Good and evil are based around someone's ethical and moral values. Someone that's "evil" is just someone with a sense of these values which are distorted or twisted in comparison to society's as a whole.

Basically, evil is just a reversal of the average person's values.

Your argument appears to be rather semantic.

I use the word "evil" to describe things that I find severely detrimental, or diametrically opposed, to... not necessarily my ideals, but what I perceive to be of the most virtuous ideals.

I use the word "evil" to describe things that I find severely detrimental, or diametrically opposed, to...

So, for you, the word "evil" doesn't contain any sort of agency in its definition?

Never underestimate just how short linguistics can sell us sometimes, Meta

I'm not sure if I can think of anyone of an Emperor Palpatine or Joker kind of evil who likes evil for the sake of evilness.

Everyone likes to think that what they're doing is the right thing, that they're a hero of some sort. Villainy and evilness are reserved for labeling people you don't like.

Well, calling someone evil, it's as irrelevant as, say, calling my opposition a bunch of scum-sucking, repugnant piles of pusillanimous ever-loving shit, or any combination of colorful words I can use to describe someone I disagree with. I'm pretty adept at demeaning people, but demeaning someone has never led to one's revelation of, "Oh, he called me a... violent pig rapist, I guess that means I'm wrong now!" so, yeah, you're saying I use words like "enemy" and "evil" as insults, or demeaning words--and I absolutely agree, especially in terms of their efficiency when it comes to turning my opposition into my allies.

Which is to say, entirely inefficient.

So, obviously, that's never the goal. The goal of insulting people, much of the time, is to sort of validate myself. I like knowing who my enemy is, and I like telling my enemies if they are my enemy. That's sort of important to understand--if we have a fundamental disagreement about something--and it has to be a fundamental disagreement--we are enemies, and we have to understand that we will not get along. lol

It's... a concession that any discussion between enemies is futile, because of the fundamental disagreement. You will not engage in any intelligent discussion until you get to the core of your... ethical foundations. For example, you and I couldn't ever discuss anything involving economics, because it's complex as fuck and too much of it is contingent upon one's "moral" foundations. And I despise the word "moral". We'd have to discuss values before anything else--and even that's going to be tricky.

You say you think altruism is stupid. I say, I find it very poetic that someone who thinks altruism is stupid also believes that evil is an irrelevant concept.

So, that's our fundamental disagreement there. Would I describe you as my enemy? Uhh, nah... You have shown yourself to be a highly open and malleable individual, which is virtuous in itself...

Ah, okay. Well, indeed, not all psychopaths are unscrupulous murderers. I'm not a psychologist, so I don't want to speak too at length and risk embarrassing myself with ignorance... but clearly, there's a lot of psychopaths, and a lot of these psychopaths have to be a lot more psychopathic than others, enough to kill another human being for whatever reason (focusing on the unscrupulous).

Knowing that... Yeah, the notion of "evil" does seem to be irrelevant. I'd sooner use the word... pitiable to describe a psychopath.

But yes, as far as I'm concerned, it's something you don't want to be. I do agree that evil does imply a sort of complacency in one's sheer lack of scruples, but that's just because we sort of romanticize evil in media. Which isn't bad, necessarily--makes for entertaining films and such--but it makes discussion of the word quite tricky.

I reckon it depends on your perspective. To be honest though, I don't really believe in true evil, that someone is so irredeemably cruel that even with enough time and/or rehabilitation they cannot improve themselves.

I couldn't name anyone who was evil that didn't believe they were right, or were completely healthy.

Its hard to even narrow down comic book villains. Most believe they are doing the right thing or lived a horrible life that changed them into the evil they became. There's only a handful of villains you could claim were truly evil; doing evil with perfect mental health and believing/understanding their actions were wrong and unjustified.

I doubt you'd ever find someone in real life. Humans almost always act the way they do for power, wealth, revenge, whatever. If they don't then its some mental deficiency and/or they can't help themselves. Some kind of inner voice or impulse is controlling them. Flying spaghetti monster help us if someone who is completely evil is ever born. We already know how harmful intelligent, calculating monsters can be. Imagine if they didn't have impulse clouding their judgement.

Yes. Dick Cheney.

Quote from: Meta Cognition on December 17, 2014, 01:06:44 PM

I'm at a lose to find a truly sane, healthy individual who was actually evil. Namely because such people just don't exist.

Jeffrey Dahmer?

What?

He's like the best example of a mentally ill serial killer.

Evil...what is true evil? The absence of good.

The Court ruled that he had no mental disorders and experts today disagree with each other about it.

Both of those claims are false. He was ruled to be legally sane, and he has pretty resoundingly been diagnosed - primarily - with borderline personality disorder.

You don't do what he did unless you're mentally ill.

Quote from: Meta Cognition on December 18, 2014, 01:34:22 PM

Both of those claims are false. He was ruled to be legally sane, and he has pretty resoundingly been diagnosed - primarily - with borderline personality disorder.

You don't do what he did unless you're mentally ill.

In his final trial "Dahmer was ruled to be sane and not suffering from a mental disorder at the time of each of the 15 murders for which he was tried". But yeah I was wrong about the other part.

First of all it's entirely possible the court could've been wrong about that, considering knowledge of mental illness has only really exploded in the last decade or so.

Secondly, you're going to need a source for that quote.

Quote from: Maverick on December 18, 2014, 02:59:44 PM

Quote from: Meta Cognition on December 18, 2014, 01:34:22 PM

Both of those claims are false. He was ruled to be legally sane, and he has pretty resoundingly been diagnosed - primarily - with borderline personality disorder.

You don't do what he did unless you're mentally ill.

In his final trial "Dahmer was ruled to be sane and not suffering from a mental disorder at the time of each of the 15 murders for which he was tried". But yeah I was wrong about the other part.

First of all it's entirely possible the court could've been wrong about that, considering knowledge of mental illness has only really exploded in the last decade or so.

Secondly, you're going to need a source for that quote.

Wikipedia