Some people chose simply to be evil.

If you believe in Good, you have to believe in Evil.

It's like rain and sunshine. We may have no choice in which climate we are born, but we can choose where we live. :wink:

that's why serial killers leave signatures. To be sure the world knows their "work".

Now, do they CHOOSE to be evil? That I don't know. I think some people are predispositioned to violence. Is it a chemical imbalance? A deficiency? Some difference in brain function? Don't know. These people are often very smart, articulate people so it would lead me to believe that they function properly. I guess that would mean that they were indeed just born evil. hm.

I function properly, am articulate, and quite smart.

>evil laugh<

>>Quietly slips away, hoping to be unseen by shewolf<<

hehe..
seriously though,
Is it a choice when someone is born with a chemical imbalance that makes them desire and receive satisfaction from murder/rape ?

No. Which is why I am not sure whether people are just born to murder or if people somewhere along the line choose that path. Nature vs. nurture I suppose.

Many people like standing outside the norm. They have issues with authority. There are more "bad boys" than good ones. PLUS it's easier to be bad than good.

In some eastern cultures human life is expendable, and individual "rights" are not given much importance.

I indriectly work with some sociopaths who constantly ask WHY or WHY NOT when they are given statements most of us take for granted.

EX: We should not use violence to solve a problem.
They say: "It's been effective for me" so why not?
There are different mind sets out there and because we see it as "sick" or immoral, we call it evil.

They do not have nor Desire to be a part of society and it's "Rules".

I think people who murder for a ' thrill' are broken ( to put it simply! )
There sence of right and wrong isnt there....
No matter laws, rules, regulations etc..
We all have this sence of " i shouldnt do this' inside of us. The feeling of " Is this ok to do"? isnt effective in these people and probally non existant.
They see murder as just something else they did today. And nothing else.
Sort of like how we see doing laundry. no big deal.. just something we did today..

I agree with you, but there still ARE those people, they do exist and they have no incentive to seek "help". That's why we don't get them till after the fact (I Work in a Mental Institution-where we only take "court charged" patients). We say their morailty meter is out of sync, but NO ONE to my knowledge has been 100 percent in correcting the problem.

But under the LAW they are NOT GUILTY by reason of insanity (NGRI) and eventually must be released back into society. Even here where they have the death penality "sick" people are generally not tried under it. (Not that they should be), and in reality there is NO SUCH THING as life w/o parole.

Being 'evil', is just one's relative state of 'not getting it'.
To most people, whether they act on it or not, the values of a social group are quite obvious, and a positive approach is simply the best, most likely to be successful, route.

Those who do not grasp this, and act in a societally negative way, do so from a lot of different reasons. Primarily, they are acting out a 'copycat' negativity, doing to others what has been done to them, by a previous generation of 'victims' (frequently family members) who, in most cases were mistreated themselves, as an itteration of a repetetive syndrome.

Otherwise, the chemical imballance/psychotic mental state accounts for the vast majority of incorrigable offenders, who simply do not understand, see, or care, how their actions affect others. Here the problem is how to deal with them, as housing them permanently is the only safe course (since our capacity to correct their 'sicknesses' is low to nill), the state, that is society, must be willing to bear the cost; otherwise it will instead be bourne by future victims.

[re-education and incarceration are the only tools available to society to control behaviour; and if the first does not work, it is necessary to fall back on the second.]

People are born with personalities and they do not choose them..

Personalities can control people to a certain extent so when someone is evil it can be by nature or by choice.

When by nature people can't be blamed for being evil or horrible to another human/creature becuase that was how they were born or programmed.

Purple Horse Feathers!

(See it's ALL BLUE POTATOES TO ME)

Many murderers and other 'evil' types do have their own set of beliefs of what is right and wrong, like everybody else. For example, racist attacks are surely based on some sort of belief that, for example, immigrants in the UK are stealing our jobs or our tax money or something, or that black people are bad people for some reason. Many people kill for revenge, and revenge is a moral concept - it's based on the "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" thing. Many murderers of course are likely to be psychotic in some way, so their reasoning would be muddled and not logical, and their mroal decisions would be ridiculous, but of coruse they can't be blamed for that. But whatever the cause of their behaviour, evil doesn't seem to come into it anywhere.

What is the cocnept of evil based on? Is their any reason to believe that evil exists?

It seems to me that 'evil' is a subjective judgement. It is a term most often used by religionists rather than philosophers. It does not exist in legalese. A person behaves in a 'legal' or 'illegal' manner, not a 'good' or 'evil' manner. Whether or not we deem a particular act to be evil reflects only the values of the culture into which we were born and raised. In some societies murder might be seen as a disturbing aberation, but not necessarily as 'evil', whereas not worhispping the local gods in the prescribed manner could be construed as 'evil' and cause the execution of the offender. When we say that a rapist or serial killer is evil, we are simply voicing Judeo-Christian and Western European values.

this of course, leads us to the fact that 'evil' (let's use the word, to simplify) can be taught, and when that is the case the perpetrator is actually under the impression that what they are doing is the right way to behave, based upon an adopted view of society - be it 'hate' crimes, or even stealing back their 'fair share' of the 'pie' - they really do not see it as 'evil'.

i give no credence to the concept of 'inate' evil; there are people who, by no fault of their own, are deficient, and unable to register 'unacceptable deeds', and there are those who do them because they have been 'programmed' to do so.

[re-education, and incarceration are the only tools available to society to deal with the problem]

BoGoWo, I am reminded of Socrates' claim that "no man errs willingly." In that view, all "evil" acts are the result of ignorance, not ill will.

give no credence to the concept of 'inate' evil; there are people who, by no fault of their own, are deficient, and unable to register 'unacceptable deeds',

Such as those who can not comprehend evil. SEE CRACK ROCK DEALER in the Street Dictionary. JMO

Evil is a relative concept, I agree completely with Merry Andrews on this subject.
There is no Good or Evil, we choose what best allows us to function; calling the unwanted actions evil is just a remnant of our primitive past.

Now what makes people act on those unwanted desires, or what causes those desires in the first place can be attributed either to past experiences, or innate inability to choose between harmful behavior and harmless behavior.

Philosophical HORSE FEATHERS.

Purple Horse Feathers