Scott Peck in his 1983 book, People of the Lie, The Hope for Healing Human Evil. Angelo Corlett as well as the late sociopolitical philosophers and psychologists, Joel Feinberg and Erich Fromm, but most significantly by psychiatrist and author M. 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.īringsjord's research builds on earlier definitions put forth by San Diego State University philosophy professor J. The evil person must have tried to carry out this plan with the hope of "causing considerable harm to others," Bringsjord says.
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). "I've been working on what is evil and how to formally define it," says Bringsjord, who is also director of the Rensselaer AI & Reasoning Lab ( RAIR). He's so intrigued, in fact, that he has developed a sort of checklist for determining whether someone is demonic, and is working with a team of graduate students to create a computerized representation of a purely sinister person.
But it is indeed evil-or rather trying to get to the roots of evil-that fascinates Selmer Bringsjord, a logician, philosopher and chairman of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Department of Cognitive Science here.
TROY, N.Y.-The hallowed halls of academia are not the place you would expect to find someone obsessed with evil (although some students might disagree).
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