Yair. It seems to be one of those times where the individual might say"I can’t define devil, but I know it when I see it"
It does seem that the perception of evil tends to be subjective. Does that mean that can be no objective definition of evil?
May we extend it to our own society? IE it seems to be the consensus in my country and I suspect yours, that people such as Hitler,Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were evil personified. So too that people who intentionally harm children or who commit murder for money are also evil.
What about psychopaths such as Ted Bundy? Surely he was evil? Yet he would almost certainly not have seen himself as such. The term may well have had no meaning for him. It is my understanding that people we would call truly evil have little if any self awareness and simply do not see themselves as evil.
In her book,’ Eichmann In Jerusalem’ Hannah Arendt coined the term “the banality of evil” in referring to Adolf Eichmann and others responsible for the Holocaust. That in their personal lives, such people tended to be like burgermeisters in the most banal meaning of the term.
I think it was her who tried to define evil as ‘the absence of empathy’. Does conscience have to exist in the perpetrator for an evil doer to be existentially evil?
As with other important questions which plague the thinking person, I’m not convinced there is a simple answer
Thought for today “Humans are more rational-ising animal’s than rational ones”(anon) Over a lifetime it has become clear to me that human beings can and regularly do rationalise any behaviour whatsoever.
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Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a 1963 book by political theorist Hannah Arendt. Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany during Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, reported on Adolf Eichmann’s trial for The New Yorker . A revised and enlarged edition was published in 1964.
Overview[edit]
Arendt’s subtitle famously introduced the phrase “the banality of evil”. In part the phrase refers to Eichmann’s deportment at the trial as the man displayed neither guilt for his actions nor hatred for those trying him, claiming he bore no responsibility because he was simply “doing his job” ("He did his ‘duty’…; he not only obeyed ‘orders’, he also obeyed the ‘law’.“p. 135).”