Evil is a threshold reached through active autonomous harmdoing, not coercion

Evidence

Although I am not sure that Lifton would agree with me, let me draw a line somewhere along the continuum of participation in the encounter, and suggest that people who go beyond that point are evil—more precisely, have become evil. The person who is induced into participation, and who goes far enough in the conversion process so that he or she autonomously and intelligently initiates evil actions, is an individual who has become evil. Examples may make this clearer. The soldiers who, yelled at by Lt. Calley, with tears in their eyes, fired into crowds of innocents were not evil. Those soldiers who coldly and knowingly killed innocents while operating independently, were evil. Staub reported a case of two young, rosy-cheeked Hitlerjugend whose frequent habit it was to “hunt” in the Warsaw ghetto. They simply wandered into the ghetto and shot whoever it captured their fancy to shoot. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3956 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

A science fiction reader reminded me of Asimov’s fa-mous laws governing the conduct of robots. Obviously, in a thoughtful society, one would build a prohibition against killing a human being into the governing program of a robot. In one disconcerting short story, I recall that the author figured out a way that robots could bring about the death of a human being. The programmer simply created a series of apparently innocent steps that brought about a human’s death. For instance, one robot puts rat poison in a container in the tool shed, another robot is told to move the container from the shed to a kitchen shelf, the third robot is told to put a spoon of “sugar” from the container into the victim’s coffee. To return from the fanciful, the general point is that a series of subroutines, each not morally outrageous, can sum to an outrageous act. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4045 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Absolute evil is evil detached from any humanly comprehensible motive — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 13; A chain of innocent-seeming steps can jointly produce evil — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4045; Every person can perform evil under sufficient situational pressure — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4034 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Evil requires autonomous, intelligent initiation rather than coerced participation. #corroborates (0.95) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3956
• A chain of innocent-seeming steps can jointly produce evil #complicates (0.75) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4045