I don't see prion as inherantly evil. It serves a purpose f protecting teh innocent from teh dangerous by restraining that which is dangerous. It is, to return to teh Tjapakai division, banefull- it does do harm, but in teh same way that a curse-stone can provide protection (at least in the minds of those using it) and serve society teh prison can do the same, especially when considered against the alternative of killing those who present a danger to others.
Generally evil is defined by being oppositional to good rather than whether or not it does harm, personally I tend to think the idea of evil is probably the greatest example of it's actuality- defining someone or something as evil is an easy way to remove any moral consideration with regard to pursuing it's destruction, whether it is the US invasion of Iraq, the Nazi's characterization fo Jews, or the Witch trials of the late middle ages. And each of these was done for supposedly noble reasons. Even the Conquistadors (who at least admitted to motives of gold and glory) began by defining those they marched against as evil and inhuman.

Prison is evil - it restricts liberty and forces suffering and discomfort on people. However, it is a justified evil. Taxes are evil - it takes what is not earned by force. However, it is a necessary evil.

Defining evil as oppositional to good is like defining any other two abstract, made-up terms solely in relation to each other - it tells you nothing of what they are, how you test for them, etc. That's a useless definition. However, I rarely hear people say that restricting liberty, suffering, discomfort, loss of resources, etc. is "good", only that, in some circumstances, it may permit or lead to good.

I want to live a life with honor and prove to the world that good people can and should have all of the wealth, glory, success and happiness in life. I want to disprove the saying, "Nice guys finish last." If I do that, then I can say I have done my part in making the world a better place.

But when I say that, I ask myself if I am asking for too much or if I am being too greedy. I ask myself if I can obtain these things if I succumb to the temptation of doing dishonest, immoral or even misguided things.

Everything comes with a cost. Life isn't a Disney movie where, just sticking to your morals means you end up fabulously wealthy, beautiful and adored. If you want to stick to your morals, but also end up fabulously wealthy, beautiful and adored, you're going to either have to be extremely lucky, or pay somewhere else (the easy one being, work hard, go to med school at nights, work your buns off until you become a doctor, then spend your time helping sick kids - but that requires a *LOT* of work).

Otherwise ask, what is it you really wish to accomplish? How do you define your goals? I consider "wealth" meaning that I can put my kids through school and one day be able to retire to a comfortable lifestyle akin to how I'm living now. Maybe you see it as owning a BMW, or as having a mansion.

So there you go - determine your goals and what you're willing to spend to get there. Unfortunately, by that measure, morality is just another commodity, like time and money.

What I find interesting is your four stated goals, wealth, glory, success and happiness - among those four, you don't actually include "making the world a better place". If you want to make the world a better place, why don't you make that your goal, and accept that the other ones are perhaps not what will make you truly happy.

Of course nice guys finish last, it's only polite to let the lady finish first.

But really wealth, success, glory, these are all forms of power (financial influence, influence of public opinion, success is just overly generic...) and happiness is tautaological (not many people looking to be unhappy, and presumedly whatever you are looking for is what you expect to bring happiness...

...and I am willing to go through that. Actually, I chose to pursue business because it allows me to do a lot by working hard and working smart.

The problem is, I also have to deal with businessmen who think business is just about making money (sometimes by any means necessary) when they can actually do more good with it.

Like I said, it was a short and semi-snarky answer.  However, there is a lot of truth in what I'm saying.

Let's imagine a utopia, where everyone puts the needs and desires of others first.  If you want a sandwich, someone else will recognize your need and help you get a sandwich.  If someone else needs one, you'll put aside your needs temporarily and  help them get one.

Granted, that's a utopia, and not the real world.  But every act of evil can be deconstructed to someone putting their desires above the needs and desires of everyone else.  You can slap a bunch of justifications onto it, but that's what it all boils down to.

One piece of advice I picked up from my reading about buddhism that's really come in useful to me is that idea that unfulfilled expectations are the cause of unhappiness.  It's not the state of the world that makes one unhappy, its expecting it to be different that does.  There are some things you can change in the world, and some things you can't.  If you keep expecting things to be different just because you want them to be, when you have little or no control over how they turn out, you'll end up unhappy.

I think this applies in your situation.  You do have control over how you act, and can act in accordance with your expectations.  You have only limited control over how others act, so expecting them to act differently can (and seems to) lead to unhappiness for you.  Do what you can to change them (largely by setting a good example, I'd guess), and then stop fretting too much about whether or not they're doing the right thing.

Another way to phrase it, is to do whatever you can, and be satisfied that you're doing all you can, even if "all you can" isn't enough to lead to the ideal outcome.

That's a good way of putting it Tycho. Maybe I am moralizing life too much to the point that it is no longer fun for others and for me.

The problem is that is not teh case. Nazi attrocities were founded in a sense of national altruism- sacrifice of yoruself for the country and protect it from teh evil nasty Jews, gypsys, commies, etc. While there were people in the Nazi regime who did act selfishly 9as tehre are in any regime) the core problem was not in the selfish behavior but in the *selfless* behavior. An Al-Queida terrorist (or anti-IRS protester) doesn't fly a plane into a building because he is being selfish, but because they eblieve ina  higher cause and tehy are willing to sacrifice themselves, and others, to that cause. A witch hunter might be motivated by greed, admittedly, but how many more tortured and killed innocent men women and children because tehy were dedicated to eliminating Satan's minions to make the world a better place? The worst attrocities are not committed as a result of greed, they are a result of altruism which has been molded into a force of destruction.

Dude, the return key is your friend.  As is spell check.

Nazi atrocities were so they could set themselves up as the "Superior race".  An Al-Qaida terrorist kills because he believes he will be rewarded in heaven, and doesn't care about the infidels.  A witch hunter is motivated by glory, along with the other reasons you mentioned.

In all these cases, what happens is that the "evil" person gets something out of it, and doesn't care about the cost to others.  They're putting their own needs and desires above that of others.  And before you go there, the acts of the brainwashed aren't "evil", they're tragic.  Hence, Jonestown.

Oh, and I'm calling a Godwin on this one.  I win.  =P

If you're going to take it to that level than there's no such thing as altruism at all, because every act, no matter how giving, rewards the giver in some way (if only by a boost of pride because I know how great a person I am."

That is pretty much the case; selflessness is doing something at the expense of your own interest. Yet the very fact that they are doing that thing entails that there is some desire or hope that their interests will be furthered.

Stinger Missiles are selfless, if only because they have no interests of their own (or at least none we can comprehend ;P).

For everything else, Altruism might just be the perception of third-parties projecting their own interests onto a person or people who's differing interests led to sacrificing said third-parties' assertion of what those interests might have been.

Yeah, I think silveroak is on to something.  There is certainly plenty of evil that involves putting your own wants above those of others, but I also agree that some of the greatest evils involve people who are convinced they are acting selflessly in the name of a greater cause.  Many evil acts are committed by people thinking that "its for the greater good," and to a degree, that kind of evil is harder to deal with than the standard "I'm in it for number 1" type of evil.

There's the old quote "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."  I think it's too limited in that I don't think it needs to be religion, just a bigger cause to get behind, that is necessary to get good people to do evil.  But I think the idea carries some truth.  It's possible to get people to do evil acts out of a sense of devotion to a greater cause, as well as just thinking of themselves.  And, to a degree, I think these "greater cause" evils tend to be more dangerous than the "gimmie gimmie" types of evil acts.

Keep in mind it is also possible for evil people to do good things for evil reasons if we are defining evil (in the motivations department at least) as selfishness.
I'm a politician (hypothetically) and I'm a selfish greedy son of a biscuit. I see a building on fire, with children inside, and thinking of tomorrows headlines run inside and rescue the nearest children...

Yeah, I agree on that as well.

I was just thinking about the ABC's of Ethics.

A - Attitude (Feelings and motivation)
B - Behavior (Actions taken)
C - Consequence (Results)

If an act is motivated by good feelings, done using ethical and moral means and has good results then we can truly say that the act is truly altruistic.

The Nazis may think they have good intentions but their behavior and the consequences of their actions do not make them moral or ethical.

What you're describing is justifications.  Rationalizations, persuasion, what-have-you-- it all amounts to doing an evil act and then trying to prove it was really a good one.  The act itself is motivated by selfish desires, but the justification can be anything.  Done right, you can even convince others that you're doing the right thing for the right reasons.

I think if you believe that's the only possible case, then you're misunderstanding and oversimplifying a lot of history.  You seem to be making an assumption about other people, and I don't accept the assumption, and thus disagree with your conclusion.  If you want to convince us, you'll need to offer some evidence, I think, rather than just saying it again.  You've just said that 'done right' people can be convinced that the evil acts of others were done for the right reasons.  Why do you feel people can be convinced of the same for their own actions?

There's been no studies that I know of on rationalizations; they're just accepted by psychologists and many other people as fact.  Just like weather, we can observe justifications without fully understanding the exact science behind them.

In this case, I'll defer to personal examples.  Woody Allen said that rationalizations are more important than sex, because you can go for a day without sex.  Have you ever done something that you perhaps felt you shouldn't have, but convinced yourself it was for the best?  Then you've rationalized a small but selfish act.  I'll bet that every one of us has done this within the last week.  It could be something as small as buying something that you shouldn't, or maybe making yourself a few minutes late to something, or even spending too much time on the computer.

Practically every day, we do small things that should make us feel guilty, but we rationalize the guilt away.  This is not, in and of itself, evil.

It's late, and I'm rambling.  Let me sum up by saying that the fact that people rationalize away uncomfortable emotions is a given.  In many cases, they even convince themselves it was "for the best", and try to make themselves feel good instead of guilty.

You've never heard of teh Milford Prison expiriment? Or the MIlgram expiriment? How people will abuse and torture other people because of a role definition and mass psychology or simply because tehy are told to by an authority? Neither of these are based on selfish goals. For someone who claims to know the whole of human behavior and experience you are woefully undereducated in the field.

Those studies aren't on rationalizations.  I'd suggest you read more carefully next time.  And for the record, I know psychology, not the "whole of human behavior and experience".  Thank you for assuming it is so, but only the woefully uneducated make that mistake.

The Milford Prison experiment, IIRC, demonstrated selfishness in the desire to wield authority.  Milgram's experiment did demonstrate rationalizations: "I did it because he told me to." but was mainly concerned with other things.  So, your own examples prove my point instead of yours.  As far as I know, there are no studies on rationalizations themselves, since they're largely an internal process and difficult to examine directly.

The Milford Expiriment shwoed nothing about desire to weild authority, it demonstrated the reponse to having it. There was no gain of authority to be had by doing what they did in those roles, and considering that it could be looked back upon in future job situations their behavior was more likely to result in a loss of potential authority positions rather than a gain.

It "schwoed" nothing.  It "showed" that simply having authority led to a desire to abuse it.  Using authority is the same as "wielding" it, although the connotations are different.

Maybe this will help move the conversation forward, and give us a position we can both agree on, GMC.

From what I understand, you're saying that person A will only ever commit an evil act against person B if person A puts their own wellbeing/needs/wants/whatever above those of person B, yes?

I propose another situation in which person A can commit an evil act against person B, without the above assumption being met:  Introduce person C to the mix.  Person A values both person B, and person C more than they do themselves (ie, person A puts both of their needs above his own).  However, Person A happens to put person C's needs/wants/whathaveyous above those of person B.  Thus, A will be willing to commit an evil act against B because doing so benefits person C.  He's harming B not to help himself, but to help another, whom he values more than person B (even though he happens to value person B more than he does himself).

Do you believe such a situation is possible?