Rethinking Evil

Serial killers. Serial rapists. Sexual predators. Parents who serially abuse their kids. Kids who serially abuse their parents. These are people who are doing evil things. Not simply criminal. Stealing a bag of potato chips from a corner store is criminal, not evil. Walking into a corner store, raping the cashier and stabbing her seven times, then going home, cleaning up, and sitting down for dinner with your family…now that is evil.

Over the past several weeks, I have been gorging on true-crime podcasts and television shows. My favorite is a documentary series on the Investigation Discovery channel called Evil Lives Here.

Consuming this content has changed my views on “evil” people. I think many people who commit heinous and horrific crimes have far less choice in their actions than I originally thought. Moreover, taking an overtly moral approach — calling people like this evil, is counterproductive. Instead, we need to take a clinical approach where people are judged to have a disorder predisposing them to harm others.

Let me explain.

In each episode of the Evil Lives Here series, the friends and family of an evil person sit down in front of a camera and tell an audience about their experiences. A mother recounts watching her psychopathic son grow up to be a sadistic killer. A son describes how his mother poisoned to death several of her…