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I am about to post something for discussion, but want to stress that I do not have the source for this particular piece (even though subsequent searches of the subject matter have turned up similar discussions, I found nothing that could be considered authoritative). I managed to trace it back to a site, but since I am not a member of said site, was unable to find it in there. What I know, though, is that the source of this particular piece, the site in question, is not set up and managed by doctors or therapists or any other medical professional, they are writers and journalists who "specialize in writing health articles and content" so for the purposes of this exercise, I won't bother posting the link, but would be interested in your thoughts/opinions regarding the content, and if CE or Hill have any references to primary sources for discussion, I would be interested in reading them. I'll post my opinions up in a bit.

*Wonders whether this will raise another nurture/nature or creationist/evolutionist debate*

(February 13, 2005) -- EVIL, a concept long reviled by psychologists, may have been rehabilitated. A study of serial killers and mass murderers suggests that some criminals are so inherently bad that there is no other word to describe their actions. The term evil has been derided because it is regarded as unscientific and carries unhelpful religious connotations. Psychologists argue the most awful crimes can usually be explained by mental illness.

However, this orthodoxy is now being questioned by Michael Stone, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University in New York.

He looked at 500 British and American serial killers including Ian Brady, Myra Hindley and Fred West, to work out their motives. He found that while some were the victims of mental illness, others were perfectly sane — and had decided that they would enjoy killing.

Such behaviour, Stone says, defies any psychiatric explanation. Many killers are diagnosed as psychopaths but most psychopaths never commit violent crimes. This suggests that something extra is at work.

“Such people make a rational choice to commit terrible crimes over and over again. They are evil and we should be able to say that formally,” he said.

Stone and his team devised a 22-level hierarchy of evil derived from interviews, biographies and case notes of 500 violent criminals. They found many were suffering from illnesses such as schizophrenia. Others’ behaviour could be partially explained by abuse or events in their early lives which had left mental damage. Such people attained relatively low placings in Stone’s hierarchy, despite committing terrible acts.

Others, however, had no history of illness or other events to explain their actions and, said Stone, had made a rational choice to enact their fantasies for pleasure. Such people were placed at much higher levels in the hierarchy, with level 22 representing the ultimate in evil.

Stone includes West and Brady — but not Hindley — in this level, alongside some of America’s most notorious serial killers. They include Ted Bundy, convicted of two murders and suspected of many more in the 1970s, John Wayne Gacy, who strangled more than 30 boys, and Jeffrey Dahmer, a cannibal serial killer.

Stone accepts that the word evil has to be used carefully but says that for some there is no better description. “I am talking about the kind of people who torture their victims first before killing them and who may have a number of victims,” he said.

“In England people like Fred West and Ian Brady are clear examples but Myra Hindley might not be because she was to some extent led by Brady.”

The “mad or bad” debate is not a new one. Up until the last century people with mental illness were often considered to be possessed by the devil.

Sean Spence, a reader in psychiatry at Sheffield University, will be co-presenting a lecture on antisocial behaviour at the Royal Institution in London on Thursday. “The word evil has an outdated metaphysical ring to it. It would be no help to label someone as evil as it risks reinforcing their own fantasies and making them feel powerful and grandiose,” he said.

To kick off, this subject is also dicussed at length by Scott-Peck in his book "People Of The Lie" Essentially he is alluding to narcissism, which makes for a good discussion in concept, but - even though he regularly claims not to let his Christian standing impose upon his professional opinion - he does blur the line too much between psychology and religious theology in my mind, and as a result I found it hard going to read (especially when considering a couple of the cases he cites as black and white examples of "pure evil")

I guess what I am trying to say is that maybe there is such a condition that goes beyond rational explanation, but then psychology is not an exact science, is it? so people look for the answers elsewhere, and some find it easy to fall back on the oldest label known *shrugs* I guess it doesn't help Scott Peck's case knowing he was a Buddhist before a Christian, maybe he has found his own answers finally, and it sells books, but it doesn't mean we have to agree with him just because in his mind he has successfully married religion with psychiatry and found a common denominator.

To clarify, narcissism (or more specifically, "malignant narcissism") was Scott-Peck's (and his layman supporters) choice of example, not mine. What I found unsurprising, was the majority of positive reviews of Peck's book that I read were written by Christians.

Are experts like Stone and Scott-Peck and their peers agreeing that all the answers will have been found if the unknowns can be boxed up according to the severity of their crimes, or a lacking in clinical diagnosis? Only recently a man in India, in his seventies, was released from an institute when a review decided that he was misdiagnosed as clinically insane some fifty years ago, when in fact he was epileptic. Can we write of decades of learning just like that, with a sweeping generalisation? Many are capable of evil deeds, that goes without question, but is there truly such a thing as an inherently evil person?

If experts are now going down the road of labelling individuals evil as some kind of catch all, where formal clinical diagnostics and treatments may have failed, in my mind they are risking going back 100 years and writing off unknown quantities to a subjective label which is wide open to moral and cultural interpretation. I worry that, even when some individuals do fall outside of modern profiling, society resigns to the experts opinion that there is nothing else to learn, after all we rely on expert opinions to keep us safe, and the term evil is something a layman can accept and quantify without having to understand the clinical diagnostic spectrum. But then, what do I know?

*not sure how to respond*...
well i drew one point from that, which is not all serial killers are physcotic, i would also argue that not all serial killers that are not pyshcotic are evil.
Some may just be very very very confused individuals. They go on killing sprees because say, their religion tells them that a certain group of people are evil, and that it would be a good thing if they exisrtence were shortened, many islamic extremists operate in that sense, christians would too if the bible promisied us x number of women upon death. some people kill because of what thety believe. unless we are going to diagnose religion as a mental illness not everyone wants to kill, some think they have too. I tihnk a new study needs to be done, including all serial killers terrorists (and evangelists ) and the result wil be that all prominent people of the two grops and all serial killers will end up with three ratings:
Illness: How any mental illnesses thst they have affected their... work.
Evil: How... well, evil they were. evil being defined as it was described in the artical above.
Fanatiscm: How much personal, and religious beliefs, as well as society and tradition efected their choices.

all ratings would be out of either 10 or 100.

Interesting POV, Phreddie, thank you!

Like I said, since I have nothing but an opinion of a journalist to go on here, we can only assume that the study group were predominantly violent serial killers, as cited, but the group were 500 strong. Maybe it did consist of religious fanatics, and megalomaniacs such as Hitler and Pol Pot, but you would hope that if this opinion was impartial, that it might have mentioned some of the top X "evil" personalities included these two, for example, at least? Maybe they were considered psychopathic, or sociopathic enough, to not be evil? Maybe the study was confined to a selection of society that excluded those with political power (shame lol!) and religious conviction (which in my mind might contradict the use of a label associated usually with theologians) Maybe their selection made for a quick conclusion, considering they would have had confirmed psychological profiles already at their disposal? Oh, and btw, the Christians have killed many in the name of their god.

Scott-Peck discussed narcissism as one condition behind the "evil", if you like, which raises another interesting concept. Am I right in understanding that it is a common belief that narcissistic tendencies are genetic? If so, you could reasonably argue that there is an evil gene. Hmmm...

[QUOTE=Yshania]Scott-Peck discussed narcissism as one condition behind the "evil", if you like, which raises another interesting concept. Am I right in understanding that it is a common belief that narcissistic tendencies are genetic? If so, you could reasonably argue that there is an evil gene. Hmmm...[/QUOTE]
Never heard abo0ut that myself, have to wait for the scientists, get chu to blow his Hill Horn if hes on that always brings hill wondering...

From what I have read though, not there are not many people who are relgious serial killers, they general go the mass murder/suicide route. Check out the guy named Starkweather, he was bakc in the 50's i tihnk, near ohio/wyoming or wisconsin, he sounds like he has some basic evil ness in him, along with a lot of stupidity.

I'm not very sure how to respond to this either. I don't quite follow the point which the Stone study is trying to get at.

Stone]Psychologists argue the most awful crimes can usually be explained by mental illness. [/quote] This seems to me to be a straw man. I see no evidence for this statement. When someone is accused of a crime it is assumed that they are responsible for their actions wrote:“Such people make a rational choice to commit terrible crimes over and over again. They are evil and we should be able to say that formally,” he said.

What does this mean? If he is suggesting that his freedom to use ordinary language is curtailed, then I think he is wrong. He can say anything he likes as a private individual.

If he means he would like to be able to use an ordinary word in a privileged way, (as is suggested by his use of the word formally) then I do not see that he has made any case at all. Evil is not a diagnosis of anything; it is a value judgement. On the face of the information which you have been able to provide there is nothing which leads me to suppose that organising the concept into 22 levels changes that in any way. We now have a map of Mr Stone's conscience. What else do we have?

Yshania] Many are capable of evil deeds wrote:
I think this sentence illustrates the basic point here. This is not a scientific question at all. It is linguistic and philosophical at its root. If that is accepted then Stone and Scott-Peck have no more expertise than anyone else.It is dangerous to accord them the status of experts and I suspect that is the core of your unease.

In the UK there is a safeguard in law, in that a person cannot be compulsorily detained for treatment unless two genuine experts confirm that person is a danger to him/herself or others AND is suffering from a treatable mental illness. In many cases no action can be taken in quite serious circumstances because doctors will not so affirm. They often diagnose a "personality disorder" and since that cannot be treated the person cannot be detained. (That is a simplistic description of the law, but it is useful here, I think) If we change the label from " personality disorder" to "evil" what has been gained except stigmatisation of the person so labelled? Very unappealing because the word evil does indeed carry baggage, and yet using it adds nothing to our understanding. There is a whiff of moral condemnation disguised as science in this, IMO

Ysh, this is an interesting topic which I will certainly comment seriously and thoroughly about this later, but right now I am terribly busy becasue I'm holding an important lecture tomorrow, plus I have some teaching apart from my normal job. I'll get back to you in a couple of days! Very briefly though I can say that Stone's conclusions are debatable to say the least, but if Stone has choosen to define "evil" and narcissistic personality disorder with strong instrumental components, I understand what he means but I don't agree with his conceptualisation.

People argued for a while that Hitler was truly evil, and others say he was mentally ill. So what about everyone under him? Were a majority of Nazis just evil, or were they all mentally ill? And what about radical Islamic terrorists (and Phreddie's to-be-feared evangelists )? We may think they're evil or mentally ill, but other people think they're good, and the most sane people in the world. Evil's such a subjective term, but I'd expect as much from someone who rooted for the Sith in Star Wars, the Borg in Star Trek, the First Evil in Buffy, Jasmine in Angel, and eagerly awaited the episode when Wile E. Coyote--super genius--would finally catch the Road Runner. Of course, for the Sith and the Borg and Jasmine, they brought order to chaos, structure to amorphousness, and peace to war. I won't even try to justify the Wile E. Coyote case. :mischief:

Anyway, just because someone's mentally ill doesn't mean they can't be classified as evil (Hitler). Of course, just because someone's mentally ill doesn't mean they're necessarily evil (Dahmer). People can and will debate this kind of issue for decades and never really come out with a "good" answer. Lestat's signature comes to mind, the one about not trying to explain how evil exists in the world but how good does. I think we're all capable of committing some pretty heinous acts given the right circumstances... so maybe we're all inherently evil, but some of us just happened to come into a certain group of situations that made it so we'd exhibit it in such extravagant ways.

Ahh.. how I hate discussions like these, they make my brain think form running around in circles.

Alright... Evil is a subjective term that can be interpreted by any one as they will based upon their view point. Extermination of the Jews during World War II was not seen as evil by the Nazi Hierarchy, rather i was seen as a necesity becuase the fuhrer demanded it be done. Fear can bea powerful motivator as well, ordinary people can be moved to do extraodinary feats because of fear, eagerness to impress, or solid belief. The problem with judging people as evil, or even as guilty of a crime, ona societal level, is that not everyone in the society may believe something is a crime, to some murder is worng, it is evil, but to others, it just a emans to an end, or possibly a religious duty. While the majority may think it is worng, a small minority may think other wise, and just becuase they dont have as many fellow believers means that they should be punished? eh, now im geting into that phase where i try to justify the other side, im going to bed before i say sometihng i shouldnt....

Would it be helpful to separate the idea of an evil deed, from that of an evil person?

[QUOTE=Fiona]Would it be helpful to separate the idea of an evil deed, from that of an evil person?[/QUOTE]It is not only helpful, it is essential.
E.g. many of the perpetrators in the Rwandan genocide were pressured or even forced in taking part, and did so out of fear of being killed themselves.

For me someone is evil if he willingly and knowingly commits an evil act. Of course this means that you don't "detect" someone is evil until the deed is done and you can raise the question: at what point did the person become evil? Was he evil before, even if he didn't commit any evil acts yet. Can you detect this and thus prevent the evil deeds.

[QUOTE=Lestat]
For me someone is evil if he willingly and knowingly commits an evil act. Of course this means that you don't "detect" someone is evil until the deed is done and you can raise the question: at what point did the person become evil? Was he evil before, even if he didn't commit any evil acts yet. Can you detect this and thus prevent the evil deeds.[/QUOTE]

I think you have yourself identified the problem with this. It's like a hall of mirrors.

For myself I cannot "make windows into people's souls", and I cannot assume the existence of evil people at all.

I agree with previous posters that the identification of an evil act is very subjective. The whole discussion is muddied because we are not talking about one concept. Maybe the best we can do is to define certain actions as unacceptable to the group, and sanction those actions. The rule of law is important because it moves the judgement from the individual and subjective level to the societal level and this makes it more transparent. Some people will disagree with the consensus and will deliberately choose to break the laws.That does not make them evil, and if they act out of deeply held beliefs and accept the consequences of what they do then they are not evil and they are not mentally ill. That covers many of the instances which Chim and Phreddie cited

There is a problem with defining the size of the group. For example, Nazi germany has been cited and many people there acted entirely within the law but were subsequently judged to have been culpable. The justification appeared to be two fold. On the one hand the court decided that individual responsibility always applies; and on the other there was a belief that the group comprised the international rather than the national community. the latter does not pose a problem of principle for me, though the practical implication is difficult. I have more problem with the former. Although some laws are shared across cultures the idea still seems to me to be based on some notion of a "higher" morality. I have some difficulty with that.

This is going to be long...

First, let me address the question of definition of "evil" and why psychiatrists and psychologist don't like to use this word. The word "evil" can, as has already been pointed out in this thread, be interpreted in different ways. It is a word with a lot of religious, moral and cultural connotations. Thus, like most laymen terms, it is unsuitable for science and even more for diagnostics that determine the fate of people's lives, because it lacks an exact operational definition that can is measurable and quantifiable.

However, there are many human behaviours that are destructive and harmful for others. Instrumental narcissism, the idea that you have superior rights which means you can use and abuse other people as much as it please you and this is just your right, is one such behaviour pattern. Another is sadism, that you take pleasure out of other people's suffering and even induce suffering in them for your own well-being.

Genocide politics of the kind we saw in nazi-Germany certainly belongs to the narcissism-spectrum. You hold one race or one group of people superior, and think it's right to get rid of others. On a smaller scale, you can see it in many ordinary people (for instance on this board) who believe they have superior rights because they come from a certain country or belong to a certain culture. Narcissism is inself only a elaboration of the proximity-principle: people care most about what is closest and most immediate to them. Narcissism, like many other behaviour patterns, can not be classified into absent = healthy, present = disorder. The same with sadism, sadism can be seen in everyday behaviour, people take pleasure and gloat at other's misery, especially when they feel they want to revenge something. Few however would take pleasure in kidnapping another person and torture the person for days before eating the persons body parts, to take an extreme example.

In any case, extreme acts based on instrumental narcissism and sadism, belong to the group of behaviours that most people would agree on labelling as "evil". On the other hand, bisarre delusions and visual hallucinations belong to a group of behaviours that most people would agree on labelling as "mad", but that doesn't mean "mad" is a useful concept in diagnostics or in psychiatric research. When Michael Stone claims that it's a good idea to re-introduce the word "evil" in psychiatry, it is to me an analogy to re-introducing the word "mad" or "idiot". My question is: what for? Why strive for using loaded laymen terms with moral, religious and stigmatising connotations that makes them open for all sorts of subjective opinion? Why not develop the diagnosic system into deeper detail? It's increased detail knowledge about causes and mechanisms we need for development of better treatment (or any treatment) and for risk-assessment of criminal offenders, not more words that are vague and sweeping generalisations.

Neurological, neuropsychiatric and psychiatric disorders have an observation-based classification where we look at symptomatology and functional behaviour. It's not like infectious diseases; there is no schizophrenia virus or ADHD-bacillus. We are working with the body's most complex organ and the complexity of human behaviour. Diagnosis are made base on a pattern of set symptom criteria, and subjective labels like "evil" or "good" are irrelevant here. There are however many other problems here, but I need to explain a bit about the diagnosis system in order to demonstrate what the problems are.

Psychatric disorder is diagnosed based on a system which is described in the manual DSM-IV. This system was developed in order to release psychology and psychiatry from the various opinions and ideologies that previously influenced assessment of patients (ie psychoanalysis and anti-psychiatry back in the 1960's). The system is divided into 5 axis, including symptomatology and level of functioning, but I will only go into the first 2 axis. The full DSM-IV is only available for professionals, but those who wish to read more, can find some information here:
http://allpsych.com/disorders/dsm.html
Axis I covers the clinical syndroms, which includes the well-known disorders
schizophrenia, bipolar, depression, phobias. There are no major problems with these diagnosis. Then, we come to the problem child of psychiatry, axis II, the personality disorders. To make a long story short, the personality disorder system was constructed as a consensus compromise between several different schools of psychiatry. The basis for this bad solution was simply that much less in known about personality disorders than of psychosis, affective disorder and anxiety disorder. We are not even sure of how to conceptualise what is currently called personality disorder. Current personality disorder diagnosis overlap each other a lot, and also overlap with normal personality traits a lot.

Now, with this background we can look at the diagnosis anti-social personality disorder (ASPD), an axis II diagnosis that has replaced the older psychopath and sociopath labels, and is associated with criminal behaviour. The criteria for ASPD are a horrible mix of behaviours and symptoms that overlap partly with the different psychopath concepts (yes, there are more than one), developmental disorders ADHD and autism, conduct disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and axis I dissociative syndroms. It's actually quite worthless, and it's not connected to "evil" either.

Although brief and simplified, I think this little article illustrates the lack of connection between "evil" and psychopathy as well:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... B9A8D1.DTL

If anyone is specially interested in reading more about the concepts of anti-social PD, psychopathy and criminal behaviour, I have a good essay written by a collaborator of mine who is a forensic psychiatrist. It's part of a research program, but it contains some useful information for the interested layman, so if you wish to know more, PM me.

A behaviour that can be labelled as "evil" have a multifactorial background that differs between individuals, but also, the labelling will differ depending on context and observer. I understand the frustration from forensics people and laymen alike, when they are looking for a development that would help in risk-assessment and treatment and thus reduce "evil" acts and protect people from it. However, starting to use the term "evil" will not assist us in this task even though Stone claims so. There is no support for the existence of a concept of "evil" as an individual trait or behaviour pattern. People committ "evil" acts for all sorts of reason, in some areas and not others, at some points in time and not others, during some conditions and not others. It is simply a useless concept for any sort of serious take at psychiatric disorders, or human behaviour in general.

Second, it is important to note that the concept of psychiatric disorder is completely different from the legal question of whether a person can be held responsible for their acts or not. Most people with a neuropsychiatric disorder never committ any crimes, and lots of people with no neuropsychiatric disorder committ crimes. These are two disparate questions. Then, from a health perspective (which is not unimportant), it can be discussed whether a person perhaps must suffer from a psychiatric disorder in order to develop such a deviating and destructive behaviour like for instance, sadistic murder like I described above. The health issue is however not relevant from a legal perspective, but it's highly relevant for the question of treatment.

I think that people harm another person because they are delusional, angry, ignorant, etc... For example a person may be ignorant and not see that harming another life will only contribute to their own hurt.

So clearly according to how I think of things there are unpleasant and unskillful states of being. Now whether I believe in evil? That depends on what you mean. To me your "evil" would translate to affliction. Affliction with delusion, anger, greed, ignorance, etc.

I distinguish between conventional (or relative) reality and ultimate (or non-relative reality). Nobody wants to suffer. What goes around DOES come around. In a conventional sense these people are nourishing seeds of suffering in the world and they do bear fruit. However, I think that many people use "EVIL", the word, unskillfully. They want to insulate and separate their own identity from that which is disturbing them. In an ultimate sense evil can only be transformed by facing it. In other words, that which is denied persists, but by directing our attention (facing) the evil the process of transformation occurs. Where can we direct our attention? Can we send our attention into the minds of another human being? No, only to the extent that we can talk to them. We can only be peaceful and loving in our own sphere that we touch.

That being said, I will mention that I would not say that you cannot refer to such people as evil. But I will warn that there are pitfalls. It has been said time and time again that only love can conquer hate. Not the other way around. By categorizing some person as evil I think in some cases one is trying to "make it go away" or rejecting it. I don't think this contributes to either transforming the behavior of the afflicted individuals nor does it in reality ease the disturbance in your own mind.

myrophine