Are EVIL people capable of great GOOD, and GOOD people capable of great EVIL????

Question

Most of us are morally ambiguous. We don't vary to far from the center.

But for those few individuals who are EXTREMELY Evil or Good....do you think they are capable of acts that would be the polar opposite of thier normal behavior????

I don't think beating a prisoner qualifies as and act of great Good. ;)

Answer 1

We should often be ashamed of our finest actions if the world understood our motives.
-Francois de La Rochefoucauld

The truly good are rarely as good as you think but the truly evil are often worse.

Answer 2

yes....we are layers in our personalities....some very evil people are bonded to others in a way that seems polar opposite of how they act. Remember Silence of the Lambs and how the teenage wacko son was loyal and loving towards his mother? (she was a wacko, too, and probably made her son crazy). Think further about this: Our prisons are filled with sociopaths....some more evil than mentally ill. Yet, if a child molester is incarcerated, the molester becomes the lowest rung on the ladder of respect and is beaten, regularly. So even the inmates know that hurting a child is despicable....and some of these inmates have done horrific things themselves.

Answer 3

I don't think so. If someone is extremely evil they do not have the capability to do good. If they do something good it is probably for evil purposes.
On the other side a truly good person could not commit an act of great evil.

Answer 4

Interesting question - asked throughout history, right? Guess the best answer would be made with an equally ancient quote: The road to hell is paved with good intentions. That is to say, people are capable of doing great evil with the best of intentions or doing great good with the worst of intentions.

Answer 5

Even Hitler was voted man of the year in 1938. He did great things for his country and for his people, and he had a great many friends and people who truly loved him. This is the condition of all men.

Man is inherently evil. You can experience this best in raising children. You don't teach your children to be bad, do you? No, you teach them to be polite, to respect others, to share; i.e., you teach them how to be good. We have all known and worked with and greatly disliked adults who seem to never have gotten past the emotional maturity of a three year old.

Further proof of this is the fact that when people are given the opportunity, they will lie, cheat and steal at will for their own benefit. How many of us have cheated the time clock by 15 minutes or taken that ten bucks out of the wallet before returning it to the original owner, lied to the cop about how fast you were going, or who was at fault for the accident? And when push comes to shove, how many of us revert back to our very basest nature of wickedness when we feel that our backs are up against the wall?

The fact is that men see degrees of good and evil. We compare our little bit of tax evasion to the next guy who steals cars, to the next guy who beats his wife, to the next guy who is a murderer. But God sees only two things: Perfection or imperfection. Since we all live by the credo that "Nobody's perfect," which gives each of us an awful lot of leeway to be the way we are naturally without much thought. It is this very thing that makes man evil at his very core.

Of course regular, ordinary men who are inherently evil are capable of doing great good. But when you realise that you are truly inherently evil, then you begin to understand the need to be saved from our evilness, and that is why Jesus, who is God in the flesh, who lives perfectly for us, who paid for our wickedness so that we didn't have to, and saves us when we but ask and believe. And THEN your sense of morality is no longer ambiguous.

Answer 6

Philosophically yes but in reality no. There are movies where the villain does a wonderful unselfish deed in the end but that is not reality. Evil people are evil and good people are relatively good all the time.

Answer 7

I think under the right circumstances that anyone can be extremely good or evil. But I think that it would be much harder for a good person to do an evil deed than for an evil person to do a good deed.

Answer 8

Yes to both. Read Shadow of Hedgemon. The whole of the Enders Game/Enders Shadow series and I think You'll agree.

Answer 9

Yes, but their motivation is likely to be directly in line with their Morals.

A good person may be motivated to commit suicide if it meant saving the lives of others.

An evil person may be inclined to show mercy, if it furthered his own self interest.

Answer 10

From an evil person's point of view they're doing good

No one is inherently evil which is to say they don't intentionally seek to commit evil

Answer 11

Yin and Yang. The symbol has a white spot in the black area and a black spot in the white area...no such thing as perfect evil no such thing as perfect good.