What measure is evil?

[CODE-D]

How would you measure evil? like on a scale of 1 to 10.
Is an evil deed against many worse than an evil deed directed at one person personally?
Is the worse thing you can do to a person is kill them or make them suffer to a point where they cant recover and must live in suffering?
Is causing harm to a person worse than causing harm to a person that person likes out of hate for that person?
Is doing evil deeds for fun worse than doing it out of hate?
So many questions.

 

[applesandoranges]

edit

 

[geK0]

Its subjective really

I do find this show pretty interesting though [link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_Evil[/link]

 

[dyre]

Obviously a number of factors are involved, including the ones you mentioned. And a large part of it is determined by your own beliefs, emotions, etc.

I guess in the end it doesn't matter too much, since "how evil is that guy" doesn't really have any real world consequences

 

[WolfThomas]

Can the unit be in Hitlers? That was an act of evil measuring 1x10^-5 Hitlers.

 

[geK0]

Can the unit be in Hitlers? That was an act of evil measuring 1x10^-5 Hitlers.

10 micro hitlers? that's pretty bad!

random fact:
Did you know that an average of 16.76 megahitlers are committed per year by EA?

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

Well Nationstates, a browser based nation simulator I play on, measures authoritarianism in Stalins. My friends and I have adopted this measure for evil in general.

Spoiler: A typical conversation while gaming with a friend

"So, me killing you right there with that knife. How many Stalins was that?"

"I would judge that as 38 Stalins. About."

"Damn, I was aiming for higher. Maybe I can kill you while simultaneously killing kittens."

I also thought of that 'Most Evil' show. I'm kind of interested in it but it's never on when I want to watch TV.

 

[Strazdas]

How would you measure evil? like on a scale of 1 to 10.
Is an evil deed against many worse than an evil deed directed at one person personally?
Is the worse thing you can do to a person is kill them or make them suffer to a point where they cant recover and must live in suffering?
Is causing harm to a person worse than causing harm to a person that person likes out of hate for that person?
Is doing evil deeds for fun worse than doing it out of hate?
So many questions.

Evil is unleasurable as it is only a title for certain actings that majority has deemed not acceptable.
Evil deed agasint many is worse due to the wider damage range. You do more damage, therefore it is worse.
Death versus suffering depends on the psychology of the sufferer and their belief in life after death. Our law currently considers killing as worse.
I dont understand. do you mean to ask whether it is worse to cause harm to a person you like or hate? it desnt matter.
Evil deeds are evil deeds, regardless if your causality.

 

[McMullen]

1. You can't measure it, and even if you could, the scale wouldn't have endpoints. You can judge for yourself whether one thing is more evil than another, but it's entirely subjective and people will likely disagree with you.

2. I'm sure there are scenarios diverse enough to allow each option to be true.

3. You have a very limited imagination if you stop there in thinking of the worst you can do to a person. Again, it depends on the situation, although in general I think driving a person into suicidal shame or despair is pretty awful, and perhaps worse than most killings or tortures.

4. Hurting those who are uninvolved with your dispute is always more despicable than going after the person you dislike directly.

5. If the motivation is fun, it is less likely to ever stop, so I'd say that's worse.

 

[Strazdas]

So corporate greed is 16 million times worse than mass genocide of 11 million people? SEEMS LEGIT!

Ofc its legit. Jew genotcide is nothing compared to what corporations did collectively.

 

[jklinders]

"Evil" like many other moral stances is far too subjective to be given catchall answers. What is considered to be the highest form of good or evil to one is of less significance to another. Therefore I could only really answer that question for me and not for the OP.

To me, evil is defined as causing harm or injury to someone who is innocent without cause. The higher the scale of pain and suffering, the more evil. If the target is not innocent, or if the perpetrator has legitimate reason for his action, then the harmful act is less that of evil and more that of doing wrong with perceived cause.

Evil is not a word I casually toss around. To me there needs to be malicious intent for no reason that can be justified by society at large.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

I suppose if I were to lay down some metric for evil, it would have to be rather vague. Defining what is evil is largely cultural and I can not think of an act that is considered evil by every culture through time.

Thus, if we assume that "evil" remains a nebulous term, the rating of evil would be based largely on the following: Intent, number of people affected, and mitigating circumstances. If I was going to create a model it would look something like this.

First, intent is obvious enough. It simply encapsulates the conscious effort to knowingly perform an evil act. This would be measured on a 0 - 5 scale. A person who does evil with no reasonable knowledge that their actions would lead to such a result would rate a zero. The same man who walks up to a person with a large caliber gun and shoots them in the head would rate a five.

Number of people is just as obvious and would be rated on the same 0 - 5 scale. A zero is something that simply allows evil (Say the Judges who ruled that Corporations had the right to seize private property through eminent domain) where a five is something that would affect a multitude (whatever the maximum scale of your personal monkeysphere is).

Finally, mitigating circumstances offer a negative value of 0 - 9. The trick is this can never reduce the evil score to less than 1. This would also be a cultural thing. One might award a high score to the classic Cowboy gunslinger archetype. Such a person knowingly commits evil (generally murder) in service of a greater good.

 

[The Night Angel]

1- It depends entirely on the deeds, but the same evil deed done to many people or one person, is clearly more evil against the many.
2- It depends on the victim, if the person themselves would prefer death, then letting them live is the more evil act.
3-Hurting someone's loved ones is more evil, because there is no motivation behind hurting that person personally.
4- The motivation doesn't matter, the act is what is evil, not the reasoning.

 

[Agow95]

KiloNazi's with the hypothetical offspring of Sauron and Cruella de Ville as a baseine for comparison.

 

[launchpadmcqwak]

torturing innocent people is evil wether you kill them or not

 

[Hollyday]

The measure of evil is roughly 17 centimetres, though in some countries they would prefer the number to be in inches. It's slightly more complicated to measure in that sense since the imperial system is also evil.

The problem is that people will TELL you it's 17cm but in reality it's actually much smaller...

 

[SEXTON HALE]

Yeah the use of an actual unit of measurement of evil seems to bring most of the mathamatical theorems I know of crashing down around my head causing them to spout nothing but numerical nonsense.Were going to have a lot of sciencing to be done if were going to be able to get the univerese as we know it back on track and keep it from spinnning out of control in a horrible quantom singularity of absolute evil.