“Evil” is a strong word.
The Oxford English Dictionary says it derives from Old English and, when applied to a person, is “the most comprehensive adjectival expression of disapproval, dislike, or disparagement.” It means the person is “bad, wicked, vicious” and causes harm.
The concept is on the extreme end of the continuum of immorality. Ayn Rand says that evil people are a small minority in any culture, though their evil is often unleashed by appeasers. Let us take a look at the source and meaning of the concept of evil.
Ayn Rand’s moral values and virtues (16) are those that sustain and enhance our lives as rational beings. We are the animals that possess a volitional consciousness and therefore must choose to exercise our rational faculty to successfully live our lives. Some of her derivative values are honesty, courage, integrity, and justice.
Most decent people, I would say, think of morality in terms of telling the truth (honesty) and being fair to oneself and others (justice). Lying and unfairness are immoral. What is this continuum of immorality and where does evil lie?
Every concept, according to Rand’s epistemology, identifies a range of referents that are similar to each other, such as large and small tables, but different from others, such as beds and couches. The concept table identifies a range, or continuum, of measurements, specifying its essential distinguishing characteristics without the measurements—flat surface with supports designed to hold smaller objects.
The continuum of immorality ranges from someone who occasionally tells minor fibs and sometimes treats oneself and others unfairly to the seriously wicked and vicious person who might be justifiably called evil. I put the criminal personality in this evil classification, though the concept of evil is itself a continuum, ranging from the bungling burglar who leaves his identity behind to the murderer who enjoys watching the blood ooze from his victim’s body.
The criminal personality, as identified by Yochelson and Samenow, is someone who lies, cheats, and steals as a way of life and enjoys getting away with the forbidden (348–57). It is the criminals’ way of thinking—their thinking errors—that causes them to become criminals.
Working for the courts, Yochelson and Samenow for years interviewed criminals who had claimed the insanity defense.* They found few who were psychotic, especially when committing crimes. Interestingly, the criminal’s departure from reality was often a psychosis of conscience (voices and delusions) that prevented them from committing crimes. When the psychosis lifted, they returned to crime (476–81).
Also, the authors reviewed the literature on the notion of “psychopath,” concluding that the research is confusing and fails to describe a separate personality that is psychopathic (89–106). They even quote one investigator who says the research is a “wastebasket of psychiatric classification” (99).
Yet, the range of evilness that is wicked and vicious, I submit, can reliably be called psychopathic, as long as we do not call them psychotic. They are people, for example, who really believe, as does the rapist, “She really wanted me” and the murderer, “He deserved it.” The beliefs are rationalizations, but that is what constitutes the criminal’s way of thinking.
On the less extreme side of evilness, though still talking about people who are decidedly not nice, are what Yochelson and Samenow call the “non-arrestable criminal” (chap. 7). Such behavior is not illegal but often leads to illegal activity.
The authors call this behavior “criminal equivalent.” The criminally equivalent person seeks power for its own sake at the expense of others, enjoying the excitement of manipulating, bullying, and giving orders (not always cordially). They exist in all walks of life, at home, school, and work. Some are attracted to law enforcement, the military, fire prevention, and politics.
Crossing the line of legality, for example, the non-arrestable firefighter may start a fire, then help to put it out.
Ayn Rand says that the root of immorality is evasion of thought, the refusal to exercise one’s reason before acting. And one can readily say that there is likely evasion going on in the criminal’s mind, from an early age. But a question I have raised before, is how does one know that someone else is evading? How do we, or can we, judge others without making the hasty-generalization mistake?
My answer in the past has been, “Not easily” (1, 2, 3). I question whether we can judge someone as immoral unless we know that person well. Throw in the fact that many criminals are con artists, pretending to be an honest person, and add hyperbole and BS that many honest people like to use in conversation. You can have difficulty drawing conclusions about your conversant.
Indeed, I question whether Ayn Rand could readily make the judgment of thought evasion about another person—because psychology plays such a big part in the determination of our behavior, and Rand acknowledged that she did not know much about psychology. She did allow for errors in knowledge, which is where we can classify psychological defenses.
What about public figures—politicians and journalists, for example—who seem to lie as a way of life? They may be “criminal equivalents,” but how would we know without personal contact? I would say that targeting one person or organization with what seems like repeated falsehoods is moving in that direction, while frivolous lawsuits and unjust fines and imprisonments have moved across the line, the latter two the legal line.
Can we know these persons’ motivations with certainty? I don’t think so, and, to put a point on it, what does it matter to our personal lives, unless we are the target?
If we are the target of harmful and seemingly immoral or evil behavior, we must call out that behavior as wrong. But condemning the person as immoral or evil is a serious charge. With incomplete knowledge, I recommend giving the other person the benefit of the doubt. They have psychologies, after all, just as we do.
The most frivolous of frivolous discussions today in ethics is what I call the fallacy of moralizing concretes: red meat is immorally unhealthy, drinking water out of plastic bottles immorally harms the environment, and owning a gun means you want to kill people. The appropriate response here, after an exasperated exhale, would be, “Seriously?” Concretes—red meat, plastic bottles, guns—are neither moral nor immoral. The truth of the first two statements is doubtful, though your doctor may recommend a different diet. The moralizer of concretes is possibly a criminal equivalent who wants the power—and excitement—of banning the concretes.
Moral values and principles are broad abstractions that each of us must apply to our own lives. Honesty is not Immanuel Kant’s dictum of never lying. It is the principle of telling the truth, unless under duress, threatened with invasion of privacy, or when a blunt truth might be unnecessarily hurtful to another person. And justice means judging oneself and others correctly and, when appropriate, praising or denouncing.
The criminal suffers a deep character flaw of enjoying lying, cheating, and getting away with the forbidden. Crossing the legal line makes criminals easier to judge, though even here, one must ask, “Is the law valid that is being violated?” Am I immoral if I refuse to pay my taxes? No, but it is a practical issue. Ayn Rand paid her taxes because she did not want to go to jail. I certainly pay mine.
Most laws that criminals violate are crimes against person and property. This makes it easier to judge criminals as falling into the evil classification. Though even here, I am tempted to say that the really bad, wicked, and vicious ones are more on the psychopathic end of the scale, the types who enjoy watching blood oozing from their victim’s body.**
* Yochelson died at age 70 in 1976, but his co-author Stanton Samenow continued their work, and still continues today. Samenow has several books. I recommend Inside the Criminal Mind, The Myth of the Out of Character Crime, and Before It’s Too Late (advice to parents). I have cited this work on the criminal mind in earlier posts. See especially these two in Applying Principles (267–69, 280–83).
** Can ideologies and historical figures—such as communism and Hitler—be judged as evil? Yes, but extensive fact-finding must be done before condemning. A topic, perhaps for another blog.
Follow-up to last month’s post “On Writing”: I forgot to mention an important form of short writing in business: the conference memo. Say, you and your boss attend a meeting with the client. You, the junior person, will likely be the note taker and writer of the subsequent conference memo. The memo itself is no more than one page and summarizes the essence of the meeting, such as purpose, problem and suggested solutions, and, as the final section, next steps, which states who will do what, when, with a specific deadline for the project.
Speaking of deadlines, they do exist, whether for term papers and exams in school or for manuscript submission of books and articles (or, to go one further, for payment of taxes and credit card bills). My advice to students and myself: do the work ahead of time, allowing a chance for reflection on what might also need to be done. This is the subconscious “percolation” I mentioned last month, the process of filtering and integrating the knowledge you presently have. (And the deadline I give myself for these blogs is that it be posted sometime during the month.)
