The Nature of Evil

The nature of evil is a crucial yet difficult to understand concept. The conundrum of how good people can turn bad is one of the most prominent questions in today’s society. However, the word good is to be used lightly as following John Locke’s theory of Tabula Rasa; people aren’t born inherently good or evil thus their morality comes from experience and perception. The privileged like to think that they are all good people and there is a distinct line that separates them from everyone else. However it is not nearly so black and white. Almost everyone is neither wholly good nor evil but rather a product of their circumstance. Who is to say a privileged, successful student wouldn’t flourish in a life of crime they been born into it? I will attempt to explore how good people can “cross over” and do evil things. To describe this conundrum, physiologist Philip Zimbardo uses the term “the Lucifer effect”. I think that three core root things that cause “good” people to commit evil are blind obedience to authority, the bystander effect and desire for power.

Blind obedience to authority is a catalyst that can cause ordinary people to commit evil. A researcher named Stanley Milgrim asked the question “could the holocaust happen in America?” He wanted to know if regular good people would electrocute an innocent purely because they were told to. People thought, no way not me I’m a good person. So to test this Milgrim conducted a series of experiments which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. The experiment involved the subjects assigned as “teachers” being told to give “learners” increasingly powerful electrical shocks as they answered questions incorrectly. The experiment was supervised by an authoritative experimenter. Unbeknown to the teachers it was a set-up, the learners were hired actors and weren’t actually receiving any electrical