Based on the excerpt from Evil: A Primer, William Hart goes through a painstaking process in trying to pin down the definition of evil. “Despite five thousand years of recorded human wrong doing, despite all that out prophets and scholars and poets and undead homicidal maniacs have told us, the origin and definition of evil remain impossible to pin down” (Hart 2). Hart tries to define evil and in the end he is able to boil the root of evil to a lengthy list of criteria and an empty definition. This inability to define evil manifests itself in out literature, politics and especially our entertainment. Films like The Dark Knight portray how evil can range from a true hero that is seen as a threat or villain to society to maniac that kills steals and wreaks havoc with no reason, like The Joker. In The Dark Knight Christopher Nolan portrays the difficulty in defining evil and the many forms evil can take in our society through the complex relationships between Batman, The Joker and Harvey Dent.
William Hart describes clearly how difficult evil is to define and it is apparent if you were to look up the word evil in the dictionary. In the Oxford English Dictionary there are dozens of definitions for the word including; “To harm or injure; to ill treat; to affect with disease; to fall ill or be sick; something morally depraved, bad, wicked, and vicious”. Hart’s process in trying to define evil includes many criteria that make it difficult to understand. In the end Hart simply defines evil as “a human act that causes harm to innocents and attacks our basic moral order” (Hart 22). This unsatisfactory definition doesn’t leave much to work with. The reason that Hart’s definition is so inadequate is because, like Hart stated, for over f...
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... such as mob bosses like Maroni, maniacs like The Joker, and heroes like Harvey Dent and Batman. Nolan uses heroic exceptionality and the importance of social order to show us that evil can be portrayed in many forms and “good” can take forms that are false. Batman’s public image as the evil doer or the villain shows that we cannot define evil in a simple or correct way, that sometimes good is bad and bad is good.
Works Cited
1. Hart, William. Evil: A Primer: A History of a Bad Idea from Beelzebub to Bin Laden. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2004.
2. McGowan, Todd. "The exceptional darkeness of "The Dark Knight"." Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media (2009).
3. Riegler, Thomas. "The "Mastermnd": Personifications of Evil in the Cinema." inter- disciplinary. 16 3 2010 .
4. The Dark Knight. Dir. Christopher Nolan. 2008.
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In “The Dark Knight: An Allegory of America in the Age of Bush”, Ron Briley comparing the terrorist acts of 9/11 to one of America’s top movies, The Dark Knight Rises from the Batman series. Briley gives many different ideas of similarities and a lot of good points, but is not as clear as you would hope someone would be when trying to persuade and convince you to believe such an allegory. Briley is comparing many of the main cast in The Dark Knight to many real people who are not as great as these characters are seemed to be.
The archetypal theme that evil exists in all humans is exemplified in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In all humans there are prominent examples of good and evil, depending on the way in which they are viewed in society. The stereotypical perfect fairy tale expresses that perfection is attainable and permits people to enhance their physical features through magic or witchcraft, which in reality is inaccurate. Humans also naturally posses a duplet identity that suggests that one is evil while the other is pure. For example, Dr. Jekyll is perfect while Mr. Hyde is pure evil. Furthermore, mortals occupy a trigger that is within them that wants to manifest into a monster to relinquish their inner demons
Evil is defined as being profoundly immoral of malevolent. Being faced with evil is can be challenging especially when the person is unaware that it is present. In the Play Othello by William Shakespeare and the novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Othello and Ralph are faced with the challenge of evil. Othello is an outsider of Venice coming from South Africa that is sometimes ridiculed based on the color of his skin; yet earned the title of respect with his intelligence, courage, and skills. Othello’s insecurities and him not knowing when evil is looking him straight in the eye, leads him to his down falling. Ralph... Both characters in the beginning act in a moral manner, until the end of the stories when both characters have been
In the world of the living, evil is not inherent and can change or influence a person’s aspect of the world based on the community they are in. Evil is the force of things that are morally wrong and the matter of suffering, wrongdoing and misfortune (Merriam Webster). Evil is not inherent because an evil community can change or influence a person’s way of thinking, can consume people the more they are relinquished to it, and can mold a person when a person has power or feel a certain way. Furthermore, evil can be claim as not inherent from reading about Josef Mengele, Stanley Milgram, and the Stanford Prison Experiment. I will persuade my point that evil is not inherent from the sources that depicts the claim of evil.
Evil is defined in multiple meanings. In J.R.R Tolkien’s works he describes evil in a variety of different ways. Like in the award winning book The Hobbit, evil is a big factor for the entire journey for the dwarves, Bilbo, and Gandalf, and without the evil in The Hobbit the quest wouldn’t have been necessary. So the question is what is evil? The definition for evil is profoundly immoral and malevolent. Tolkien portrays evil in The Hobbit by using trolls, goblins, fire breathing dragons, and other mythical creatures.
A villain is truly just a victim whose story has not been told. This is clearly shown in The Creature in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” When the story states, “My organs were indeed harsh, but supple; and although my voice was very unlike the soft music of their tones, yet I pronounced such words as I understood with tolerable ease. It was as the ass and the lap-dog; yet surely the gentle ass whose intentions were affectionate, although his manners were rude, deserved better treatment than blows and execration.” (Shelley, 134). The monster feels that people should judge him on his personality and emotions inside instead of his appearance on the outside. Frankenstein’s creature is truly just a victim of circumstance. No individual is born evil,
Claudia Card sees evil as “foreseeable intolerable harms produced by culpable wrong doing”, thus she builds her theory and views around this definition (Card, pg.3). She distinguishes wrongdoing and evil acts by the consequences and results of those actions, and to what extent they harmed the victim. She sees evils as actions that ruin people’s lives that achieve significant harm that causes permanent or difficult to recover from damage (Card, pg.3). However, she does make a point of differentiating evildoers from evil people, as they do not always have the purposeful intention to do the evil that they cause (Card, pg.4).
Has evil always been around, or did man create it? One could trace evil all the way back to Adam and Eve; however, evil came to them, but it was not in them. When did evil become part of a person? No one knows, but evil has been around for a long time and unfortunately is discovered by everyone. In many great classics in literature evil is at the heart or the theme of the novel, including Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird. This classic book demonstrates the growing up of two children in the South and illustrates the theme of evil by showing how they discover, how they deal, and how they reconcile themselves to the evils they experience.
The lines that define good and evil are not written in black and white; these lines tend to blur allowing good and evil to intermingle with each another in a single human being.
There are two kinds of evil, moral and natural. Moral evil is things like murder, rape, stealing, terrorism, etc. Natural evil is things like suffering and unpleasantness typically as a result of moral evil. Evil is that which has no power of its own. Evil is darkness, a negation of light. Its power is in us, in our fear of it, in that we consider it a "something" worth responding to.
Wicked, dishonorable, corrupt, villainous, malicious, and vicious all have one thing in common: they define evil. A person or a group of people that display these qualities are often to be defined as evil beings or creatures. Two people that have many of these characteristics developed within them are Iago from Shakespeare’s Othello and Lucifer from the Bible. Both Iago and Lucifer are developed with many “evil” qualities woven intricately into their character development. The representation of each “evil” characteristic gives them something they have in common allowing the description and portrayal of both Iago and Lucifer in literature show the audience they share common “evil” characteristics and that they lead to chaos and downfall.
The world is filled with many different words, some harder to define than other. One of these difficult words is considered by many to be evil. The definition of the word evil depends entirely upon the reader or writers perspective upon the word. The most innocent and simple ways that of would define evil is by simply saying that evil is the exact opposite of good, but what is good? In order to understand the true meaning of evil, we must first be able to describe what good is, what has goodness produced, and what has evil truly defied.
Myers, William Andrew. "The Banality of Evil in an Age of Terrorism." Considering Evil and Human Wickedness (2004): 33.