I'm a 25 year old female. I would say I've done evil once (using a loose definition of something that I couldn't easily live with having done). After several years of emotional abuse by my family, in my late teens, I hit my younger brother (early teens at the time), who participated gleefully in the abuse along with my mother, over the head with an iron laundry rack during a day of particularly bad treatment. He was knocked out briefly and had a concussion all night. I was suicidal with remorse over it and actually spent time afterwards researching suicide methods. Before the incident, I'd spent a lot of time cooking for, taking care of, and trying to aid in the moral development of said brother. After the incident I rarely spoke to him and we no longer have a relationship. I'm doing much better in general after leaving home and ceasing contact with most of my family.
It's tough to share that kind of story! I hope telling it is somewhat therapeutic for you. But I am personally not so sure I would call that evil. The fact that you had such remorse I think shows you are not evil. When a person, even that young pushes others around them, they have serious behavioral issues and they invite pushback and people are not evil if they push back! I'm glad you are back on track, it is always terrible when you have to cut off family.
I chased my brother around my grandmother's wheelchair with a butcher knife in my hand. I didn't consider it actually evil at the time. He deserved a good stabbing.
I wasn't able to catch him, mercifully. But as I stood hysterically screaming at the locked bathroom door behind which he had hidden himself, I had an intense moment of 12 year old clarity: "I sound exactly like mom", I said to myself. In that moment I understood evil, and it was not comprised in the knife, or the chasing, or the wheelchair.
I've spent most of my life trying to not be like her. But since that day, I've done evil. Everyone has. Not understanding that is one of the current moral conundrums into which we have fallen as a society.
I'm a middle-aged man, and I would have clicked the "done evil just once" option. Of course I've done other things that caused people emotional pain, broke important promises, supported movements I now disavow, etc. For some of those I think I had amelioratingly good reasons; others not. The definition of evil that comes very quickly to my mind is purely subjective: about how intensely it hits my conscience. In this case, the guilt has never let up, many years later. I'd written a speech for a high school event, and I stumbled over my words. Being a very religious boy I didn't even realize the alternative meaning, but the rest of the school sure did. In the slang of the time I'd accused a popular girl, the student body president, in front of the whole school, of certain lewd acts. The crowd roared, the girl cried on stage, I was baffled. Another student had to explain it to me later. The guilt of it no doubt has to do with how very publicly I hurt one specific person.
interesting polls. but since I am convinced evil is manufactured by having an opposite good that one has violated that would not have been violated until the definition between the two had established one to be right and the other evil, or wrong then the only persons who have done evil are those who have established the concepts.
Having said that, I fail every day to live up to the Kantian version of the golden rule that the duty to do is good is to act as if the action done will always be good.
Goodness is an impossible achievement and so all have done evil, but the judgment in the first place is the evil responsible for people doing or believing they have done evil.
They are the cousins that manufacture the guilt and shame that creates the actions we assume must have been wrong.
The only best we can achieve is to value others equal to ourselves and for them to value us equal to themselves. Then we apologize and thank, we applaud efforts more than results, we forgive appropriately, but not indiscriminately, and we reward more and condemn less.
Then perhaps there are fewer desires towards so-called evil deeds because ethics cannot be about a set of absolutes and violations of standards, but about achieving a level of balance and when the cabin begins to tilt off the cliff you grab each other and pull them back to the other side.
(Referencing Chaplin's Gold Rush).
Good and evil tilt the cabin over the edge and can never attain Morality.
‘I think differences between the young and the old here are probably driven much more by variations in conceptions of evil than by any variations in evil deeds.’
This is an unintentionally(?) ironic line because those old people had to carry through young and middle age to get there.
Interesting data!
My interpretation is not that young people are more cynical. Older people have been forced into more grey / incentive-driven situations and adjust worldview accordingly.
You might say this is the same conclusion, but only when interpreted as a data vector. As an explanation, I think it holds more weight as it describes the phenomenon itself rather than just the correlates.
On the men / women split, I think you’re probably being too literal with the data though your conjectures are worth investigating further.
Some additional variables:
- how ‘honest’ men and women are with their own self analysis of their actions
- the extremity of conditions men and women face
- sample bias
- peer pressure and social norms around being good and evil
As someone dealing with an ex wife who committed sex crimes against him (revenge porn), I take deep issue with equivocating evil ONLY to REPORTED serious violent crime. There was significant social pressure from our social network and from police for me to do and to say nothing about it.
The reality is that woman are FAR LESS LIKELY to be accused of crimes, much less arrested/held accountable for them at all. On top of the fact that women get lighter sentences when committing the same crimes as men. Which is a far better (and evidence supported) reason for why fewer woman *think* they have not committed evil or minimize the amount of evil they say they have perpetrated. Using my ex wife as an example, she didn't think it was wrong or problematic at all to non consensually share intimate videos of me with her affair partner because *he didn't enjoy it*. At least to me (I don't know what her internal monologue is, but she lies a lot) she was unable to acknowledge any harm caused to me by her actions.
Unfortunately, your article simply rationalizes false, misandrist narratives that paint women as morally superior to men. When in reality, they are just as likely to commit crimes or acts of evil as men. We as a society simply hold them less accountable, for whatever reason.
I'm a 25 year old female. I would say I've done evil once (using a loose definition of something that I couldn't easily live with having done). After several years of emotional abuse by my family, in my late teens, I hit my younger brother (early teens at the time), who participated gleefully in the abuse along with my mother, over the head with an iron laundry rack during a day of particularly bad treatment. He was knocked out briefly and had a concussion all night. I was suicidal with remorse over it and actually spent time afterwards researching suicide methods. Before the incident, I'd spent a lot of time cooking for, taking care of, and trying to aid in the moral development of said brother. After the incident I rarely spoke to him and we no longer have a relationship. I'm doing much better in general after leaving home and ceasing contact with most of my family.
It's tough to share that kind of story! I hope telling it is somewhat therapeutic for you. But I am personally not so sure I would call that evil. The fact that you had such remorse I think shows you are not evil. When a person, even that young pushes others around them, they have serious behavioral issues and they invite pushback and people are not evil if they push back! I'm glad you are back on track, it is always terrible when you have to cut off family.
I chased my brother around my grandmother's wheelchair with a butcher knife in my hand. I didn't consider it actually evil at the time. He deserved a good stabbing.
I wasn't able to catch him, mercifully. But as I stood hysterically screaming at the locked bathroom door behind which he had hidden himself, I had an intense moment of 12 year old clarity: "I sound exactly like mom", I said to myself. In that moment I understood evil, and it was not comprised in the knife, or the chasing, or the wheelchair.
I've spent most of my life trying to not be like her. But since that day, I've done evil. Everyone has. Not understanding that is one of the current moral conundrums into which we have fallen as a society.
I think you have refined your sense of evil. I think that is progress.
Maybe the word evil is just too intense for many people? Something confined to colonial-era Puritans or horror films or comic book villains.
I was raised as a Fundamentalist Christian on the King James Bible, so perhaps "evil" is less extreme for me, closer to "morally wrong".
On my understanding, I've done many evil things, and so has everyone else I know well.
I wonder how people would answer if you used the criteria the Catholic Church uses to define mortal sins:
1) grave subject matter
2) full knowledge
3) deliberate consent
I'm a middle-aged man, and I would have clicked the "done evil just once" option. Of course I've done other things that caused people emotional pain, broke important promises, supported movements I now disavow, etc. For some of those I think I had amelioratingly good reasons; others not. The definition of evil that comes very quickly to my mind is purely subjective: about how intensely it hits my conscience. In this case, the guilt has never let up, many years later. I'd written a speech for a high school event, and I stumbled over my words. Being a very religious boy I didn't even realize the alternative meaning, but the rest of the school sure did. In the slang of the time I'd accused a popular girl, the student body president, in front of the whole school, of certain lewd acts. The crowd roared, the girl cried on stage, I was baffled. Another student had to explain it to me later. The guilt of it no doubt has to do with how very publicly I hurt one specific person.
Not to dismiss your feelings of guilt, but if that's your worst moment, you are a Yurodivy/Lamed Vav Tzadikim/Abdal/Bodhisattva/hidden immortal.
For comparison, my worst moment was premeditated (though not unprovoked) and could have destroyed someone's life without just cause.
interesting polls. but since I am convinced evil is manufactured by having an opposite good that one has violated that would not have been violated until the definition between the two had established one to be right and the other evil, or wrong then the only persons who have done evil are those who have established the concepts.
Having said that, I fail every day to live up to the Kantian version of the golden rule that the duty to do is good is to act as if the action done will always be good.
Goodness is an impossible achievement and so all have done evil, but the judgment in the first place is the evil responsible for people doing or believing they have done evil.
They are the cousins that manufacture the guilt and shame that creates the actions we assume must have been wrong.
The only best we can achieve is to value others equal to ourselves and for them to value us equal to themselves. Then we apologize and thank, we applaud efforts more than results, we forgive appropriately, but not indiscriminately, and we reward more and condemn less.
Then perhaps there are fewer desires towards so-called evil deeds because ethics cannot be about a set of absolutes and violations of standards, but about achieving a level of balance and when the cabin begins to tilt off the cliff you grab each other and pull them back to the other side.
(Referencing Chaplin's Gold Rush).
Good and evil tilt the cabin over the edge and can never attain Morality.
"I think it is unlikely that young people have truly done more evil, although I suppose I can’t rule it out."
It would align somewhat with the fact that young people are far more narcissistic than previous generations when adjusted for age.
‘I think differences between the young and the old here are probably driven much more by variations in conceptions of evil than by any variations in evil deeds.’
This is an unintentionally(?) ironic line because those old people had to carry through young and middle age to get there.
Interesting data!
My interpretation is not that young people are more cynical. Older people have been forced into more grey / incentive-driven situations and adjust worldview accordingly.
You might say this is the same conclusion, but only when interpreted as a data vector. As an explanation, I think it holds more weight as it describes the phenomenon itself rather than just the correlates.
On the men / women split, I think you’re probably being too literal with the data though your conjectures are worth investigating further.
Some additional variables:
- how ‘honest’ men and women are with their own self analysis of their actions
- the extremity of conditions men and women face
- sample bias
- peer pressure and social norms around being good and evil
As someone dealing with an ex wife who committed sex crimes against him (revenge porn), I take deep issue with equivocating evil ONLY to REPORTED serious violent crime. There was significant social pressure from our social network and from police for me to do and to say nothing about it.
The reality is that woman are FAR LESS LIKELY to be accused of crimes, much less arrested/held accountable for them at all. On top of the fact that women get lighter sentences when committing the same crimes as men. Which is a far better (and evidence supported) reason for why fewer woman *think* they have not committed evil or minimize the amount of evil they say they have perpetrated. Using my ex wife as an example, she didn't think it was wrong or problematic at all to non consensually share intimate videos of me with her affair partner because *he didn't enjoy it*. At least to me (I don't know what her internal monologue is, but she lies a lot) she was unable to acknowledge any harm caused to me by her actions.
Unfortunately, your article simply rationalizes false, misandrist narratives that paint women as morally superior to men. When in reality, they are just as likely to commit crimes or acts of evil as men. We as a society simply hold them less accountable, for whatever reason.