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Comment by anm89 | Hacker News Reader

I think the effort to say "look, this guy wasn't evil, he was doing what he thought was right" is totally off course.

Almost no one is intentionally evil. Most people somehow or another justify whatever they are doing as right. I'd imagine most low level nazi party members thought they were making a hard decision to do what was right.

He did what he thought was right and luckily he got killed as opposed to surviving to make contact causing serious damage to the tribe.

He is the embodiment of evil to me, not because he wanted to be evil but because he was too stupid or intellectually dishonest to realize that what he thought was right was deeply damaging to other people. In this sense he puts himself in the company of most horrendous people in history.

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I don't think the article is trying to justify what the guy did. It is trying to explore the background and specific experiences that made him do what he did, from the point of view of someone who clearly isn't thrilled about evangelical Christianity.

Although this kind of explanation can and are often used to apologize for bad behavior, it can be valuable to learn the mechanisms by which people are pushed toward those kinds of behavior. Learning what encourages people to commit certain crimes in our own society, for example, can help us reduce the incidence of said crimes.

Instead of just pointing fingers at religious fanatics and blaming them for everything, we could do something more constructive and try to reach out to troubled kids when their dad loses his medical license (which is what happened to this particular guy) so that they don't need to seek refuge in a fantasy project. That's the kind of insight that a detailed post-mortem can bring, both in technology and in the society.

Brutal. Can it really be classified as evil without intention to do harm, though? It seems to me that true evil can only be if the actor knows and intends harm. Classifying ignorance as evil seems disingenuous - ignorance can be not only a symptom of laziness or some other self-imposed decision but also a result of circumstances out of ones control. Being a victim of circumstance does not IMO precipitate being evil.

> true evil can only be if the actor knows and intends harm

Between born psychopaths who seemingly can't even empathize with current or future victims https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/thinking-about-kids/..., and criminal rational choice theory http://criminal-justice.iresearchnet.com/criminology/theorie... which posits that even most of a criminal's willful acts are rational given their circumstance and motivations, I don't think there's a tremendous amount of room left for "true evil".

I can't help wondering if history will look back on most of what we see today as "willful evils", instead as "misunderstood tragedies"... see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Whitman whose tower sniping was initiated by... a brain tumor.

The truest evil IMHO is that committed by people who believe they are doing good (but perhaps are "making the tough decision"): see the Nazis.

Would you consider attempting to convince an entire civilization to bend to your (lord's) will, against their own (as expressed on several occasions, spanning several decades), to be a harmful act?

I mean, I think there is one sense where you can define evil only as the intent to be evil. In this case donating money to orphans would be evil if somehow your intent was to do harm failing to realize that you were doing good.

My argument is that from a utilitarian perspective, people with good intentions doing [bad, evil, unethical, whatever] cause much more human suffering and misery than those people whose intent is evil and yet they so often are given a pass on their actions.

And then either way, you could make this argument like: "why did person x choose to be evil where as person y chose to be good." That seems almost more arbitrary an likely to be biological from a detached perspective. I'd much rather judge people on their ability to deeply introspect and evaluate the world and come to good conclusions.

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