Question: Do you think it could ever be possible to objectively define 'evil' or measure a persons levels of 'evilness' in some sort of empirical definitive way? And if so, do you think there would be any cultural differences in this (i.e. would people from specific countries be more susceptible to being 'evil'? What cultural differences could effect this? Thankyou.

Ben Kenward answered on 10 Jun 2017:

Evil can be hard to define but it’s definitely about morality. Morality is about what is right and wrong, and what is right is wrong is basically what people say is right and wrong – as I scientist, I don’t believe in any objective morality that comes from anything outside of people. We make morality ourselves – the human sense of what is right and wrong is all there is. But there can still be empirical ways to define and measure evilness. We can ask people to define what they think evil is, and then we can measure a person according to that definition. Most people will say something like “evil is extreme moral badness”, so then we can just measure how much extreme moral badness someone engages in.

And as to whether there are cultural differences in what is counted as morally bad, yes you bet there are differences. One famous study found that when asking Hindus in India to order a list of bad things in order of badness, “having a hair-cut the day after your father’s death” came in as most bad (above wife-beating). That kind of hair-cut is apparently not cool according to the Hindu religion, so for a Hindu that’s very morally bad.

So we can’t objectively say that country A is more evil than country B, but we can empirically say that according to the way people in country A tend to define evil, country B is more evil. But country B will probably think country A is more evil.

Differences in what counts as morally bad vary a lot inside a culture too though. Another famous study asked people in the USA and in a south American country (I think Brazil) whether it was OK to buy a dead chicken from a supermarket and have sex with it at home in private. In both countries, most people thought it was morally bad, but there were also quite a few people who didn’t think it was bad at all. They’d say, what you do in the privacy of your home without harming people is entirely your choice – but that kind of morality sounds very strange for many people.