In the reading, one of the guards of the Stanford Prison Experiment after the experiment was over talked about how when one enters such experiment as a guard they create themselves as a guard defining who they are and yet they want to say that the person they are during such experiment is not them and they don’t actually enjoy doing these things.
As a small group in class, we discussed how could possibly differentiate between when a person is evil versus when a person isn’t evil (but the act they do is). We decided that a possible way to differentiate between the two is that a person is evil when they know the act(s) they are committing to be evil and they still do it, and when the act is evil and the person isn’t it is because they do not know the act is evil when they are doing it.
Throughout the year we have been struggling as a class to define the difference between what makes someone evil versus what makes someone not evil. The distinction my group came up with provided some clarity as to how this distinction might/could be made. Looking back at the readings this distinction seemingly was supported by the guards saying the study defined who they were and that even though they wanted to deny it they did enjoy doing what they did. They also all acknowledged that what was going on was wrong which further supports our idea.
Having this possible distinction allowed for me along with others in my group to have some clarity -finally – about a question we all had thought about throughout the content of the course that never seemed to be answered.
In a news article, the person the article is about tries to murder a child while drunk, and the stance that the author of the article takes is that being drunk and that being out of the persons usual normal mind made the person not evil (but the act still evil).
This supports the idea my group had since the author decided that being drunk means they did not/could not be in their right mind and know fully what they are doing. I find what helped me understand how this might be is thinking about how when someone is drunk they cannot consent because for various reasons, one of them being that they might not fully know what they are agreeing to. So when a person is not drunk, they cannot always know that their acts are evil and if they are clearly not thinking straight, they do not know and are not an evil person.
The academic article by Hellzen et al. (2004) aimed at looking at what is it means to be a nurse with a patient with learning disabilities and provoking behaviours (aggressive behaviour). Interviews were done with the nurses asking about the nurses view of the patient, a normal day with them, and situations in which they cared for them (either ending well or badly). Results showed that patients were seen as nice and gentle and then suddenly a monster, which was seen under the being tormented theme seen from the nurses. It was discussed that the nurses, seeing these evils acts in what should be a good person, tried to explain the evil acts through things such as pathological explanations (brain damage).
In other words the nurses did not want to define them as evil but rather define their evil acts. In the nurses’ opinion this was because they were not themselves when they were acting out due to some pathological reason. They were acting this way because of some type of brain damage or something alike that caused them to not be themselves.
Both the news article and the academic article seem to show that there are conditions to the human life such as brain damage and getting drunk that make someone not evil because they are not thinking straight and therefore do not fully know what they are doing is evil because it isn’t really them thinking to do these things (not them in their normal state of mind). This showed some versions of a person not being evil that I would not have/did not consider when discussing the idea of how to make the distinction between those who are and are not evil.
Hellzen, O., Asplund, K., Sandman, P., & Norberg, A. (2004). The meaning of caring as described by nurses caring for a person who acts provokingly: an interview study. Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences, 18(1), 3-11.
Psychology of Evil Online Journal 
Hi Madison, I find your comparison between not being aware of partaking an evil act and being drunk very interesting. Being drunk removes a person’s inhibitions, which can remove a person’s realization for the implications of their actions. It’s not a far stretch in the slightest to say that people can do some really stupid things when intoxicated, and this lack of thought about their actions is talked about with consent. Can someone consent to something when they are under the influence, and perhaps not thinking things through properly? It’s a really good question in the context of wondering of a person’s evil action can that person be conceived as evil.
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