toast_CSL.pdf
Reminds me of one of my favorite poems ever, written by a Chaplain during WWI:
When Jesus came to Golgotha, they hanged Him on a tree,
They drove great nails through hands and feet, and made a Calvary;
They crowned Him with a crown of thorns, red were His wounds and deep,
For those were crude and cruel days, and human flesh was cheap.
When Jesus came to Birmingham they simply passed Him by,
They never hurt a hair of Him, they only let Him die;
For men had grown more tender, and they would not give Him pain,
They only just passed down the street, and left Him in the rain.
Still Jesus cried, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do,”
And still it rained the wintry rain that drenched Him through and through;
The crowds went home, and left the streets without a soul to see,
And Jesus crouched against a wall and cried for Calvary.The world we live in is a super complex ecosystem of geopolitical, historical and cultural relationships and differences.
To make sense of this complex world we create simplified narratives for ourselves, whether through movies or daily new broadcasts, whatever. Its easier to think in terms of good guys vs bad guys but in reality there are no good guys and bad guys. As the article says "Nobody thinks they’re doing evil". Ones freedom fighter is another ones terrorist.
We're pretty much all capable of being charitable/thoughtful while at the same time regurgitate a false narrative to advance our political opinions/careers or perform self serving interests or even criminal behaviour.
Humans self righteous beings.
To make sense of this complex world we create simplified narratives for ourselves, whether through movies or daily new broadcasts, whatever. Its easier to think in terms of good guys vs bad guys but in reality there are no good guys and bad guys. As the article says "Nobody thinks they’re doing evil". Ones freedom fighter is another ones terrorist.
We're pretty much all capable of being charitable/thoughtful while at the same time regurgitate a false narrative to advance our political opinions/careers or perform self serving interests or even criminal behaviour.
Humans self righteous beings.
There are many people who intentionally choose to act purely selfishly and not in good faith, to maximize personal gain. I met many of these types in SV, and I imagine they get much worse on wall street and in military industrial circles. Call it what you will, but these people don't have any illusions of being benevolent or fair.
The toughest one is when you see someone who, for instance, is living beyond their means and because of it they 'have to' do something unpalatable at work. They have walked into the trap and pulled the door closed behind them.
But I've also worked with many engineers whose actions and self-image don't align. When time is tight they'll participate in hand-wringing over all the tech debt we have, but the moment there's a gap in the schedule they "don't know what to work on". If you really meant it when you said "if only we had more time" then why don't you have a hit list? I don't think they're lying, or evil. They're just deluding themselves about their principles.
But I've also worked with many engineers whose actions and self-image don't align. When time is tight they'll participate in hand-wringing over all the tech debt we have, but the moment there's a gap in the schedule they "don't know what to work on". If you really meant it when you said "if only we had more time" then why don't you have a hit list? I don't think they're lying, or evil. They're just deluding themselves about their principles.
> why don't you have a hit list? I don't think they're lying, or evil. They're just deluding themselves about their principles.
I rather think the answer is simply that they aren't very organized. Nobody likes technical debt, but unless you're organized enough to make entries in your 'hit list' while they're bugging you, you'll inevitably forget the specifics.
I rather think the answer is simply that they aren't very organized. Nobody likes technical debt, but unless you're organized enough to make entries in your 'hit list' while they're bugging you, you'll inevitably forget the specifics.
When I mentioned SV, I was referring to investors, many of which are sociopaths. I'm not talking about engineers that subconsciously take shortcuts.
you could use that argument to defend hitler, after all, he did lift Germany's economics in a way that no one else could.
There's certainly a grey area, but there are also non-grey areas, and we need to make sure we're clear on those non-grey areas.
There's certainly a grey area, but there are also non-grey areas, and we need to make sure we're clear on those non-grey areas.
If we can be unintentionally evil, could we be unintentionally good too?
That is basically Adam Smith's (and consequently almost every pro-market economist) thesis. Actually his thesis is that on average the answer is "yes".
If it's true or false is a matter of intense debate, to say the least
> ... Nobody thinks they’re doing evil — maybe because it’s just impossible to be intentionally evil, maybe because it’s easier and more effective to convince yourself you’re good — but every major villain had some justification to explain why what they were doing was good. Everybody thinks they’re good.
Could it be that the root of evil lies in failure to recognize this universal truth? In other words, the prerequisite for evil deeds is to convince oneself that monstrous evil exists in the world that the ends justify the means when dealing with it?
Could it be that the root of evil lies in failure to recognize this universal truth? In other words, the prerequisite for evil deeds is to convince oneself that monstrous evil exists in the world that the ends justify the means when dealing with it?
Distilled down to a pithy saying, I think a good moral foundation is something like:
One may never morally commit an evil act for any reason, even if that act will prevent an even greater evil from being perpetrated.
That "will" is tricky, because often you don't actually know what the outcome will be, but I think it applies even if you do know with certainty.
Forgive my following ramble:
This is hardly a new thought - it's one shared by a number of religious belief systems (Catholicism comes to mind, CCC 1753 explicitly says this in about as many words), but there's a lot of wisdom to be had with this even if you completely write off the religious angle.
It completely removes this possibility. The avenue is forever closed; if you reject evil acts, no ifs-ands-or-buts, no ends justifying the means, this is simply never a thing you'll accept or allow yourself to be involved with.
It's simpler as far as moral thinking goes, it removes a lot of judgment, which is usually a red flag for lazy reductionism, but given the sheer quantity of evil in the would of the banal sort, exactly as you described, I'd wager that the world would be a better place overall if this principle were followed by good-faith actors.
One may never morally commit an evil act for any reason, even if that act will prevent an even greater evil from being perpetrated.
That "will" is tricky, because often you don't actually know what the outcome will be, but I think it applies even if you do know with certainty.
Forgive my following ramble:
This is hardly a new thought - it's one shared by a number of religious belief systems (Catholicism comes to mind, CCC 1753 explicitly says this in about as many words), but there's a lot of wisdom to be had with this even if you completely write off the religious angle.
It completely removes this possibility. The avenue is forever closed; if you reject evil acts, no ifs-ands-or-buts, no ends justifying the means, this is simply never a thing you'll accept or allow yourself to be involved with.
It's simpler as far as moral thinking goes, it removes a lot of judgment, which is usually a red flag for lazy reductionism, but given the sheer quantity of evil in the would of the banal sort, exactly as you described, I'd wager that the world would be a better place overall if this principle were followed by good-faith actors.
This is deontological ethics, or Kant's categorical imperative. Just in case anyone wants to follow up on this.
There are some instances where this is justified (e.g. Nazi Germany). If you look back in history, there are many instances of evil committed by most nations.
However, one has to be careful with conflating hyperbole with facts. A lot of very heinous crimes aren't committed outright; there is always some veneer of righteousness by demonizing the other. If you believe that "pure evil" exists, then you're more likely to believe such a narrative and maybe take part in the action it calls for.
However, one has to be careful with conflating hyperbole with facts. A lot of very heinous crimes aren't committed outright; there is always some veneer of righteousness by demonizing the other. If you believe that "pure evil" exists, then you're more likely to believe such a narrative and maybe take part in the action it calls for.
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when a mafioso high boss talks t his son, he would say that thanks to the mafia Italy did not became a comunist country, that the politicians (center, in power) were extremely corrupted and useless.
I am serious.
nobody thinks to be evil (as nobody thinks to be an idiot)