Are some people unfixably evil?

Answer 1

Yeah, I think so. There was this one woman who deliberately hit my daughter and her friend on their bikes with her car. It seems that the girls were riding on the sidewalk, going across the spot that the woman needed to drive over to get into her garage.
Neither girl got more than scrapes & bruises, but bikes were damaged.

The other Mom & I went to the woman's house. Stood on her porch, identified ourselves as the mothers of the 2 girls she'd hit.

Instantly, she screamed like a banshee, and the force of her anger was like a physical hand, shoving us both off the porch. She did not push us, but her anger did shove us. We ended up picking ourselves off the lawn. Scared us so badly, we were afraid to talk to her.

So, went to the police station and reported her. The policeman said that this woman does whatever she wants, and she doesn't care whether its right or wrong. That every single day, the police had to go to her house to talk with her. And every single time, she gets away with what she does.

I don't think that anything short of an exhorcism can cure her.

Answer 2

That's the sort of question that people have been asking for what is probably thousands of years, and they'll still be asking it long after we're buried and our bodies have returned to dust. In view of what has happened during the 20th Century, it's pretty easy to toss off an answer in the affirmative. But it might be wrong.

First you must define "evil" and make it something so that we can judge what is and isn't evil in order to determine, then, after you do that, if the class of evil is "so bad, so black" that we have to decide if they are considered irreparably damaged or "unfixable," as you put it.

In some parts of South America the Aztecs performed ritual sacrifice, primarily consisting of cutting someone's heart out of their chest while they were still alive, and, presumably, eating it. We see these ritualistic acts of cannibalism as wrong, but they probably didn't. Which opinion is right? Were they evil or simply misguided? Does the fact that there are reports that over a weekend - whether this was a two-day or three-day weekend I'm not sure - the Aztecs had a party that was so wild that 75,000 people didn't come back alive, change the opinion? As the saying goes, if everyone's doing it why would someone think a popular practice is wrong?

You gotta wonder when over a weekend they engage in the ritualistic slaughter of about 1/2 of the people who died in the direct explosion at Nagasaki or in the firebombing of Dresden in World War II. And they did all that killing with nothing more than knives in their hands, no power tools or anything more complicated than a spear or maybe a bow-and-arrow.

It's probably arguable that we could declare upon some people, as Ayn Rand called it, "a verdict of irrevocable damnation," but we have to also ask the question as to why they went the way they did.

What do we consider evil and how do we define it? Do we consider evil to be the knowing choice of what is wrong by individuals, or do we assign evil to a group of people for whatever they did together?

No human being is born evil (or if they were, the concept of good and evil would be meaningless) and presumably no matter what they've done, no person believes themselves to be evil. Presumably they might come to change their mind and realize they need to atone for their past misconduct, or they do and believe their misconduct is irreparable and kill themselves.

No particular act in and of itself is evil; it is the context of what the person has done that determines whether an action is right or wrong. And that's the hard part; determining the context. And how do you know what is the right thing to do, what do you use for the standard?

Personally, I do believe there are some people who are of that class. I also keep finding that whenever they've had a chance to look at the worst of them, they also had brain damage; Idi Amin who ran Uganda into the ground in the 1970s, and Adolph Hitler, both had brain damage due to contracting venereal diseases. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the other major totalitarian rulers like the Ayatollahs in Iran or Kim il-Jung of North Korea also have some sort of mental problems causing them to act the way they do.

Then you have the issue of normal people going along with things that are at some point determined to be wrong, immoral or evil. And then the question to be asked, is, why no one bothered to stop these things.

The simplest answer is that for most people, they just go along with what is happening around them and either might not think about it, might not realize it, don't care, or do not (or believe they do not) have the capacity to not go along or to stop what is happening.

I don't like having to weasel out of your question; part of me would like to just say, "yeah, there are," but I realize, in thinking about it, that maybe the answer isn't that simple. Some questions aren't that simple to answer, although we can do so in hindsight.

The big problem is finding a way to answer that in foresight so we can determine if some action is perceivable as evil and maybe prevent it from being done. I don't know if that problem is solvable or if there even is a good answer offhand.

Answer 3

No, nobody wants to be evil.

Yet, at the same time, I bet you would find a hard time locking down a definition of evil. Evil many times depends on who wrote the history book.

Take any great nation, if conquered it wouldn't be hard to convince people with in a couple generation that nation was pure evil.

Answer 4

I think evil is a learned behavior, as in all behaviors. Sociopaths dont kill because they are born with a gene that makes them do it, but because they learn how to or are conditioned in a way that makes them. If you think about it, no one is ever born evil. However after people learn the trait of being evil, one can always choose to continue being evil.

Answer 5

No. Even those who lack instincts for empathy and altruism can be taught these things. While they may never have the strength of an instinct, such training can help them.

The question of nature vs. nurture often overlooks the fact that it is almost never one or the other -- some combination of both is involved.

Answer 6

If you define being "evil" as having a total lack of of concern for the well being of others, then probably some people - hard-core sociopaths - fit the bill.

Answer 7

I saw an interview with a man who murdered some people.He said he wasn't sorry and he never would be so why apologize for something he is not sorry for to the victims of the family?
Some people cannot be fixed and they are a threat to other human beings as long as they live.
Sad but true.

Answer 8

If you're a christian, you would believe that all people are inherantly good, and therefore there's no one who can't be "saved"... I'm not religious, so I don't believe in "evil", but I do believe that bad people are bad because they choose to be. So, that being said, any bad person could choose to be good. They would have to want it, though... no one can make a person change.

Answer 9

Unfortunately so. Like Ted Bundy, whom there was a question about the other day.

People are defined by their deeds, true, but some people are just evil.

Answer 10

No, the Bible states that God is NOT willing for any to perish, so apparently he provided a way of escape and salvation for everyone. I really, my personal opionion, believe that Judas had a chance to repent not the version he did.

However the Bible states that the wicked is a number no man can number.