(July 31, 2012 at 7:48 pm)Epimethean Wrote: I suppose that my question then would be, if the evil that a person does is driven by a brain defect or tumor or some such, is the person committing the acts truly doing them in order to be evil and through an engagement with being evil, or is that person split between doing the acts and regretting them and thereby not truly evil at the core. Serial killers and those who are psychotically predisposed to kill seem to me incapable of accurately assessing reality to the degree necessary for cognizance of evil as a state of being.
I don't believe on the concept of evil, but I have noticed that different people have varying levels of empathy.
Lets imagine you set up a legal system and with an accurate way to determine the individuals ability to assess the consequences of their actions, you would then be able to punish the individual appropriately.
This would be fair for the individual, but a society which punishes the nicer people more than the aggressive, will naturally select in favour of psychopathic tendencies.
Could being fair now, create an awful society, and are we better off with injustice?
