Yeah, some people are genuinely natural born killers. I was watching a documentary by Morgan Freeman (yes, god himself) on religion and the problem of evil. He interviewed a murderer who is sentenced to lifelong imprisonment. And the killer knows he did wrong but just doesn’t feel bad about it at all. CT scan of his brain showed that part of the brain linked to empathy is not active on him. So yes, unfortunately some people are just evil.
Not having empathy isn’t enough to be evil. Just like having empathy isn’t enough to be good. You need ideology.
For example, the guy who lacks empathy could use basic libertarian or anarchist ideology for why we shouldn’t hurt people using logic instead of empathy.
Another example would be if you use fascist ideology you can turn empathy into a weapon for evil. The us vs them ideology requires empathy. The idea is that they are going to hurt the people you love just by existing is what dehumanizes them enough for a normal person to attack them.
If we have a utility function, we are capable of assigning any arbitrary physically possible sequence of local world states to a unique real number. We can then designate a discriminant (if the utility function is capable of producing negative outputs, this would typically be 0). We can designate inputs that give outputs higher than the discriminant as “good” and lower as “evil”.
This example has flaws, but demonstrates that the terms good and evil can be well-defined in a useful way that reasonably conforms to platonic ideals of the terms.
You need ideology
No; compassion and naive morality is usually sufficient. A well-developed ethical system is good, and typically out-performs the former, but avoiding being outright evil without outside influence is easy.
I might have a broader definition of ideology than you because morality and ethical systems are ideology. Look how many different moral and ethical systems we have. Just choosing between what exists requires ideology first.
Does us vs them really require empathy? I always saw it as a lack of empathy - the empathy in tribalism seems to end at the tribe
Beware the (only) highly empathetic too, while you’re at it.
Get the right (wrong) combination and you have:
Someone who can understand and read the changes they are engendering in others, adjust manipulation in real time, feel terrible about it, but be able to justify it to themselves as improving the lot of others if they genuinely lack the intelligence to comprehend the whole “you can lead a horse to water but not make it drink” adage.
Self-awareness is tragically never a guarantee; much less using it to take responsibility for shortcomings.
Was it Why Does Evil Exist??
Pseudoscience bullshit. Might as well talk phrenology or body language science.
:Not OP:
I think our brain is more complex than just if a particular area lights up in a scan but to call it all bullshit at the same level of phrenology is just ignoring the hard work of really smart people.
