The End.

Here we are friends, the end of a semester and for many of us, the end of our time here at Trent. What a crazy time in the world for us to be wrapping up our undergraduate degrees and our educational year as a whole, but nevertheless we can make do with the situation, cope as we may and wrap up this class as well. I must admit, the thought of wrapping this all up in one blog post surely seems like a daunting task but with this much time on my hands I’m sure I can figure it out. Or can I?

This semester studying The Psychology of Evil has been a whirlwind of information, theories, thoughts and assessments and while very complicated as proven to stay interesting and thought provoking through every topic. As the weeks barrelled on we learned about things such as garden-variety evil, corporate evil, evil to family members and loved ones, cults, taking pleasure from others’ pain as well as the power that a situation can have on one’s ability to do evil things. Through all of this however, I still am struggling to find a concrete definition of evil; while I think that the definition we came up with early in the semester still fits well, I think that a lot of it comes down to situation, and personal opinion. This makes it hard to find one concrete definition, but I think that this is important to evil as well. Evil does not present itself as one single entity, evil can be anything from stealing from a small business to murdering someone, and all things in between. Evil presents itself differently in different circumstances, situations and to different people. To the person following orders perhaps their idea of their actions are not evil but to the person the orders are being taken out against, they are.

Due to all of this, our class had no shortage of topics to debate and issues to confront. I could define evil as something implicitly done to harm others, but that could leave out people who fall into Baumeister’s category of Idealism, wherein the evildoer is doing evil things as they think they are bettering the world and are not doing so with the implicit intention of harming others. I could also try to define evil as something done to others in hopes of eliciting personal pleasure from their pain, however we know now that the amount of people who do harm just to see others suffer is relatively small. I suppose if I was tasked with coming up with one single definition, I would say that Evil: an action towards another individual, group or society that results in what the victim sees as harmful. While I know that this definition may not fit all ideas of evil, I believe that this is a definition that can be used with context and perception in order to identify whether something is evil. I think this because it takes into account the perception of the victim, if the victim deems it as evil than the action can be seen as evil to that individual based ultimately on how the act affected them. Ultimately, I think that the victim has one of the most important views on evil; while yes their opinion may be shrouded in the concept of what has been done to them, are they not best at visualising the harm that the action can have, and then should they not be able to identify it as evil to them? I believe they are, and they can.

In terms of this class, I think that no amount of personal research could have taught me the things I learned over the semester. While I could have learned about the technicalities of it all and read the texts to go a bit more in depth, the biggest strength of this class to me was the discussion. Being able to discuss and hear different opinions on each topic truly helped me see things from different perspectives and reading the blog posts from my classmates furthered this even more. I feel super lucky to have had a great group of peers to work through this material with, and I know that these ideas will stick with me as time goes on. This can further the idea that evil needs to be looked at from different perspectives, as it furthers our understandings. In this class we were able to distinguish that evil is not one single entity but rather is something based in situations and situational power, perceived outcomes, perceived harm, the separation between victim and perpetrator, and intentionality. This class provided me with many different views and understandings of evil and while I am still driven to continue to learn more, I will be able to do so with the information from this class in my toolbelt.

Thank you for a great semester!