What about evil? - part 2: from bad to worse

I see unethical behavior - stealing, cheating, vindictiveness, malicious deception - as a step below rudeness, thoughtlessness and selfishness. This includes levels of behavior that societies and communities are pretty clear in condemning. This is stuff that has become inherently antisocial; it does lasting harm to others, disrupts society, and alters the character of communities.

This level of badness is pretty much frowned on in all societies. That doesn't mean that people don't do these things!. And the people who do bad stuff always have an excuse to explain why they think it wasn't bad - or at least why they shouldn't be criticized for doing it. But that doesn't change how the rest of us feel about it. There is a reason we call it unethical - we've all decided it's bad.

So then we come to a level I'll call criminal - not in a legal sense but behavior that is profoundly misanthropic - cruelty, rape,  violence, deliberately harming people or animals. We do make laws about such things, but I'm not limiting this to actions that have actual laws making them illegal. There is a level of badness that is so deeply harmful that society must take a conscious concern in preventing it.

But wait, isn't all this evil? Hold on, we're not even there yet. This isn't the bottom floor of our human psyche. Unfortunately it sometimes appears that some parts of our human genome continue to be actively involved in lowering the floor on bad behavior. We seem to keep inventing new ways to be malevolent. Maybe we are our own worst nightmare, our own evil twin. But we really can't point fingers at "them", we're all in the same genome.

So we come to evil. I read one description of evil as behavior that is appropriate at lower evolutionary levels of consciousness, but which is utterly inappropriate at the human level of consciousness. So it's ok to bite off the head of your sex partner if you're an insect, but not if you're a human (except metaphorically speaking of course). Nature is full of instances of killing and even sometimes eating babies, a common biological response to innate drives for many species - but at the level of human consciousness that's evil.

Yet there isn't a clear universal consensus on what actually falls into the various categories of bad behavior - not even what we consider evil. For many cultures in the West, cannibalism is the ultimate taboo. Yet in some societies it is a legitimate tactic of war, striking such terror into the enemy that it puts an end to the war itself. Is that more evil or less evil than dropping a bomb that obliterates an entire city with all its inhabitants in an instant?

see next blog for more of the problems of deciding what is evil