I work with prisoners and that has forced me to reevaluate the concepts of good and evil. When you work with child molesters, rapists, murderers, drug dealers, etc. every day you begin to really see another side to the human condition and I struggled with it for awhile. I read the book, "The Righteous Mind" by the psychologist Jonathon Haidt. His extensive research on moral foundations was invaluable. The six moral foundations he found that permeated just about every society have expanded my understanding of why I percieve some actions as inherently "evil" even when I lack a rational explanation.
His evolutionary psychological explanations for how the human psyche developed for survival within groups has led me to develop a "person within culture" perspective.
Most of what people consider good and evil is really just a matter of cultural differences, particularly across different socioeconomic classes. The street culture and institutional culture differ considerably from main stream American culture.
The one exception are anti social behaviors which display a disregard for and violation of the rights of others. Those behaviors seem to tend to originate from developmental problems, typically in childhood and are manifested as personality disturbances in adulthood.
What I believe to be true is that a person's freewill extends to the point that they are aware of how their environment and circumstances influences their thinking. In that regard, when an individual chooses to act in a manner he or she recognizes is damaging to themselves or others and makes no effort to change that process, that is evil. A lot of my job is making prisoners aware of how their thinking has been influenced by others, their past, and their beliefs and how that has led to behaviors which were damaging to themselves or others. Whether or not they choose to change their thinking for the better is entirely up to them.
