What is the Nature of Evil?

[chrispenycate]

I suspect that, when all the cards are counted, more damage will be discovered to have been done for motives which seemed beyond criticism at the time than for greedy, selfish ones.
Take now. The most important problem, and the one from which most of the others stem, is an excess of human beings. And where did this population growth that is too fast for social mores to catch up with it originate? In the desire of the medical profession to alleviate human suffering. The most laudable of sentiments causing the most difficult of situations and, in the long run, self defeating as there are now more humans to suffer.
Certainly individual greed, and the desire to avoid any loss of personal comfort (traditional "evil" motives), is adding to the final payment, but the root cause is excess of humanity.
So, if I released a virus which sterilised ninety percent of humans, I'd be hailed as a saviour, right? By the time medical science had worked out how to eliminate the effects (at least in rich countries) the baby ploomp would have given a chance to stabilise or reverse desertification, to discover that, just as an army requires fewer officers than soldiers a society requires fewer administrators than administrated. (And could get by very nicely with fewer lawyers, fewer politicians and fewer bureaucrats; still, I'm not sure any of those could be retrained to work)
A bit of a "Greybeard" scenario; but anyone featured in a novel attempting to do that would be immediately classed as "evil", however pure their motives were.
Can something which gives beneficial final results be "evil", no matter what the original intentions? And can we condemn the doctors who, by introducing asepsis and saving millions of lives have created the present crisis?
I don't see how good and evil can be judged until all the results are in, and we'll none of us live to see that.

[Ursa major]

Often, there's a lack of thought about the consequences of actions and policies, even when they seem simple (the policy, that is, not(?) the policy maker).

Last night, I heard the procedings in the House of Lords, in a debate about the European Union. One lord - of UKIP, I believe - stated that by leaving the EU, the UK would be able to create another 2,500,000 jobs. I couldn't help wondering where the people needed to do these jobs would come from. Surely not Europe. (I further wondered what the other members of his party might think of this influx.)

[malko]

there is a nice riff on the 'good/evil' setup in the cartoon
'the powerpuff girls movie.'
under the guise of
'helping the world and making it a better place'
an evil monkey causes some undeniably perfect girls to do great wrong

[The Pelagic Argosy]

I prefer to read and write stories where the characters, regardless of whether they are labeled 'protagonists' or 'antagonists,' are motivated by a complex mixture of lofty ideals and selfish desires. The interest comes in discovering which motivations will win out. I think this approach has some advantages. 1) In the fantasy genre, it's a fresher approach than the 'band of heroes vs. a nebulous Evil/megalomaniacal dark lord' template. 2) The ending will be less predictable.

The fact that this relativistic approach is, IMHO, closer to the true nature of what we call "evil" is just an added bonus.

[Daniel Hetberg]

I think the question what evil actually _is_ is the work to be done by the author. Ultimately, there's probably no right or wrong answer to that question, so it's defined by the author, and his answer will likely appeal to people who feel very similarly, or possibly very differently.

Good and evil are opinions, and you know what they say about opinions... everybody has one. Also, if there are ten thousand people saying one thing is bad, this won't and shouldn't stop the ten-thousand-and-first person from doing it anyway, since he believes it's good. The ten thousand people just have better chances of punishing one guy than the other way around.

[malko]

In a full fantasy world it would be strange if everyone was a balanced psyche, can't there just be a few baddies? Baddies are fun and illogical and have cool powers that you wouldn't take home to mother. Somewhere there should be someone who plain terrifies every one of your hard, 3d, real, central, fully described guys. This thread was started to think up a new, interesting kind of evil for huscarl's background, it isn't any use if we all admit that there is no evil, really. There is evil, and it's in fantasy books. Big, scary, spooky evil. We just want a twist. And 'there is no good and evil, just a spectrum of self deluded moral stances' isn't a sexy twist. How about evil as threads of glass on the wind. They break on your forehead and you scratch off all your hair with the itching. Your hairs sail off on the wind, carrying the fibreglass curse. Bald, redfaced people, flood the land, wandering blindly; itching. Can we just let the real existence of evil slide for a bit and try to think of some interesting kinds, please? I write scientific body-horror, so all the evil that I can think of is about people making each other sick. Someone who writes something a bit more deep should be able to come up with some cracking ways to be believably bad, in a new way. I believe in good and bad, comfort and pain, friends and assmunches. I'm an old fashioned cat. But then writing is terribly old fashioned.

[Ursa major]

The "baddy" doesn't have to be cool and illogical. The cold and logical mind can be just as terrifying in the right (wrong?) circumstances.

To quote H.G. Wells (from near the beginning of War of the Worlds): "Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment."

The thought that this might be occurring in my world makes me feel warm and comfortable, I don't think.

[malko]

The bad guys from war of the worlds had giant walking robots, cool power, ray guns, cool power,
and they waged war over a planet that was uninhabitable to them, illogical.
Just send one guy and see if he survives, don't commit your planet to a war footing
and then discover that you don't want what you are fighting for.

If they were so clever, they would have been the goodies

Plus,
'minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish.'
So nice of HG to leave us the plans for his unperishable mind before he died, and his mind perished.
We all perish, bad guys most of all.
Without baddies, who do you rake with satisfying minigun fire?
without baddies, how do you make your love interest glad to be with your inattentive lead?
*sings* without baddies, the world is cold and dark, harsh and stark.
send me baddies without end,
send me infidels to rend, and demon's lives to spend; in warfare... *end*
Give me characters so rank that no person who reads them will ever willingly act like them.
Give me bad guys like brakes on the narrative gocart,
suppressing the sickening rise of acid-house self satisfaction,
allowing quick turns and leaps and crashes without losing our central identity.

If no baddies, why thick people?
cut 'em out, reason is not so difficult, let 'em drop.
People too boring to write about? Don't put them in either, everyone is worth the same.
Everyone is as good as they can be and we are all trying so hard, aren't we?
No evil people, because you never meet allmightybastards in the workplace do you?
There are no justifiably hated people, we are all equal and fine.

Even writing crime there can be no baddies, the killer is explained in chapter 3,
he's as much a victim as anyone.
No problem that the writer had to think up the rationale,
but the evil crimes just leapt to mind unbidden.
Evil is what you fight every day not to do.
Much of it is not resisted, it happens.

[robccld]

Evil, well to quote a somewhat famous line
"Evil is a point of view", from one perspective that evil act could be considered good, saying that it also means that a great number of us share the same point of view of what evil is. But to your question evil and its nature relys soely on the person and how far they are willing to go for their beliefs. To which I add evil is also a belief, intresting isn't though i doubt it answers anything but thats my take

[Moonbat]

(ha ha ha ha) evil cackle
(tee hee) innocent giggle

I'm loving this thread, what a deep discussion. I

have to say that 'Evil' as an independant entity doesn't exist. As many of you have said it is all relative, 'one man's poetry is another man's poison'. As Neiche (sp) says in beyond good and evil, an animal that slaughters defenseless cubs that are not his own is not evil, it is nature.

I think the most evil thing would be nature, would be evolution, the selfish gene and all that.

But Evil is there, or not-goodness is there, I do things that I know I shouldn't but I want to and the fight I have against my own will power (which I usually lose) is what makes me give in and do the thing thast I know isn't good for me but I enjoy.

Actually Nature is probably the most 'evil-seeming' thing I have whitnessed, especially insects, Wasp! they are just plain mean. We think that a grown man raping a child is evil and the parents and the child are victims, but imagine if the rapist planted eggs into the baby that ate the baby from the inside out and eventually escaped to devour the grieving parents and lay eggs in more babies! That is nature and not really evil.

So the ultimate evil that you can have in your book, is nature and one species survival pitted against the next.

I wonder how un-evil you could make a villain. I suppose if you wrote it well a goodman could be the villian to your anti-hero?

[pyan]

Originally Posted by Moonbat

wonder how un-evil you could make a villain. I suppose if you wrote it well a good man could be the villian to your anti-hero?

The best evil villains are those with just a hint of grey to relieve the unrelenting blackness, or those that reveal a spark of humanity at the end...Darth Vader being a good example....

[andrew.v.spencer]

What is the nature of evil?... Some say... Marmite?

[Lith]

Nature itself isn't evil, but nor is it good. Good and evil are things people do; specifically when they know they shouldn't do something and do it anyway. A person that tries to do good and uknowingly does evil hasn't done evil (though the results are tragic, and people may call him or her evil, and if he could reasonably be expected to have foreseen the consequences, he's guilty of negligence), and the person that harms another, but with unexpected good consequences, hasn't done good (he can't be called a hero).

Shakespeare said it well, when he said: "There is nothing good or ill, but thinking makes it so." (I'm paraphrasing) This at first seems like a statement of moral relativity, but it's rather ambiguous, because it also means that good and evil are properties of the mind.

Anyway, my 2c.

[fire_elf20]

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.

Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all -- the apathy of human beings.

It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.

I believe that ignorance is the root of all evil. And that no one knows the truth.

[Manarion]

Originally Posted by fire_elf20

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.

Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all -- the apathy of human beings.

It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.

I believe that ignorance is the root of all evil. And that no one knows the truth.

The road to Hell being paved with the best of intentions? Personally I think evil is a conscious choice, darkness for the sake of darkness, from those who find goodness to be a sign of weakness. It's sick and twisted, but that's the way I view the subject.