Phil 005 (Evil - UCR) Final Study Guide (Quote Identification)

Doris (excluding his Milgram/Zimbardo summaries )

"A persistent theme in accounts of the Holocaust is the perpetrators' "ordinariness." Matters could hardly ever be otherwise. It takes a lot of people to kill 800,000, 6 million, or 100 million human beings, and there just aren't enough montrous things; if this were the case, our history and prospects would be much brighter. A plausible conjecture, just as with Milgram's obedients or the Stanford guards, is that a very substantial percentage of perpetrators in the Holocaust had previously led lives characterized by ordinary levels of compassion."

Arendt

"When he said in the police examination that he would have sent his own father to his death if that had been required, he did not merely to stress the extent to which he was under orders ,and ready to obey them; he also meant to show what an "idealist" he had always been. The perfect "idealist," like everybody else, had of course his personal feelings and emotions, but he would never permit them to interfere with his actions if they came into conflict with his "idea

Staub

"Research on helping in emergencies has shown that, when a number of people are present, responsibility is diffused, and each person is less likely to help" Another consequence is what Bibb Latane and John Darley call pluralistic ignorance: people tend to inhibit expressions of felling in public. In an emergency, the fact that all bystanders are hiding their feelings may lead them all to believe that there is no need for concern and nothing need be done. Hiding reactions is also common when suffering is inflicted by agents of society on members of a minority."

Staub

"Certain child-rearing practices produce submissiveness to authority to a tendency to devalue the powerless. These practices usually stress conventional values and make children unwilling to acknowledge in themselves impulses or feelings regarded by society and thus by their parents as undesirable-anger. All human beings have these feelings. and it is destructive to lose awareness of them. People who do not acknowledge these feelings in themselves tend to project them onto others and experience hostility or moral outrage."

Staub

"Some people learn strategies of resolving conflict by aggressive means. Research indicates that aggressive behaviors persist from childhood (as early as age eight) into adulthood. Some researchers believe that aggression become self-perpetuating because children learn aggressive "scripts" or cognitive schemas, representations of reality that serve as blueprints for aggressive behavior. Fantasies may also fuel aggression."

Rachels

"At the Blair Brothers Ranch, No. 534 ate grass and was given corn and alfalfa hay to fatten him up. In his last 6 weeks at the ranch, he put on 148 pounds. After being shipped to Poky Feeders, he would never eat grass again. His diet would be mostly corn and protein supplement, "a sticky brown goop consisting of molasses and urea. "10 Corn is cheap, and it pro-duces "marbled" beef, although it is not what the animals naturally desire. In a grisly sort o forced cannibalism, the animals are also fed rendered cow parts. The animals could not live on this diet for long-it would "blow out their livers," said once of the feedlot operators. But they are slaughtered before this can happen. The diet is effective, however: the animals weigh more than 1,200 pounds when taken to the slaughterhouse."

Rachels

I believe a better explanation is in terms of the overall difference between how scientist and animal-rights advocates think about the nature of nonhumans. Defenders of animal rights tend to see the differences between humans and nonhumans as slight. They frequently emphasize how much the animals are like us, in order to argue that our ethical responsibilities to the animals are similar to our responsibilities to one another. Animals are pictures as intelligent and sociable creatures who live their children who experience fear and delight, who sulk, play, mourn their dead, and much more. So how can it be denied that they have rights, just as we do?

Haidt

In the second scenario, Scott offered subjects $2 if they would sign a piece of paper that said: I, ____, hereby sell my soul, after my death, to Scott Murphy, for the sum of $2. There was a line for a signature, and below the line was this note: This form is part of a psychology experiment. It is NOT a legal or binding contract, in any way. Scott also told them they could rip up the paper as soon as they signed it, and they's still get their $2.

Fromm

"Because of the close connection between sadism and masochism it is more correct to speak of sadomasochistic character, even though the one or the other aspect will be more dominant in the particular person. The sadomasochist has also been called the "authoritarian character," translating the psychological aspect of his character structure into terms of a political attitude. this concept finds its justification in the fact that person whose political attitude is generally described as authoritarian (active and passive) usually exhibit ( in our society) the traits of the sadomasochistic character: control of those below and submission to those above."

Fromm

"Mental cruelty, the wish to humiliate and to hurt another person's feelings, is probably even more widespread than physical sadism. This type of sadistic attack is much safer for the sadist; after all, no physical force but "only" words have been used. On the other hand, the psychic pain can be as intense or even more so than physical. I do not need to give examples for this mental sadism. Parents inflict it upon their children, professors on their students, superiors on their inferiors - in other words, it is employed in any situation where there is someone who cannot defend himself against the sadist. (If the teacher is helpless, the students often turn into sadist.) Mental sadism may be disguised in many seemingly harmless ways: a question, a smile, a confusing remark. Who does not know an "artist" in this kind of sadism, the one who finds just the right word or the right gesture to embarrass or humiliate another in this innocent way. Naturally, this kind of sadism is often all the more effective if the humiliation is inflicted in front of others."

Crimes and Misdemeanors

"While we're waiting for a cab, I'll give you your lesson for today. Don't listen to what
your teachers tell ya, you know. Don't pay attention. Just, just see what they look like and
that's how you'll know what life is really gonna be like."

Crimes and misdemeanors

. "He left a note. He left a simple little note that said, "I've gone out the window." This is a
major intellectual and he leaves a note that says, "I've gone out the window." He's a role
model. You'd think he'd leave a decent note.

Augustine

"For in vice their lurks a counterfeit beauty: pride, for instance - even pride apes sublimity, whereas you are the only God, most high above all things. As for ambition, what does it crave but honors and glory, while you are worthy of honor beyond all others, and eternally glorious? The ferocity of powerful men aims to inspire fear; but who is to be feared except the one God?"

Augustine

"What was it that delighted me? Only loving and being loved. But there was no proper restraint, as in the union of mind with mind, where a bright - boundary regulates friendship. From the mud of my fleshy desires and my erupting puberty belched out murky clouds that obscured and darkened my heart until i could not distinguish the calm light of love from the fog of lust."

Milton

"Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell;/ And in the lowest deep a lower deep/ Still threatening to devour me opens wide,/ To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav'n

Nietzche

. "—The pointer to the right path was given to me by the question: what do the terms
coined for "good" in the various languages actually mean from an etymological
viewpoint? Here I found that they all lead back to the same conceptual transformation—
that everywhere the basic concept is "noble," "aristocratic" in the sense related to the
estates, out of which "good" in the sense of "noble of soul," "high-natured of soul,"
"privileged of soul" necessarily develops: a development that always runs parallel to that
other one which makes "common," "vulgar," "base" pass over finally into the concept
"bad.""

Nietzche

"The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives
birth to values: the ressentiment of beings denied the true reaction, that of the deed, who
recover their losses only through an imaginary revenge. Whereas all noble morality
grows out of a triumphant yes-saying to oneself, from the outset slave morality says "no"
to an "outside," to a "different," to a "not-self": and this "no" is its creative deed." _____

Hick

"There might, indeed, be very great value in a universe of created beings who respond to God in a freely given love an trust and worship which He himself caused to occur by His initial formation of their nature. But if human analogies entitle us to speak about God at all, we must insist that such a universe could be a poor second-best to one in which created beings, whose responses to Himself God has not thus 'fixed' in advance, come freely to love, trust, and worship Him."

Bayle

"The reasons for the permission of sin which are not drawn from the mysteries revealed
in Scripture have this defect: that no matter how good they are, they can be opposed by
other reasons both more convincing and more in conformity with the ideas we have of
order. For example, if you say that God has permitted sin in order to manifest his
wisdom, which shines forth more in the midst of the disorders that man's wickedness
produces every lay than it would in a state of innocence, you will be answered that this is
to compare God either to a father who allows his children to break their legs so that he
can show everyone his great skill in mending their broken bones, or to a king who allows
seditions and disorders to develop through his kingdom so that he can gain glory by overcoming them. The conduct of this father and this monarch is so contrary to the
clear and distinct ideas by which we judge goodness and wisdom and in general all the
duties of a father and a king, that our reason cannot conceive how God could act in this
way."

Bayle

"It is even the case that according to sound philosophy it is in no way necessary that our soul should have to experience evil in order that it might enjoy good, or that it should have to change successively from pleasure to pain and from pain to pleasure in order that it be able to tell that pain is an evil and pleasure a good."

Hume

"It must, I think, be allowed that, if a very limited intelligence whom we shall suppose
utterly unacquainted with the universe were assured that it were the production of a very
good, wise, and powerful being, however finite, he would, from his conjectures, form
beforehand a different notion of it from what we find it to be by experience; nor would he
ever imagine, merely from these attributes of the cause of which he is informed, that the
effect could be so full of vice and misery and disorder, as it appears in this life." _