What is Evil?
Here are a few points of discussion on the issue:
Evil is a pathological form of rationalization.
How could a person be so demented?
Klippoths Evil may also be enhanced by brain damage.
Recognizing the conscience and saying "so what?" to it.
What bearing does all this have on the repressing of the conscience?
Are people deliberately evil?
The repression of the conscience is a common way to run away from guilt.
Are evil people blind to their evil?
What about people who do evil deliberately?
There are many ways to disown the conscience.
Is everyone with a disowned conscience evil?
Why is disowning your conscience the essence of evil?
*A brief discussion, in order, of each of these introductions above*
Are some people really like this? Are there really people who move from moral judgements to rationales for their judgements? I believe there are. This theory of mine is drawn from observing people I regard as evil. Of course, there is still the fact that I didn't use telepathy to find out what was really making them so weird. So my interpretations of their behavior might be mistaken. So I will bring other facts to bear. The process I have identified with evil people is related to something you learn about in Psychology 101: rationalization. When you rationalize, you are seeking to justify something you've done or want to do in order to get around your belief that it is wrong. For example, you may "borrow" something from someone on the grounds that you need it more than he does. I think we normally think of rationalizing as trying to convince ourselves that we are somehow exceptions to general moral rules. This seems benign compared to what I'm describing as evil. But evil is related.
*Evil is a pathological form of rationalization.*
Evil people rationalize not only by making themselves exceptions to rules. They delude themselves about what is true and conveniently ignore moral principles when it suits them. For example, an evil person will jump at the chance to condemn other people for moral faults but not apply to herself the same principle she has used to condemn others.
How could a person be so demented? What could account for a person being as demented as I imagine the evil person is? It is difficult to fathom. I'll begin by describing circumstances that might make it easier for a person to become evil. One of the hallmarks of the evil person is the tendency to fabricate reality. This is difficult for people who are grounded in the scientific method. But not everyone is grounded in the scientific method. People often base their beliefs on authority, on intuition, on tradition, etc. All over the world, countless people have their beliefs rooted in religion. Let's say you want to do something bad and have no grounding in the scientific method. How might you find justification for what you want to do? You could shop around for an authority who advocates what you want. You could interpret the words of an authority to support what you want. You could search for something the authority has said, which supports what you want. If the authority hasn't always been consistent, this becomes easier. If you use intuition as a guide to truth, it isn't too hard to trick yourself into having intuitions that favor what you want to do. If you believe in God, you can convince yourself that your intuitions come from God, giving yourself a divine sanction for tailor-made intuitions.
Klippoths Evil may also be enhanced by brain damage. Satanists Tani Jantsang and Philip Marsh have described in various articles a sort of brain damaged person they call by the names klippoth, cruxtoid, and xtoid. In her article "Cruxtoids and Brain Damage," Tani Jantsang lists some characteristics of the cruxtoid. Here are some that may be relevant to behaving in an evil manner. 2. Lack awareness of feelings and emotions as DIRECT PERCEPTIONS of bodily states. Feelings and emotions are NOT associated with bodily organs, but exclusively with external objects, words, faces, etc. which evoke them. Feelings and emotions are mere qualifiers in life for them, not REAL THINGS. (Hence when the feelings rule them (as they rule others) they are UNAWARE of it: unconscious mind.)
If someone is unaware of her emotions, her emotions may lead her to make moral judgements without her being aware that this is going on.
5. The body is never used as a yardstick or gauge for knowing and measuring the world. This frame of reference is MISSING in them. Some external reality or idea is used as a ground reference for constructions of the world and reality. (their knowledge is OUTER, never INNER or CARNAL.)
*Without an inner or carnal reference of knowledge, people are less grounded in reality.*
9. Sense of responsibility to the self and others is impaired. (The Devil made me do it; it's the fault of some imaginary conspiracy of people who are NOT IMPAIRED and make well.)
This makes it easier to selectively use moral principles.
10. Inability to orchestrate one's survival at the command of one's own free will. (Hence they seek the HEAD to guide them: fascism, religion, etc. practical Jesus e.g. Hitler, Stalin.)
This impairs their ability to come to moral judgements in the normal way.
11. Inventive of tales with no foundation except one's own FANCY in regard to the self (fantasy, LIES; their selective amnesia as to the deeds they've really done.)
This is getting at the heart of the evil person. The evil person fabricates lies and believes them.
15. A value system exists and can be utilized in abstract terms, but it is unconnected to REAL LIFE situations. Decisions are minimally influenced by past experience (they never learn) and old knowledge. CAPRICE REIGNS. (Civilized "values" -- wear clothes, cut down trees, act polite and stuffy.)
This makes it easier to selectively use moral principles. Evil people will often use moral principles for condemning other people rather than for guiding their own behavior.
18. Defects in reasoning intelligence is only glaringly apparent in the late stages of reasoning close to the points at which their choices and selections are made, responses that affect one's personal and social survival. (Sounds logical, but is illogical as hell; looks like a house, but it is a house turned upside-down with no foundation).
It's easier to rationalize and to convince yourself of lies when you have a defect in your ability to reason.
20. In reasoning, all options are equal, none are value-highlighted over others. Decision making landscape for them is FLAT.
This makes one less inclined to guide her decisions by her moral values.
27. Memory is capricious: it fails where you would expect learning to have occurred, but it succeeds suddenly on a peripheral subject and often in great detail. (Repeat the same errors.)
Capricious memory makes it easier to selectively apply moral principles.
31. They lack and con not construct appropriate theories of other people's minds, or even their own minds. (They never know the EFFECT they have on other people and how other people SEE THEM)
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*An inability to know how others see them makes it difficult for them to evaluate their own behavior,* thus contributing to their selective use of moral principles.
*Are they deliberately like this?* Are evil people deliberately evil, or are they blind to their evil. In answering this question, it is important to understand something of how the mind works. Contrary to Descartes, the mind is not a single stream of conscious thought activity. The mind behaves in a modular fashion. Different tasks are handled by different parts of the mind, and what one part is doing another part might be unaware of. Brain science shows this, and so does my own experience. For example, while having breakfast one day, I brought my glass to my mouth to take a drink of water. While I was doing this, I looked down and noticed my glass wasn't on the table. I started wondering where it was and began looking around for it. All the while my glass was in my hand. This is just one illustration of the modularity of the mind. What's important to bear in mind is that mental activity is modular.
The modular conception of the mind allows us to think of a person as, so to speak, a set of different people, a government, if you will. Decision making is a process that involves different mental modules interacting with each other. There are different ways in which they may interact with each other to make decisions. In healthy decision making, the modules are all listened to and given due consideration. In unhealthy decision making, some of the modules are not listened to. Just like a person who isn't listened to, mental modules will employ tricks and tactics to manipulate the decision making. This is the basis of self-deception. One part of the mind is denied its rightful role in decision making. So it seeks power through dishonest means. It deceives the part of the mind which makes the actual decisions.
One of the distinctive things about the klippoth is the inability assimilate carnal knowledge. Thus in a klippoth, the body, which is as much a part of the mind as the brain is, will engage in all kinds of machinations to secure its part in the decision making process. As one example, Paul of Tarsus, who is perhaps the world's most famous klippoth, complained that his body regularly made him do sinful things that he didn't want to do. Speaking as someone who is not a klippoth, I don't have this same experience. My body does not make me do sinful things I don't want to do.
Getting back to the general principle, unheeded parts of the mind will resort to manipulative tactics to secure their role in decision making. When decision making is healthy, all each part of the mind needs to do is present the facts as it knows them. When decision making becomes unhealthy, a mental module may employ deception to further its agenda. One of the grander deceptions is to pretend to be the voice of a deity. Julian Jaynes talks about this in his book on the bicameral brain. In Charismatic Christian churches today, there is a lot of talk about the Holy Spirit talking to people. With this idea floating around, it becomes easy for an unheeded part of the mind to manipulate the larger mind by pretending to be the Holy Spirit. Thus, part of the mind gets its agenda through through chicanery and deception.
This is the sort of thing that I'm describing as evil. What at one level is seemingly irrational fabrication of facts is at a more basic level simple and straightforward chicanery. If we think of chicanery only in terms of what a person deliberately and consciously decides to do, evil makes no sense. But when we think of separate parts of the mind as autonomous units, evil begins to make sense. In an evil person, one part of the mind is conning another part.
It is obvious how the inner intrigues of the mind account for the fabrication of facts. But what about the selective use of moral principles? Can it account for this? So far all I have mentioned is outright deception. There are other tactics at the disposal of the mental modules. The conscious part of the mind suppresses other parts, and that it why they resort to tactics. Well, they also have the ability to suppress different parts of the mind. For example, they can suppress the conscience, letting it be heard only when it serves their purposes. They can also deceive the conscience, thereby manipulating it into becoming indignant at other people's actions and oblivious to one's own misdeeds.
All of this will be clearer if we postulate a few mental modules and describe interactions between them. Since it is only for the sake of illustration, I won't worry that the classification isn't exactly correct. I will speak of the shadow, the ego, the ego ideal, and the conscience. The ego is the conscious part of the mind. The ego ideal consists of those parts of the mind which the ego recognizes as part of itself. The shadow consists of those parts of the mind that the ego refuses to recognize. The conscience is the part of the mind concerned with right and wrong. It is wholly possible that in some people the conscience belongs to the shadow.
How can this be? How can the conscience be part of the shadow? Wouldn't anyone naturally include the conscience in the ego ideal? No. If we realize that the shadow is just the unrecognized part of oneself, not someone's evil side as the popular imagination has it, we can begin to see how the conscience may become part of the shadow. Christianity teaches us that we are naturally sinful and that our desires are corrupt and ungodly. If a Christian who believes this hears the voice of his conscience, he may assume that it is coming from God rather than from himself. I have come across an idea among Charismatics, and perhaps it is common among other Christians, that God convicts us when we do something wrong. What this means is that God lets us know that we did something bad. This has never happened to me in all my life. God has never convicted me. But my conscience has convicted me from time to time. The voice of God doesn't guide me in my moral decisions, but my conscience does. So I believe that many Christians mistake the voice of their conscience for the voice of God.
What is the consequence of this? What does it matter whether someone thinks his conscience is his conscience or thinks it is God? It matters a great deal. When you recognize that your conscience is part of you, you will take measures to cultivate your moral sensibilities. You will want to know right from wrong. You will want to try to make consistent moral judgements. You will want to cultivate your empathy, and so on. This is all because you recognize the responsibility is yours to make correct moral decisions. But those who mistake the conscience for the voice of God will place the responsibility for making the right decisions squarely on God's shoulders. When I told Carisha that her actions toward me were immoral, she told me that if she were behaving immorally, God would convict her, and she added that God had not convicted her. That is how she morally evaluated her action. She waited for a word from God that she was wrong and received none. She completely shirked her responsibility to judge her actions by the application of moral principles. She shirked her responsibility to use her conscience consciously.
I believe that Carisha's conscience operates unconsciously. It is part of her shadow. As a result, it is poorly developed, and it doesn't guide her actions well. Her ego will listen to her conscience when it supports the ego, for example when it says that she is in the right and someone else is in the wrong. But her conscience is less able to guide her actions. It is not finely honed, and it lacks the strength to make a firm impression on her ego. This describes one way in which someone may use moral principles selectively. A conscience that is in the shadow has a hard time making itself heard. It is more likely to be heard when it has the backing of other parts of the mind.
When the different parts of the shadow are in agreement, the shadow becomes stronger and can more directly control the person. For example, suppose that someone has been repressing pain caused by the actions of someone he loves. Let's say he has also been suppressing his conscience. But after a while he feels not only hurt but wronged. His pain and his moral sensibilities both agree that something has gone wrong. This may lead to outbursts of anger, directed by the shadow, which includes his hurt feelings and his conscience. He may then condemn his love for things he never thought to condemn himself for, even though his conscience should have guided him away from similar behavior.
When it comes down to things, evil and the shadow are related. It is wrong to say that evil is just the promptings of the shadow. There may be good things repressed in the shadow. The shadow may include the conscience, a love of life, the desire to dance, etc. These are not bad things. Evil results when the conscience is put in the shadow. It is not having a shadow that makes someone evil. It is what goes into the shadow that makes a person evil. That is what makes evil people moralistic without being moral.
Recognizing the conscience and saying "so what?" to it.
No conscience What about people without any conscience? Do such people exist? Are they evil? I believe everyone has a conscience. I understand the conscience to be that part of the psyche which evaluates goodness and moral worth. To some extent, everyone evaluates. It is hard for me to even imagine a person who does not evaluate anything. The best example I have is the protagonist of Camus's novel The Stranger. He was fairly indifferent and lackadaisical. He might be an example of someone with no conscience. But he did seem to evidence some conscience. He went for a walk with a friend who, if I recall correctly, was drunk, and he offered to hold onto his gun for safe keeping. This shows concern for his friend, himself, and those around them. Yet when he accidentally shot an arab with the gun, he let himself go to the gallows without even caring what was happening. Anyhow, I believe that a person who lacks a conscience, if such a person exists, will be like Camus's stranger, lackadaisical and uncaring. When someone cares deeply about something, he has a conscience. Consider Dracula, as portrayed in the recent movie Bram Stoker's Dracula. When his wife died, he allied himself with the forces of evil to reunite himself with his wife. This shows the value he placed on his wife. It wasn't lack of a conscience that led him to choose evil. It was his conscience, perhaps an underdeveloped conscience, but a conscience nonetheless, that motivated his choice.
When we accuse someone of having no conscience, I think we mean something other than what I have been describing as a conscience. We will usually think that someone lacks a conscience when she does something so atrocious we think that anybody's conscience would have stopped them. For example, some people probably think that Susan Smith has no conscience, because she did the unthinkable, she deliberately murdered her own children. It is certainly true that most mothers have a conscience that stops them from killing their children even when they are really aggravated with them. That does not mean, however, that Susan Smith lacks a conscience. All it implies is that her conscience, if she has one, is not like the conscience of other mothers.
Consider this. People often accuse others of not having a sense of humor. For example, I once came across the joke, "Socrates' last word: I drank what?" I thought it wasn't funny and said so in some on-line forum. Someone else accused me of having no sense of humor. Now I know that accusation is completely false. I laugh loud and often at various things. The reasoning of my accuser was that I didn't appreciate a joke he found funny, so I must not have a sense of humor. I believe that similar reasoning is employed by people who accuse Susan Smith of having no conscience. Some mother notices that Susan Smith did something she would never do in a million years, so she concludes that Susan Smith has no conscience. This is just bad reasoning, and it sheds no light on what a conscience really is.
It does, however, shed light on a common misunderstanding about the conscience. The misconception is that the conscience always knows right from wrong. The conscience does not always know what it right, and sometimes it is wrong about what is right. For example, a boy who was raised in the Ku Klux Klan might make friends with a black boy and feel pangs of guilt because he doesn't hate him. The pangs of guilt come from his conscience. But his conscience is messed up. Perhaps Susan Smith just has a messed up conscience too.
It must be understood that the conscience is not some mystical barometer of right and wrong. It is the part of the psyche which makes judgements about right and wrong. Whether it makes the right judgements depends in large part on how developed it is. The conscience needs to be trained, educated, and exercised. The conscience can be twisted toward evil, it can be undeveloped or deluded. The conscience can be a very dangerous thing. It can convince people that the evil they do is morally right.
Treating the conscience as an infallible barometer of right and wrong is a way of disowning it. Instead of recognizing the judgements of the conscience as one's own judgements, the person who disowns his conscience in this way mistakes the judgements of his conscience as perceptions of right and wrong. This is the mistake committed by intuitionism. Intuitionist such as Moore thought that they could immediately intuit what is good. But they can't really. What they intuit as good is more or less what they have been brought up to believe is good. For example, Moore's intuition would probably tell him that it is wrong to eat the flesh of dead relatives after they pass away. My intuition certainly has a hard time with this idea. Yet there have been people who think this is a way to honor their dead and whose intuitions tell them that it is wrong to cremate the dead. In our society, we don't find anything wrong with this. This is just to illustrate that our intuitions are informed by what we believe.
*What bearing does all this have on the repressing of the conscience?*
When a person represses his conscience, his conscience may take control of his actions without him realizing that this is going on. That is how the shadow works. Although the things in the shadow are unacknowledged by the ego, they still affect behavior. If the conscience were just an infallible guide to right and wrong, a repressed conscience might still be a good thing. After all, it would make a person do what is right even if he weren't aware of it. But the conscience is not infallible. It is as prone to error as any other faculty of the psyche.
When something is repressed into the shadow, it doesn't grow and mature. It can even deteriorate. So when someone has his conscience in the shadow, he doesn't grow morally. He doesn't becoming better at telling right from wrong. He leaves his conscience undeveloped. So when his conscience takes control of his behavior, it is often to make him do what is wrong. Although it is a conscience, it is an untrained and undeveloped conscience, and it often makes bad decisions as a result.
Furthermore, when the shadow causes some behavior and the ego notices this behavior without knowing what its source is, the ego will often make up a story for itself to believe that somehow justifies the behavior. This is one reason why evil people will make moral judgements first and then come up with reasons for their judgements. What is happening is that an undeveloped conscience in the shadow makes some moral decision for reasons unknown to the ego, then the ego makes up a rationale for the judgement.
*Are people deliberately evil?* Are people deliberately evil? In a sense they are, in a sense they aren't. People are deliberately evil in the sense that there own choices create their shadow. In choosing what to repress, a person is responsible for becoming evil. But what about people who deliberately choose to become evil. I don't mean people who choose to be whatever it is they identify with the word "evil." There are different concepts of evil, and someone choosing to be "evil" might not be choosing to be what I have described as evil. What I mean is deliberately choosing to repress one's conscience. I think that when anyone understands what repression is, he is not going to choose to repress his conscience. Rather, he will try to integrate it into his psyche. However, not everyone understands the ramifications of repression. Some people imagine that repressing something is almost as good as getting rid of it. Thus, someone might choose to repress his conscience because it keeps him from having fun, from getting ahead, or whatever. Because the conscience can get in the way of various desires, people sometimes want to free themselves from the conscience. That is one of the reasons people will drink alcohol for. They want to become uninhibited, free from their conscience. Dr. Jeckyl wanted to free himself from his conscience. People trained to become torturers will take progressive steps to dull their consciences. They will start by hurting animals and move on to humans. So people sometimes actively choose to repress their consciences, which is to become evil
This sort of activity has been referred to as doubling. Doctors who worked in Nazi concentration camps had to repress part of their conscience in order to do their jobs without breaking down or feeling extremely guilty. The doctors developed for themselves a second persona. At home they would be kind and caring and stuff, but at work they would become heartless.
The repression of the conscience is a common way to run away from guilt. Many people are uncomfortable with feeling guilty. Whole religions have arisen to release people from this discomfort. That testifies to how unpleasant guilt is to many people. The proper way to deal with guilt is to use it as a spur to becoming a better person and for doing better next time. This involves accepting the guilt and living with it. But it is usually easier to evade the conscience. Thus people are strongly tempted to evade the conscience, and many people succumb to this temptation. When they do, they take a step closer to being evil or sink further into evil.
For many people, the choice they perceive is not between being good and being evil but between feeling guilty and being evil. Given this choice, it is less surprising that some people choose evil. They are not deliberately evil if this means deliberately choosing evil for its own sake, but they are deliberately evil if this can include choosing evil for the sake of escaping the discomfort of guilt. Bear in mind that most evil people do not think of their choice in these terms. They are focused more on what they are escaping from than on what they are turning to. But they are still turning to evil by their own choice, and that makes them deliberately evil.
Are evil people blind to their evil? Do evil people know that they are evil? I think it is common for evil people to hide from themselves the nature of the choices that made them evil. They are often running away from guilt, and most people who run from guilt imagine, i.e. delude themselves into believing, that they are running away from evil and choosing good. So if you ask the average evil person if he is evil, he will usually say that he is really a good person who regularly avoids immorality. What then are we to make of people who describe themselves as evil? For some people, I think this really is a way of becoming evil. Embracing "evil" may be a way of convincing yourself that you don't really need to feel guilty about anything. This is a way of escaping guilt, and that usually involves repressing the conscience. When that is going on, identifying oneself with evil is a way of becoming evil.
But other people who call themselves evil might be doing something else entirely. For example, identifying yourself as evil may be a way of dis-identifying yourself with a morality you reject. Nietzsche called himself an Immoralist, which is akin to calling yourself evil. But Nietzsche wasn't choosing evil, per se, he was rejecting Christian morality. Some people call themselves Satanists for the same reason. They believe that Christian morality is sick and twisted and reject it in favor of a "Satanic" morality. So calling yourself evil can be a way of dis-identifying yourself with self-described good people you believe are really evil.
Calling yourself evil may also be a way of rebelling or a way to shock people. People might also describe themselves as evil because someone has convinced them are evil, perhaps by making them feel very guilty. If that is the case, such a person is better than an evil person who runs from guilt. Of course, such a person could become evil by running from his guilt.
What about people who do evil deliberately? This may describe people who deliberately choose to do something that is in fact evil. Or it may describe people who deliberately choose what they take to be evil. The first interpretation is easy to deal with. Evil people may convince themselves that some evil is good. People may also just be mistaken about what is good and evil. A scientist who agrees with Descartes that animals are mindless automatons incapable of pain might not be evil, yet he may still choose to cut open live dogs to examine their circulatory system. The second interpretation is what I really want to deal with here. There is an attitude, decried by Ayn Rand and others, that integrity is alright in theory but doesn't work in practice.
I believe all too many people are willing to give up integrity for fame and fortune and other goods. I have a friend who moved to Hollywood after college, but she ended up leaving Hollywood to preserve her integrity. This tells me something about the integrity of the people who remain there. In general, people often find themselves in positions which at some time or other ask them to compromise their integrity. For example, a person might lose his job if he reports something shady going on in his business. Or a person might get a better deal on something if he doesn't ask too many questions about where it is coming from. Even in the supermarket, someone may buy the cheaper carton of eggs without inquiring whether free range chickens laid these eggs. These are all instances in which people may gradually compromise their integrity.
These are all instances of people doing what they know to be wrong or evil. But they also involve rationalizing and self-deception. People generally don't say to themselves, "Yes, I'm doing evil, and I feel good about, damn it!" Rather, they say things to themselves like, "Well, you know, what difference is this going to make in the broad scheme of things? It's not really that bad. It's just a little indiscretion." People will deliberately choose evil to attain other ends, but they will try to minimize to themselves the extent of their evil with platitudes like "Well, we can't be perfect all the time." What this reveals is that people become evil gradually. A good person doesn't wake up one day and say to himself, "I have decided to devote my life to evil, because it will be so much more profitable." Rather, people make tiny little decisions that compromise their integrity, and these decisions gradually repress the conscience further and further. People become evil through a process that is similar to erosion.
So people will deliberately do evil things when they are small enough for people to find some way to rationalize them. But what about bigger things like killing people or destroying people's lives? First of all, the size of an evil is not the only factor that affects a person's ability to minimize to himself its evil. Another factor is distance. When you are distanced from the consequences of your actions, it is easier to imagine to yourself that what you doing is not so bad. For example, if you put a lot of people out of work, destroying the economy of a town, you may feel less guilty about it if you know none of these people. There are also other factors. It may be easier to kill someone if you kill a "nigger," a "gook," or an "injun" instead of a fellow human being. For example, someone may think to himself, "Ah, what I did ain't so bad. He was a Goddamn faggot and nigger any way."
People can choose to do great evil by minimizing to themselves the scope of the evil and then by convincing themselves that it is ok to be a little bit bad. When they do this, they are being dishonest with themselves. So they do evil deliberately but without realizing the enormity of their evil.
People of the Lie My description of an evil person has similarities with Scott Peck's. Is it substantially the same as his? Is Peck's description just another way of describing the same thing, or does he describe something different. We should bear in mind first that I gave two descriptions of an evil person, which in fact coincide with each other. My first description got at the symptoms of evil, and my second got at its essence. The essence of evil is a disowned conscience. A disowned conscience manifests itself in such phenomena as backwards moralizing, the selective use of moral principles, and the fabrication of reality. Peck describes an evil person as someone who refuses to recognize his own sin, his own evil. Is this something that results from a disowned conscience? I believe it can result from a disowned conscience. One of the functions of the conscience is to produce guilt feelings. A person of the lie refuses to own guilt feelings. He disowns his guilt feelings, which means he disowns their source, the conscience. So my description of an evil person matches everyone whom Peck's matches. Does it go the other way too? Is everyone with a disowned conscience a person of the lie. I'm not so sure of this.
*There are many ways to disown the conscience.*
One way is to refuse to acknowledge it. People of the lie do this when it produces guilt feelings. Another way is to imagine that it is something outside of oneself, such as God. If you have a disowned conscience and feel that God condemns you for something you have done, you might feel guilty and not shove aside your guilt. That seems to be something a person of the lie doesn't do. So my understanding of an evil person may be broader than Peck's.
Is everyone with a disowned conscience evil? Is everyone with a disowned conscience really evil? After all, there are many ways for a person to disown his conscience. Some of these ways give the conscience more influence than others. Some even make a god of the conscience. Could someone who treats his conscience as a god really be evil? I say that this is precisely what an evil person is, a person with a disowned conscience. It doesn't matter why or how that conscience is disowned. It is disowning the conscience that makes one evil. What does it mean to disown the conscience? To disown something is to refuse to acknowledge something as one's own. It does not mean to lose something altogether. With regard to physical objects, disowning something may result in its loss. But disowning the conscience never results in its loss. What it results in is the impoverishment, the lessened power, and the stagnation of the conscience. The conscience remains with the person. It is just unacknowledged as one's own.
I grant that the conscience may have more influence over the person if it is mistaken for a god than if it is ignored altogether. But it still remains impoverished. The person who mistakes his conscience for a god neglects his responsibility to cultivate and educate his conscience. Thus his conscience remains primitive, and he follows it unquestioningly. A wise person accepts his conscience as his own, cultivates and educates it, and even questions it. This is good. What the conscience-worshipper does is evil.
*Why is disowning your conscience the essence of evil?*
The Conscientious Nazi There is an example that has been raised against Kant's ethics that may be raised against my theory of evil for different reasons. The example is of a Nazi who employs the categorical imperative to sanction his persecution of Jews. He decides to act on the maxim, "If someone is a Jew, you should persecute him." He is willing to legislate this maxim to everyone. Even if it turns out that he is a Jew, he will favor this maxim. That is how dedicated he is to the Nazi cause. The problem for Kant is that he has used the categorical imperative to justify what is clearly immoral. The problem for my theory is that it seems to illustrate a conscientious man who is evil. I have described an evil person as someone with a disowned conscience. So we may well think that the opposite of an evil person is a conscientious person. That is in fact true in a sense. My response is that the Nazi is not really conscientious. It is true that he is using a moral theory to justify his actions. So it seems that he is letting his conscience guide him instead of doing whatever he wants. But that is not what is going on. If anyone conscientiously examines Kant's ethics, he will find that it comes up short and is not a suitable moral guide. Since the Nazi was guiding his behavior solely on the basis of Kant's ethics, that shows that he did not conscientiously examine Kant's ethics. He just let the categorical imperative substitute for his conscience, which is a way of disowning the conscience.
