Hi readers.
Our class time was taken up mostly by presentations this week. Two of them stood out to me, one that looked at police officers who kill individuals on the job without repercussions, and another that looked at the death penalty. The interesting part about these topics is that they don’t necessarily include the intent aspect of evil but they are evil in nature. As a disclaimer, one could make the argument that police officers who kill people intend to do so, but for the purpose of this post, I am going to assume that police officers have the intention of protecting their communities. Similar to this, capital punishment has the purpose of achieving justice and remedying harm, but in a paradox, it takes someone’s life.
I think on the heels of the coronavirus that is being spoken about in the media, I think that those against vaccinations (who I will herein refer to as anti-vaxxers) have the best intentions but end up causing a lot of harm. Part of this is taking misinformation as gospel, and making others ill by not vaccinating themselves or their children.
I stumbled upon an article that was about a four-year-old from Colorado died of the flu. After the child passed away, it was discovered that the boy’s mom, Montoya, was actively against vaccinations (Evelyn, 2020). For some context, this year’s flu season is very severe and has taken 70 lives. 70 isn’t a huge number, but when you take into consideration that it could be prevented, it seems astronomical. The deceased’s mother had received a prescription for the flu shot for her children prior to her son’s death, but refused to fill it, and chose to attempt to treat her son with peppermint oil and herbs (Evelyn, 2020). Doctors prescribed the vaccine after two of her son’s siblings got sick, but after not receiving the vaccine, Montoya’s son came down with a fever that resulted in a seizure (Evelyn, 2020).
I admittedly had some trouble finding an academic article that was relevant to this topic, but I settled on an article about child neglect. Certain instances of child neglect are not intentional, but they end up being some of the most evil. Neglect is defined as an act of parental omission that put children in danger. The research states that while neglect does not always have immediate negative effects on children, it has harmful lasting effects and it is harder to prevent (Friedman & Billick, 2015). The neglect usually occurs when the child’s needs are not understood. This relates to the fact that low parental education is correlated with child neglect (Friedman & Billick, 2015). I think this relates to the Montoya case, where she did not understand her children’s needs, and this was catalyzed by miseducation.
I have been operating under the assumption that everyone who commits an evil act has at least some kind of sinister mentality, but I was proven wrong during the presentations today. Our class agreed that the intent to cause harm was really common in the commission of evil, but I argue that that isn’t always true. Usually, when a police officer kills someone on duty, the intention wasn’t to murder, it was to protect the community. Regardless, taking a life is cruel. Further, the goal of capital punishment is to achieve justice and bringing remedy to a victim’s family, but it does remove a life.
References
Evelyn, K. (2020, February 7). Advocates blame anti-vaxxers after four-year-old boy dies from flu. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/07/colorado-boy-dies-flu-anti-vaccine-facebook-groups.
Friedman, E., & Billick, S. B. (2015). Unintentional child neglect: Literature review and observational study. Psychiatric Quarterly, 86, 253-259.
Jessica's Evil Psychology 
Hi Jessica,
I am intrigued by your comment, “taking a life is cruel”. Is it always evil to take a life? Certainly, if the working definition of evil behaviour is to “intentionally behave in a way that harms others”, acts like murder and unwarranted capital punishment are undoubtedly evil. However, what about physician-assisted suicide? Is that act, which unquestionably takes a life, cruel? Is it evil? In my opinion, and using my working definition of evil, physician-assisted suicide is not evil. If a competent person with a terminal illness is suffering and has no hope for recovery or treatment, it may be the more compassionate choice to allow them the option of a humane death via physician-assisted suicide. In this case, the physician is taking a life, but are they evil? I’m curious to know what you think!
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Hi Jessica!
It’s interesting that you say that the intent to cause harm is a part of evil, but it isn’t always true because police officers usually kill with the intention to protect the community. However, in the case talked about in class where the black teenager was shot multiple times, and then the police falsified the details of the police report, I think this is evil. I’m not sure why this group of officers would cause this level of harm to the teenager, and maybe it was unintentional somehow, but the act still seems evil to me. They shot this innocent kid way more times than needed and then lied about it, which seems evil. I think your point is interesting though that officers usually kill with the intention to protect the community, so it can’t be evil. Maybe we should change our definition of evil a little bit because I would say killing black teenagers multiple times for no reason is pretty evil even if the intention wasn’t to make him suffer.
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Hi Terri. I think your point about certain police officers being evil is very interesting! I’m not 100% sure I agree, I find it really hard to make a distinction between a cop who is killing to try to murder someone (like the boy who was shot multiple times) and who was trying to protect their community. I do definitely think that the amount of times he was shot was extremely excessive, but I don’t think any of us can truly say what we would do if we felt threatened. Perhaps this police officer felt extremely threatened and that’s why he fired so many times.
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Hello Jess, I think it is interesting that you point out the lack of the Intent aspect in these topics this week, I didn’t even consider this. I do think in most cases police officers have the intention to protect their community for the most part. The blue code of silence discussed this week does tend to shine a bad light on police officers unfortunately. But I think it is an important topic to consider as maybe not all police offices are “good”? The blue code of silence can have many different levels or extremes. I think that turning a blind eye to a small scale thing isn’t “bad” per se however, there is a line that should be drawn with this code of silence.
Furthermore, I like how you discused the idea of anti-vaxxers although they may the intent to do good like the police officers, not vaccinating their children can have consequences. What do you think, is this an evil act?
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Hi Jessica,
While I don’t believe that a cop who shoots a person of colour has any good intention at all, I have been made aware of some reasons why cops so easily shoot a person of colour that would help your argument that their intent is to protect. There are biases wired into us meant to keep us safe that make us fear those of us who are different. Although by the age that someone is a cop I would like to believe that those cops would now have replaced those biases or worked against listening to them on actual experience with those who are different, it is, in fact, possible that these cops have not had enough work on replacing this bias. In this same class, it was seen that due to this bias many ordinary people in a game will respond faster to “shoot” someone who is a person of colour holding no weapon than to someone who is white and is holding a weapon. Cops should be trained to not react this way, which can be done, but it possible that these cops shooting people of colour are just responding more like the average person. I think a lot of social dynamics play into whether these reaction times and biases should be taking place, but for sure with someone exposed to the wrong or not enough social dynamics, I can see your point that they may just be protecting themselves as well as society (even though I do not agree that this is always the case or believe that it is right in any way).
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Hi Jessica, Thank you for your post! I really enjoyed reading it!
I agree with you on the anti-vaxxers point. As someone who had a fever as a 2yr old that resulted in a seizure (not from being not vaccinated) I can attest to the imperativeness that vaccinating your child has. I got sick just from the common flu, after reading that case I am so thankful that I was/am vaccinated because it could have been so much worse! and with the spread of COVID-19 we see truly how imperative it is to vaccinate because if this had been something we could have prevented there would have been so many less lives lost.
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