Wrapping things up

My definition of evil that I would apply at the end of the course: psychological or physical harm done onto someone or people due to dispositional, personality, and environmental factors. This can be done with the intent to cause harm, with intent to do harm for some greater good to occur, or with no intent to harm and an inability to see what is harmful and what isn’t.

I know this definition is very broad, but I’ve found that acts of evil are not just severe acts such as murder, rape, or war crimes, but also the smaller things like revenge, bullying, withholding important information. With so much to define under one word, I would recommend a broader definition. Another reason for the definition to be so broad is because there are many factors that are considered to contribute to an individual or group of people partaking in evil.

What I have learned over the span of this course is not everyone who commits an evil act is an evil person, an evil person – if one exists – is hard to define and identify, the myth of pure evil is alive and real, and its very easy to place blame on someone who is doing an evil act until you consider things that are at play like environmental factors or an inability to see that harm is being done (like an inability to partake in empathy).

Most of what I learned throughout the course can be connected to the myth of pure evil. We are built by media and schemas built from those around us that there are evil people, what those evil people do, and that they do it because they are evil. And mostly everything we learn about evil in a course like this is contradicting the myth of pure evil. Not only do we look at evil as something other than horrid atrocities, but things we consider minor in life that still cause harm onto others. We also consider that not everybody who does an evil act is evil (majority aren’t), and not every evil act that is done can be contributed to someone just being evil; there are reasons for acts of evil occurring.