Evil requires autonomous, intelligent initiation rather than coerced participation.

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

Categorization

• DEFINE: Proposes a concrete operational definition of ‘becoming evil’ along a continuum of autonomous action, distinct from being coerced into doing harm.