retyopy said:
And here's the problem of this topic. What is evil? Is james evil, or merely a coward who's a massive prick? Are only people you described evil? In which case, are only sociopath's evil? Does that make the mental illness irrelevant, we should hate and fear someone like that, instead of helping them? Even when you try and make Good and Evil black and white, you can't get rid of that grey...
All of these are very good questions.
When you get down to it, everyone who ever did bad things can be understood if you try to understand it. Everyone who massacred civilians in Bosnia came out of a cauldron of racial hatred where they were taught that other groups were sub human, and so killing them wasn't a crime.
Crazy people do crazy things, but they can't be evil because they weren't in control. They never knew what they were doing, they were never intending to do it, and yet they did. That was because of their illness, not because they were evil.
The point being that there genuinely is no such thing as evil. It's a creation of the moral guardians of society. It is what you label people to make it ok to do terrible things to them. That's the crux of the matter. The church called other religions evil , because that enabled normal people to do appalling things to them. Evil is a label for whatever your society dislikes that removes the humanity from those we label.
We call terrorists evil for blowing up buildings, but its ok when we bomb arab children, because they are evil.
On a philosophical level, calling a person evil is an 'evil' act, because you strip him of his humanity. It proclaims that no further questions need to be asked and that it is ok to spit on him and beat him and kill him. It says that his motivations and intentions are irrelevant and should not be investigated. We should not be interested in finding gout why he did what he did (even though that would be the humane thing to do), we should simply revile him. And it is that lack of understanding that prevents us from stopping bad things happening in the future.