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?
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.
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:
IMO evil is an immutable, intrinsic moral characteristic which is relentlessly harmful to others without remorse. It defines the soul. While varying degrees of this apply to most bad people, I generally don’t think of people as “evil” because they are typically not beyond redemption (i.e. their predisposition is mutable) and there are better ways to descibe them regardless. E.g. X person is racist or Charles Manson is a psychopath.
I also don’t call people evil because it can elevate their status. Being evil becomes
I was evil, it was from trauma. I left and I miss her.
Depends if they did it on purpose
