I've seen people saying there are no good or bad people just people who do bad or good things, but what about psychos or killers? there is no way they are good. This is causing me a lot of anxiety

i agree with everything you said. besides the whole “evil” thing. i dont necessarily think humans can be evil.

@MakeAChange I was also skeptical about using the word "evil" cause I was thinking that too but after contemplating about all the brutally horrifying things that happened throughout history I decided that this is actually a fair word for some people. I can't call Hitler or Stalin just "bad". They were way more than that.

@Crassus1 i see what you mean. however, i still do not think humans can be evil. hitler was not always a fascist dictator. certain aspects of his life that he experienced pushed him into becoming that. obviously being a racist, and killing/torturing millions of innocent people is dubbed as an evil. that’s just that. however, that is only the act. the act is evil. not necessarily him. i just woke up, so i feel like i’m not getting my reasoning across perfectly. but i can explain a little later.

@MakeAChange Don't worry :) , you explained it perfectly. I have to admit it's a very good point. The act is evil by nature and that matters more than how we think about a certain person. That's what we should look at in the end: the actions, but pls don't get me wrong: I don't believe Hitler was always bad in his nature. He was not always a mass-killer, no one is. What really blew my mind is the fact that he refused to visit the concentration camps because he said that seeing the unimaginable torture and misery jewish people were going through he may feel a bit bad for them, have mercy and make "the final solution" a little less brutal. So he was deliberately (even rationally) fighting against his own natural feelings (which could have prevented some of his evil actions maybe) in order to make the jews suffer as much as posible. I'm curious how would you define "evil" as an adjective

@Crassus1 “she acted evil, however, this was only her selfish actions, not her.” if i am correct, evil is being used as an adjective in this statement. no human is born bad, we are all born with instincts on some level with certain things. as in hitler knew he would’ve felt resentment for what he had done if he saw it first hand, so he stayed away from it. his instincts in his subconscious knew he was wrong, yet his conscious mind forced him to steer away. to hide from his instincts, and to do what he thought was right in the moment instead of looking within. proves that humans do somewhat know right from wrong, it just depends on circumstances on whether they act on their instincts in this or not. and even if they don’t, they shouldn’t be dubbed as bad or “evil” people. maybe not even people “in the wrong”. just absent minded in the time being.

@MakeAChange You put it very well, I agree. No human is born bad (but also not good). We are all born with natural insticts like survival for example (insticts are just like the nature, neutral). Our instincts can tell us about right and wrong at a lower level. But these feelings are not enough. "Where the senses fail us, reason must step in." However reason alone is also not good because in the absence of feelings, it can make you harmful to really scary things. Without reason we would be like animals, without feeling we would be like robots. So we need both: feelings+reason. They regulate each other... and I would say that mastering the balance between emotional thinking (aka heart) and rational thinking (aka mind) is key for living a virtuous life. P.S. You can also use the term adverb. "She acted badly"- badly is an adverb (cause it describes a verb, in this case "acting") "Her action was bad"- bad is an adjective (cause it describes a noun, in this case "action") In the case of the word "evil", the adverb and the adjective have the same form ;)... Dang, what an evil word

Yeah, everyone has a certain amount of potential to become good :)