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Some years ago I attended a
training class for managers of the large financial service firm for
which I worked. Slipped among the coma-inducing lectures one
suffers at these things was a talk on the company’s unofficial “Ten
Rules to Live By,” of which I remember two: “Money is good,” and
“Don’t audit every number in life.”
The latter popped to mind
while I was reading an article from the London Telegraph about
American psychiatrists who are developing ways to measure evil. The
flashback to my corporate cram course was actually my second
thought; the first was astonishment that science finally admits evil
exists.
Evil has been a topic of
debate since Cain slew Abel, with Cain winning the argument so far.
By September 11, 2001, evil was widely portrayed as an obsolete
concept, or worse, the simplistic bugaboo of religious moralists.
So-called serious thinkers, most of whom would benefit from spending
a little time outside their own skulls, came to see evil as little
more than a value judgment by the closed-minded. Much of the public
tagged along for fear of being thought unenlightened.
Then came Osama and the boys,
who, if they accomplished anything beyond getting their own tails
kicked, can take credit for reacquainting Americans with evil … for
a time. It wasn’t long before some were blaming everyone other than
the terrorists, and the notion of evil was relegated back to the
province of simpletons.
So it is good to see credible
psychiatric researchers recognize the existence of evil. Measuring
it, however, is another matter.
The two projects cited by the
Telegraph article are aimed at weighing evil in order to set
punishment for those convicted of heinous crimes, particularly
murder. Applying this research, murderers might receive vastly
different sentences depending on how they score on the evil meter.
One study, led by Dr. Michael
Stone of Columbia University, delved into the life histories of over
500 people who have killed; the findings were used to develop a
22-level chart Stone calls the “gradations of evil.” The flavors of
malevolence range from “Those who have killed in self-defense and do
not show psychopathic tendency” to “Psychopathic torture-murderers,
with torture their primary motive.”
Outlaw Billy the Kid, who is
believed to have killed between nine and 21 men, scores an almost
cuddly six on Stone’s scale, “Impetuous hot-headed murderers, yet
without marked psychopathic features.” England’s Yorkshire Ripper,
convicted of the murders of 13 women, came in at a more dastardly
17.
A second study by Dr. Michael
Welner of New York University has been underway since 1998. Welner
is researching the attitudes of law enforcement personnel, mental
health professionals and others to create what he calls the
“depravity scale.” He told the Telegraph “People say evil is like
pornography: they know it when they see it, but can debate whether
or when it is harmful. This is not true. We are finding widespread
agreement about what is evil.”
That’s good to hear given the
“evil is in the eye of the beholder” gobbledygook we get from much
of the psychiatric establishment. Still, the idea of punishing
people based on what they think rather than what they do should be
soundly rejected.
The principle of punishing
thoughts over deeds already has an unfortunate legal toehold in the
form of hate crime laws. Yet rape, torture, and all the other
ugliness that can go with murder are already illegal and punishable
by law; once guilt is proven, who cares if the criminal was thinking
happy thoughts or bad? If we start punishing thoughts, who decides
which are criminal?
The potential for abuse is
staggering. As gratified as I am that the existence of evil has
been recognized, measuring it is like listening for the sound of the
color blue. We simply haven’t the wisdom to judge evil by anything
but its actions, and should punish it accordingly.
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