What Would Make a Good Person Do Evil Things?
Understanding the origins of evil
I posed this question on Quora and received a variety of answers.
The answers fell into two camps.
We all contain both good and evil. One respondent answered:
“The most kind man/woman can be driven to do evil things. The evilness is, in its pure origin, a human character deficiency.”
The people in this camp explain that there are times when even a good person may do something evil. They believe that we all have the capacity for both good and evil and I agree with this.
The other camp argues “Only evil people do evil things.”
They believe that anyone who commits an evil act is evil. They would divide humans into good and evil. From their viewpoint, a good person would never do anything evil.
This begs the question: What is evil?
In an article titled “What Do We Mean By ‘Evil’?” Rollo Romig argues for two kinds of evil: the evil acts of humans and “collective evil” such as the Holocaust which cannot be blamed on a single person because so many were involved.
