posted August 27, 2012 05:24 PM
Evil seems to be the word of the month. All across the web it is up for discussion. So, I ask what constitutes evil?
Views on the nature of evil tend to fall into one of four opposed camps:
Moral absolutism holds that good and evil are fixed concepts established by a deity or deities, nature, morality, common sense, or some other source.
Amoralism claims that good and evil are meaningless, that there is no moral ingredient in nature.
Moral relativism holds that standards of good and evil are only products of local culture, custom, or prejudice.
Moral universalism is the attempt to find a compromise between the absolutist sense of morality, and the relativist view; universalism claims that morality is only flexible to a degree, and that what is truly good or evil can be determined by examining what is commonly considered to be evil amongst all humans.
A prominent psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck, characterizes evil as a malignant type of self-righteousness which results in a projection of evil onto selected specific innocent victims (often children or other people in relatively powerless positions). Peck considers those he calls evil to be attempting to escape and hide from their own conscience (through self deception) and views this as being quite distinct from the apparent absence of conscience evident in sociopaths.
According to Peck, an evil person
Is consistently self-deceiving, with the intent of avoiding guilt and maintaining a self-image of perfection
Deceives others as a consequence of their own self-deception
Projects his or her evils and sins onto very specific targets, scapegoating others while appearing normal with everyone else ("their insensitivity toward him was selective")
Commonly hates with the pretense of love, for the purposes of self-deception as much as deception of others
Abuses political (emotional) power ("the imposition of one's will upon others by overt or covert coercion")
Maintains a high level of respectability and lies incessantly in order to do so
Is consistent in his or her sins. Evil persons are characterized not so much by the magnitude of their sins, but by their consistency (of destructiveness)
Is unable to think from the viewpoint of their victim
Has a covert intolerance to criticism and other forms of narcissistic injury
Does your concept of evil fit an above catagory or would you define it differently? How do you recognise it?
Is Peck on target or too simplified?
note, I thought Peck`s use of "sins" odd or rather not fitting the subject.
(if this fits SPITR more aptly,send it over.)
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We dance around the ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and Knows
Robert Frost