Are you demonic?
Professor Selmer Bringsjord, logician, philosopher, and Cognitive Sciences Department chair at Rensselaer Polytechnic, has developed a checklist for determining whether someone is demonic. He heads a team that is creating a computerized representation of a purely evil person.
“To be truly evil, someone must have sought to do harm by planning to commit some morally wrong action with no prompting from others (whether this person successfully executes his or her plan is beside the point). The evil person must have tried to carry out this plan with the hope of “causing considerable harm to others,” Bringsjord says. Finally, “and most importantly,” he adds, if this evil person were willing to analyze his or her reasons for wanting to commit this morally wrong action, these reasons would either prove to be incoherent, or they would reveal that the evil person knew he or she was doing something wrong and regarded the harm caused as a good thing.”
Photo: Should an evil dictator be this fascinating? Or even…cute?
The article doesn’t mention the accomplices of evil: those who sit by and do nothing. I might have some grudging admiration for an evil mastermind who knows exactly what she’s doing, but those who allow her to have her way because they’re too blind, lazy, or stupid to resist deserve only loathing.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
November 7th, 2008 at 10:51
…if this evil person were willing to analyze his or her reasons for wanting to commit this morally wrong action, these reasons would either prove to be incoherent…
That part should be erased from the definition, IMO. If the reasons are incoherent, then this would indicate that the person wasnt sane or rational when he or she planned the evil act. That wouldnt count as evil. To be truly evil, one has to be rational. In fact an evil person is a purely rational person, unencumbered by such question-begging abstractions such as morals. An evil person sees a threat, he or she destroys that threat, or plans to, since that’s the rational thing to do. The inclusion of morals in Bringsjord’s definition of evil makes it question-begging.
November 11th, 2008 at 10:25
This quite reminds me of the D&D classifications of Evil. There’s Chaotic Evil, the kind of bad where you do it disregarding reason, and Lawful Evil, where bad is done all by the rules and rational-like.