Now that that’s out of the way, I’m going to go to dinner, come back, read your whole post, and make an on-topic comment. :)

Plato would say, that the society holds (or should hold) responsibility, that is, all the people as a collective whole, hold responsibility to care for those in need. If someone does not have the mental faculties or judgment to make rational decisions, it can be argued that he does not have or is not capable of having personal responsibility. In which case, we are stuck.

Do we let raving lunatics wander about, until one does something that jeopardizes one of us? Or do we as a society take repsonsibility, see that he has problems, get him proper medical care, and otherwise gently take him off the streets before he injures someone else?

In this case, everyone has “personal responsibility”. People saw he was a nut-case, were frightened of him, but these people did not go beyond the “observation” stage and say “hey, this guy is a potential threat to himself and/or others, who do we alert about this?”

Good VS Evil is such a childish way to look at the world. And completely unhelpful. Pretty much every person and thing is both.

If you go on a crusade to eliminate evil, you might as well just start with your self and reduce the senseless slaughter. The fact that adults can’t see that is evidence only that those individuals never became adults in an intellectual sense.

That being said, was John Hinkley somewhere on the left side of the single dimentional world when he attempted to assassinate Reagan? No. His motivation, like Loughner’s, was completely cartesian, totally out in the ether.

I’m not a Palin fan, but she had less to do with this than Jodie Foster did in Hinkley’s deluded attack. First, we blamed her, then, when we realized dude was nuts, and that she had less to do with what happened than the Communist Manifesto, we say she’s bad for calling him ‘evil’.

Pot calling the kettle black, is basically what we’re doing. She’s on the ‘right’ so she’s got to be all-bad, no matter what.

As long as we continue to believe the world is one dimentional, with a horizontal line stretching from ‘us’ to ‘them’, people will be compelled to use the same unrealist way to describe everything. ‘Good’ to ‘evil’, ‘religious’ to ‘secular’, ‘left’ to ‘right’, etc… etc… ad infinitum.

This isn’t a coherent position.

I think what you mean to say is that this kid isn’t evil; he’s delusional or mentally ill or -something else- that exculpates him from the charge of being evil. But of course this doesn’t mean that “evil” is meaningless. And who cares what Nietzsche says. He doesn’t have a good argument; he convinces all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons.

I’m reading Crime and Punishment again. Actually I only got about 3/4 through last time. This is almost exactly the type of mind Dostoevsky is describing in the lead up to the murder(s): the ‘unthinking thinking’ of a person so wrapped up in superstition and some unshakable belief in something they really only understand superficially.

In Loughner’s case though I think it’s likely some major undiagnosed mental illness that goes far beyond this ‘lazy philosopher’ thing.

I come at the depiction of Jesus in poetry via poetry, not via religion, so all I can tell you is that Pound’s depiction is remarkably unusual in the genre.

@Anon #20: I don’t want to get into a big discussion about ADHD here. I stand by my post. Now, back to Nietzsche!

“There is nothing new under the sun.”
-Ecclesiastes 1:9

Old Scratch’s male pattern baldness, in contrast, looks positively milquetoast.

It perplexes me, with all the rough-and-ready testosterone-laden junkslinging that’s been done in His name these last few centuries, how come Christ Hisself is always represented as an effete hippie who apparently brushes His hair one hundred times each and every night? Nothing against effete hippies (back in 1998, Yours Truly was a dead ringer for this guy, only with wispier facial hair), but ongchewpeng’s Savior pictured above looks much more like the kinda guy with whom G. W. Bush might share a pitcher of Coors, only muttering “get a haircut” under his breath so as not to unduly antagonize the surprisingly burly Messiah.

Nietzche’s Master Morality and Slave Morality are just corollaries of that overarching natural human view of evil. If you’re poor, the Master Morality is the perfect explanation of why the rich are so evil. If you’re rich (or identify with rich people as seen on TV, where they tell you you pay too much in taxes, for example) then, the poor are evil. Oh, but it’s always someone else! How lovely we really are, aren’t we?

So we swap it out for “malevolence”; in a couple of years it will be misused in exactly the same way as “evil” was just like every other euphemism. It’s like swapping out a circuit board that’s blown out without bothering to work out why it blew in the first place: the replacement is going to blow up next week too. In this case the underlying cause is 10,000 Watts of burning stupidity: aka the inability to deal with non-binary thinking.

BTW – I find “evil” to be a perfectly serviceable world. Just because every monster going back to Grendel has a backstory doesn’t mean they’re not evil.

That has to be a knee-jerk response. I can’t imagine you put much thought into it. Imagine that your wife of 20 years has just been drug from her car and had her head beaten to a pulp with a baseball bat, by a complete stranger. And imagine trying to answer the inevitable question that you will ask yourself…why? Or try to imagine that 6 million of your fellow men and women were sent to the gas chamber and again, you are forced to answer that question…why? Contrary to your statement that viewing the world in such terms is “unhelpful”, I would argue just the opposite. Why spend the rest of your life wondering why? A question that I assure you, you will never sufficiently answer, when you can just consider the perpetrator of those actions “evil” and go on with your life. That is the value of those terms and the worldview you criticize. To efficiently explain away that which cannot be explained or frankly, is not worthy of explanation under the circumstances.

You make your judgments of good and evil behind a computer, in the comfort of shelter. Another time and place and you won’t have the time or ability to pontificate to such a degree. Some people have experienced that other time and place, some many times over. It is those people who understand the value and necessity of the concepts of “good and evil”. And of course, there are those who do not recognize the value of those concepts and drive themselves nuts trying to explain that which they cannot explain. Seems that’s where Loughner may have been.

Lastly, I don’t think most people so casually categorize matters as good or evil or this article suggests.

Then there were people in court who were mentally ill who couldn’t perceive reality much less right and wrong.

Then there were people in court with fetal alcohol syndrome or brain injuries who didn’t think the way other people thought and who had trouble making choices or controlling impulses.

There were people in court who were mentally handicapped through down syndrome or and again had trouble communicating or didn’t know how to express thoughts or emotions or sexual feelings in a socially acceptable way.

There were people with addictions who would get desperate and steal to pay for their fixes or who would get high and be violent or reckless.

There were people with sexual compulsions who couldn’t seem to stop their behaviour.

In all of those populations or categories I’m sure you could find people not in court and not trouble with the law, but a lot of people in court fall into one of those categories.

Then you had the “normal people” who ran afoul of the law. The people who should know better. Those people did domestics, prostitution, drinking and driving, assault and fraud mostly. Sometimes they would do murders. Murder was rare. Drunkenness was common. Anger was common.

Evil. Miss Marple television evil was very very very rare. Usually when people killed each other it was spur of the moment and they were really really angry or drunk, or they were crazy.

I tended toward the end to think of evil as belonging to the people who should know better and who did bad, mean harmful things to other people despite knowing better. There were a few assholes who would repeatedly do shit and get punished and those people ought to have known better , especially after a while of being treated and punished and rehabbed. And I put them in the evil category too.

Ultimately though evil is like a colour. It’s a judgement, an adjective. It’s not a cause. There’s all kinds of reasons why people do “bad things. Evil is not the same as crime – not always.

“Everyone, myself included, probably has a delusion or two in their belief system. Once in a while they combine with other factors in a person to create a lethal combination: anger, incompetence, rejection, isolation, lack of empathy, drug-induced hallucinations, participation in economies of violence, unthinking behavior, production of a flawed script. That’s not evil.”

If that’s not evil, what is?

Wishing to call it “malevolence” and simply strip the phonetic “evil” from terminology makes no change to the outcome of such a lethal combination.

I see the problem as the make-believe world people find themselves in that suggests that they cannot be or are not capable of being evil. You may find it justifiable to change the words, trying to chase down those who suggest that they are above “evil” by saying that they cannot possibly be above this “malevolence.” The truth is that they never had right to make such claim in the first place.

I’d say feel free to give it whatever phonetic you wish, but the root of it is the personal allowance of those carried delusions to morph together and persuade you into violent decisions. Evil is not some out-of-reach demon idling in a firey lair. It is a capability, one that dwells in all of us. Able to be summoned at our command. Able to subvert our ordinary thoughts over long periods of time through unguarded allowance.

I, too have problems with people callously dismissing others’ actions as evil without recognizing the same views within themselves that can lead to similar actions. But it’s not the use of the phonetic “evil” that perturbs me, it is the very act of dismissal. How long, after changing the term to “malevolence,” will it take for that to become the word used to quickly dismiss such actions? And then will you advocate for another different word? But even then a rose is still a rose.

As for Mrs. Palin, it pains me to see self-professed Christians dismiss someone as evil without compassion for the man who succumbed to such misdeeds, and without the recognition that, lacking vigilant guard, they themselves are just as capable of becoming evil. They, in accordance with their beliefs (and mine), harbor the very same tendencies. [Romans 3:23 "for all have sinned"]

That it is a process of rationalization one takes to succumb and allow themselves to commit these vicious deeds makes it no less evil. It is that very process that is the evil (this is not to say that all rationalization is evil). I would say, instead of changing the term because others are unconciously attempting to redefine it, advocate for the term to be used appropriately.

Suppose there is no real bias toward either good or evil. Bad stuff should provoke no more notice than good stuff and vice-versa. As we (and maybe I can’t speak for humanity but I will) look at other life forms I think we would imagine that most if not all experience the world in this non-biased reality. Of course humanity may well be wrong on this. We have little if any evidence to suggest that any other life form has any other experience of reality than our own. But a lack of evidence has rarely stopped us in the past.

That there is so much discussion of the concepts of good and evil and a fair industry evolving out of this that it seems unlikely that we, humanity, on the whole ascribe to this non-biased reality for ourselves.

Nevertheless, as I contemplate the biases toward the evil or even toward the good, I find myself quickly immersed in a reality that is thick with infinite levels of internal debate. Something which the good/evil labels would quickly annihilate.

Perhaps it is internal debate itself that marks the difference between non-bias and bias. And, further, that our inclination is toward the debate, toward bias, in other words, we are biased toward a belief in the difference between good and evil. And even further that those who are not inclined toward this internal debate are inclined to the non-biased reality.

This brings up another game-changing idea: in American culture, low self-esteem is considered to be the root of all behavior problems. But few people talk about the dangers of high self-esteem.

Hear, hear! “Evil” should be used sparingly, and more in reference to ideas or specific approaches than to people, because most people have a number of (partially-)redeeming traits about them — but “good” versus “evil” is a valid and important distinction.

Loughner seems mentally ill rather than evil. (Either way, he should be locked up for a while, but it changes the kind of attention he should get while locked up.) I am glad that just about the only living Americans I can think of who might cross the line into “evil” of are the members of the Westboro Baptist Church.