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[ljgeoff]

In an interesting Scientific American article, Selmer Bringsjord, a logician, philosopher and chairman of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Department of Cognitive Science, defines evil:

To be truly evil, someone must have sought to do harm by planning to commit some morally wrong action with no prompting from others (whether this person successfully executes his or her plan is beside the point). The evil person must have tried to carry out this plan with the hope of "causing considerable harm to others," Bringsjord says. Finally, "and most importantly," he adds, if this evil person were willing to analyze his or her reasons for wanting to commit this morally wrong action, these reasons would either prove to be incoherent, or they would reveal that the evil person knew he or she was doing something wrong and regarded the harm caused as a good thing.

And what this very clever fellow has done is make a AI that is evil. He, of course, would never let it loose. It's just an interesting thought experiment.

Personally, I'm not so sure about the definition. If a person intentionally harms another and their reasons for doing so are incoherent, we usually call that insanity, not evil.

It makes me wonder at that line; I tend to think of all evil as insane. Slippery words, those.

Comments

[lovecraftienne.livejournal.com]

For me, evil isn't "intending to do serious harm to others"; it's "not caring whether, in serving one's own interests, others are harmed, perhaps seriously".

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Nod. That's my take on the matter as well. IMHO, indifference is the basis of evil.

If a person is malicious, but not indifferent, well, they won't do anything. But a person who is indifferent can cause a great deal of harm without any ill intent. (And if you add in ill intent, watch out!)

[anansi133.livejournal.com]

I'm dubious about this myself. "Evil" is such a loaded word, what it mostly does, is set the speaker apart from that which they are calling evil. When Bush defines an "axis of Evil", he's trying to make himself look good in comparison.

The word evil is a pejorative. Trying to distill the esense of it, is kind of like deliberatley painting an ugly picture of an ugly person.

Oh, and think of how much bad stuff happens in the world because of actual malice, compared to how much bad stuff happens because people don't really know what they're doing. I think incompetence is a far more important source of harm in the world.