Making Evil: The Science Behind Humanity’s Dark Side

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By trying to understand paedophilia we are not dismissing the realities of child sexual abuse, nor are we condoning or normalising the issue. Instead, we can work towards a world where we are in a better position to deal with the reality of the issue. Paedophilia has always existed, and always will. Flippantly dismissing it as an aberration helps no one. On murder, Shaw sees no evil: a person who has killed once in the heat of the moment doesn't deserve to be labelled a murderer; even Jeffrey Dahmer was apparently just lonely. Do you see this inability to let people get close as a common human trait? For example, I think there are similar types of characters in your book, Union Atlantic, with the 21st-century hard-nosed power-hungry New Yorkers. Russell also offers us an account of what we mean by an evil person. Again, he begins with seven ‘folk’ intuitions and argues that the most plausible account focuses on a certain kind of fixed disposition to perform evil actions in certain circumstances. Russell’s account of evil persons relies heavily on what he also believes defines evil actions, and hence he is a pluralist about what constitutes an evil person too. Dr. Julia Shaw takes a close in-depth look at evil in her new book. But this isn't the sort of book that most might expect. It isn't a bloody dissection of evil behavior in detail, or a discussion of pros and cons about punishment or treatment for those who commit serious acts of violence or crime. Dr. Shaw instead looks at the science behind human behavior. She points out in her introduction that her book is NOT about philosophy, morality, religious views or about punishment/consequences for aberrant behavior....it's about WHY human beings do the things they do, what in the makeup of human beings allows violent or evil choices, and what behaviors seem to be present in a person to make them capable of evil. Dr. Shaw breaks down the wide concept of "Evil'' into smaller pieces, using science to explain human behavior.

Renowned social psychologist and creator of the "Stanford Prison Experiment," Philip Zimbardo explores the mechanisms that make good people do bad things, how moral people can be seduced into acting immorally, and what this says about the line separating good from evil. Stephen de Wijze is senior lecturer in political philosophy at the University of Manchester and the co-editor with Thomas Nys of The Routledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Evil . I resonate to her way of thinking because it chimes well with my own interest in the ‘moral’ quality of violence: when people who do bad things think they are doing the right thing, out of a sense that they are morally right. Morality explains a lot of the terrible things that we do to one another. This claim isn’t unique to Manne or to me, of course. Another book that could have ended up on my list is Virtuous Violence by Alan Fiske and Tage Rai which argues that a lot of violence is motivated by moral principles—it summarises a lot of interesting research in this area.

The School for Good and Evil books in order by Soman Chainani

This new edition includes the fiftieth-anniversary fully corrected text setting and, for the first time, an extensive new index.

I hadn’t read Eichmann in Jerusalem until very recently. Obviously, I’d heard about it. I knew the gist of it. But it’s only recently that I’ve come to see what all the fuss is about. So its interest lies in the details that emerge in conversation, and about how the perpetrators understand what they have done. But surely much of that is a question of memory. It’s not as if he’s interviewing them as they come off the battlefield. The events they recount happened a long time in the past.

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I read American Psycho all the way through but nearly fainted reading one of the scenes. I did get rid of it … thought of burning it but imagined a vision of some kind of devil in the flames, so consigned to a cardboard box and then the dump.” tribord Agreed! This is a very timely book in the light of the current ‘Me Too’ movement. She describes sexual harassment and sexual assault, and she has a moving chapter on strangulation. She spends a lot of time on the case of Eliot Rogers, this man who felt he was always rejected by women, and then went on a shooting spree, killing many people, and finally killing himself. She describes these cases in some depth, and provides a really interesting analysis. I see this analysis as the mirror image of David Livingstone Smith’s, although they could both be right for different cases. Terry often comes off as entirely too credulous, too willing to accept things at face value, and too willing to interpret the evidence to fit his theories. He sees a lot of things as enormously significant and as evidence for cult activity, such as Satanic and Nazi-themed graffiti in parks and pentagrams in magic marker near crime scenes. He seems to forget that whenever teenage ne'er-do-wells congregate, you will find swastikas, pentagrams, and the names of heavy metal groups, and this does not necessarily indicate the presence of an organized cult. He also seems to view any occult/pagan/New Age group as at least potentially Satanic, which gets a bit tiresome after a while. Pretty soon things get heavily into urban legend territory: snuff films, child pornography rings, virgin sacrifices, etc.

Exoskeleton by Shane Stadler makes the torture in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four seem like a stroll in the park on a sunny afternoon. After reading it you think: “Do I really know what is going on in this world?” gavernism What is so interesting and enlightening about Sereny’s book is that she manages to reveal a considerable amount of the public and private parts of Stangl’s life and delves deeply into his thoughts, relationships, and motivations. He engaged in one of the worst genocides in history yet seemed to have good and ordinary relationships with friends and family that clearly mark him out as intelligent and capable of love, empathy and other characteristics which are commonplace. He did not, as one might expect from his actions, have obvious monstrous qualities. Nevertheless, he still willingly engaged in mass murder, torture, enslavement, ethnic cleansing, and more, while a Nazi Kommandant of a death camp. Sometimes there's too much minutiae, reporter politics and intrigue -- this district attorney, that reporter, this article, that detective. Lordamighty. This is already an incredibly complex web of connections, without all of that stuff, so I felt there's some sections that could use some abridgement. Terry also throws a lot of theories around which aren't fully explored. It's implied that some of the Son of Sam murders were committed to distract from other crimes. That's an interesting idea, but I didn't feel it was resolved. Jess has been charged with finding and terminating the creature who's assassinating Dark-Hunters. The last thing he expects to find is a human face behind the killings, but when that face bears a striking resemblance to the one who murdered him centuries ago, he knows something evil is going on. He also knows he's not the one who killed her parents. But Abigail refuses to believe the truth and is determined to see him dead once and for all.

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Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow. The horror of the Holocaust, made freshly horrifying with a new dose of absurdity and head-slapping stupidity. This book destroyed me for weeks; it’s upsetting just writing a couple of sentences about it.” tomimber From a "how seriously should I take this guy" perspective, I should probably also note that if the transcripts of the interviews Terry and his associates conducted with Berkowitz are accurate, they are at times very leading and allow Berkowitz to make non-committal responses that could be interpreted as supporting Terry's theories. Terry also claims to have found and removed evidence from a crime scene, which confused and dismayed me. He talks a lot about the fascination we have with these men, and in particular he talks about the moral issues we have when we struggle to understand them. ”