to think some people are just born evil?

[themomentsinbetween]

Do you think some people are born bad?

Or is it there surroundings and people in their lives that make them bad.

For example, Thompson and Venables, were they just born bad?

Charles Manson?

Harold Shipman?

Good people don't just have a bad day and start killing people.

Shag, we don't know whether the mum had armed herself to the teeth for fear of armageddon. There is another possibility - that the son's obsession was guns, and she thought that by teaching him to use them safely and taking him to a firing range she might have stopped him doing anything worse.

I'm loathe to blame her, without knowing a lot more, because it seems to me that the system let her down, as well as her son .

sunshine, did you really say "evil within"? Isn't that all a bit, er, biblical .

There are 3 offspring in my family from same parents. All different.
My DB born contrary, mum said, nobody could tell him what to do as he would not do it. If he was told not to do it he would. 71 years later he is just the same. He was, however never cruel, angry or violent and very intelligent.
My sister, was born determined to get her own way, mum told me, even as a baby. She is still the same today, but achieves her aim in different ways.
Me, I was born very timid and shy, with no self confidence. That has improved with age, but my nature is very different from my 2 siblings.

There is no such thing as 'evil within'

Yes it is all very biblical!

People do bad things sometimes, it is not eeeVillle that makes them do it, its just human behavior!

'They' experts who've studied it think that psychopathy (without conscience or empathy) is at least partly inherited/genetic.
There's a good book on the subject 'the sociopath next door' by Martha Stout which is a really interesting read.

4% are supposed to be like this and I guess if you have no conscience and no empathy you'd be very capable of doing some pretty horrendous things but would also be capable of learning social constraints.

People do bad things sometimes, it is not eeeVillle that makes them do it, its just human behavior!

Tbh I think that most people would not behave in a way that is considered 'evil' i.e deliberately causing considerable hurt and not giving a toss about it. I like to think that the majority of humans are constrained by empathy and conscience.

Amber leaf Mabey not evil but a collection of psychological traits that makes person more likely to do horrendous things

Lanza, the Sandy Hook assasin, is hte first of his kind to have his DNA removed for scientific purposes to establish the evil gene.

I won't link as there are far too many news sources, but just put in lanza-study-evil-gene into google and it will bring up the news reports

Scientists have been asked to study the DNA of Newtown school killer Adam Lanza to see if has an 'evil' gene

The thing is, if you don't have empathy, how can you deliberately cause hurt?

I have tried to explain it as the difference between selfishness and self-centred-ness. So if you are selfish, you do things for yourself regardless of who you hurt. If you are self-centred you don't realise that you are hurting people.

So some people who lack empathy may genuinely not think through the consequences of the appalling things they do. Does that make them evil (as in doing things to hurt people) or self-centred (as in doing awful things that hurt people, but doing them for self-satisfaction rather than to hurt others)?

The kids who killed Jamie Bulger are good examples of this. Did they kill him deliberately, knowing he would be hurt, and dead, and his parents and society would be horrified by what they had done? If they had done it knowing the result, then yes I suppose you could say they were innately evil.

But I don't believe they did. I believe they were abused young kids, with very little empathy and understanding. I believe they acted on impulse and out of curiosity, with very little perception of the end result of their actions. They wanted (possibly out of curiosity) to see what would happen, they happened to find a child, they were sort of experimenting.

What they did was appalling by normal standards. And obviously horrifying to the majority. But did they really know what the end result would be?

To be evil, a person would have to deliberately cause harm. They would have to know the harm, to realise what the end result would be, to be able to empathise with the person they were hurting, and with their victim's relatives.

I suspect many psychopaths don't have the ability to do this; therefore by definition they are not evil.

And I think

Good post MaryZ

The definition of psychopath is not simply that they have no empathy, its more that they have no conscience. The thing is a true psychopath is often very manipulative in that they know how to play the game and cover their tracks, and they're not all serial killers by any stretch of the imagination.

They hurt and they know they are hurting, they simply don't care

Whoops, got interrupted mid-post.

I was going to finish by saying that I think that finding an "evil" gene is the slippery slope to locking people up in case the do something bad. Which is not the mark of a civilised society.

Yes, it is terrible that some people do bad things. And if it was my child who was murdered by a psychopath, I would want all potential psychopaths locked up in case.

But we can't lock people up in case they do bad things. That was what we used to do in the bad old days of secure mental asylums. Where we locked up hundreds of people who were never going to hurt anyone, in order to protect society from the few who might have hurt people.

My great-great-grandmother was locked in an asylum for 40 years and died there. She had committed no crime.

Do we really want to go back to that?

I think it depends a lot on what your definition of 'evil' is. I don't necessarily think that not understanding means you can't be 'evil'. In some ways, I think it seems more 'evil' to do something with absolutely no regard for what the outcome would be than to do something with a motive.

No, we don't want to lock people up 'in case' they commit a crime. We do want to prevent serial killers killing. I'm not sure I buy the 'slippery slope' argument, we have to trust society not to misuse science, rather than just preventing science from making breakthroughs.

That's all very well, but if they find an "evil" gene, what are they going to do with people who have it?

And do you really think that crimes will only be committed by people with that gene? You might stop one or two serial killers, but the vast majority of crime is committed by people who aren't doing it because they are "evil" - they are doing it because they lose their temper, or they want something they don't have, or they make a mistake, or they are in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Science doesn't stop that.

I don't think that the discovery of a common gene/genetic mutation in a number of serial killers will lead scientists to believe that everyone with that gene will become a killer or that no crime will be committed by anyone else. The Daily Mail will probably reach that conclusion, but no-one else.

I read that studies they've done in the US show that 20% of inmates in prison are psychopathic or score as such on the Hare's checklist.

Was getting really into this thread and pondering how to compose my post.

Then flipping MaryZ rocks up and says everything I want to say but much more eloquently and with far more insight.

I can't understand why some people are being so rude to the op. disgusting thread? Hardly
I think people can be born evil. I get annoyed when people defend murderers because they may have had a bad upbringing. Well boo hoo. Having a crappy or even abusive upbringing doesn't excuse awful crimes like the one those evil little bastards Thompson and Venables committed. I couldn't give two hoots what their childhoods were like. They knew what they were doing and frankly, I think they should be strung up locked up forever.

Exactly Whistling.

Outraged, it will. Imagine a scenario where everyone has gene testing before they can get a job. Who would give the job of a teacher or a nurse to someone with such a gene?

I think even investigating it is a horrific violation of human rights.

Thanks Randal

Psycopathy is a personality disorder and very rare, I trained as a mh nurse but can't remember what they said the % was but it was very low. We were told unless we worked in forensic mh we would probably never meet anyone with it.

However a high % of prisoners Show traits of anti social personality disorder