Emotional emptiness and evil and power

Affable

If evil can dwell in people I would suggest it's because of emotional emptiness, the 'banality of evil', rather than part of a range of instincts good and bad contained within a more emotionally 'whole' person or range of good and bad that varies person to person in more 'whole' people.

I would also go on to say that power operates, in subtle cases, by emotional emptiness or inhumanity. Those with humanity can always feel exploited and de-empowered by inhumanity but the converse scenario is rare if non-existent, furthermore I believe these qualities do exist at innate levels.

I would also like to discuss the question of whether there is in fact a quality of emotional wholeness(characterised by a kind of authenticity and depth of feeling) that is in itself noble and morally superior to emptiness, regardless of the range of good and bad emotions it encompasses, or whether emotionally empty and emotionally deep people are overall morally equivalent.


Forgive me if it's a little abstract, hopefully it made some sense.

spoonbadger

Your suggesting that evil comes from the lack of emotion, or a lack of emphaty etc?.

I dunno. I know i've dont pretty nasty **** in the past, entirely of my own will because i knew i'd benefit from it. Yet i know what i was doing was wrong, realized how it was affecting whoever i hurt, and felt some sort of emphaty, so surely what i may have done doesnt stem from a lack of feeling?.

And following on from that, there's a lot of crap i've done to other people that i wouldnt do now, (yeah, i'm a much nicer person now than i was ). So does that mean that, if your right and evil-stems-from-emptiness, that i've managed to fill that emptiness?.

I just think that it's too hard to explain stuff like this using a linear spectrum. Good people do bad things, bad people do good things. No one can be classed as empty, because emptiness in this case is relative.

Wow, my first post in the philosophy section. I like it here .

Affable

spoonbadger wrote: »

I dunno. I know i've dont pretty nasty **** in the past, entirely of my own will because i knew i'd benefit from it.

Any examples??

spoonbadger

i once poisoned an orphaned puppy.....NO!!!

No!, no examples!

raah!

I think this "banality of evil" comes from relativism of morals and certain ideologies like nihilism. In the first case what they were doing wouldn't really be evil, and in the other they wouldn't care.

And of course emotional emptiness would lead to immorality in someone whose morality is based entirely on emotions. But then there are millions of moral systems in which this would not be a problem. I think the stoics held that a person who was morally and intellectually perfect would not even posses extremes of emotion, and obviously if they were morally perfect they wouldn't be committing any evil acts.

I would also go on to say that power operates, in subtle cases, by emotional emptiness or inhumanity

Perhaps you could specify as to what you mean by power.

Also hate is an emotion which leads to evil (depending on what evil is), were you refering to just empathy? (already asked by spoon there). I also agree with spoon that emptiness is relative, but obviously you can just set some kind of lower limit, or set of circumstances, and then use that.

Kama

Is your proposition that 'evil' is caused by a lack of emotion? In its strong form it seems unsubstantiated, plenty of violent harm and pain is emergent from strong emotional states, such as rage, as has been noted already.

Bracketing off the initial (but necessary) problem of defining evil, an interesting area to look at would be sociopathy, which seems to fit closely to your assumption Lack of Emotion -> Evil, although its arguable that the critical variable is not emotion per se, but the development of empathy. There's an interesting tangent made in the film The Corporation, that our social system entrains sociopathic tendencies by rewarding lack of empathy etc, which to me relates to your treatment of power.

Those with humanity can always feel exploited and de-empowered by inhumanity but the converse scenario is rare if non-existent, furthermore I believe these qualities do exist at innate levels.

Is 'evil' inhuman? Is reducing the agency of any other individual evil?
My main problem with the argument is the idea of seperation, human sheep from evil goats: that there are inhuman, evil, exploitative people, rather than the more banal existential-operational position that there are people, and people do actions that can be considered evil.

Innate evil seems a highly essentialist concept, which I find hard to substantiate, and further the belief in 'evil people' has had some social-historical results that bias me against the position.