The Scales of Good and Evil

Cliff Pickover

Copyright 2000, 2001, 2002 by Cliff Pickover

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"The Scales of Good and Evil" is a trademarked term.

Below is a list of the "Top Ten" evil people of all time followed by a list of the "Top Ten" good people of all time -- sorted in order of evilness and goodness. Please add your votes. Who would you like to see added to the list? What alterations would you make to the list or the ordering? Do the scales of good and evil balance? If I may have permission to quote you in a manuscript, please give permission in your note to me.

Do not take these good & evil lists too seriously. They are meant only to encourage discussion. Obviously, there are no right or wrong answers, and obviously one person's evil person is another person's good person, and vice versa.

Why is it easier to think of evil examples than good ones? Is it much easier to do something big and bad than it is to do something big and good?

Developing this list was not an easy task due to the complexity of human personalities and the fact that goodness and evilness depend on the perspective of the time. (For example, perhaps many Americans consider dropping the bomb on Hiroshima "good" whereas many Japanese consider it "evil.") On the evilness scale, I gave additional weight to those people who actually enjoyed and personally participated in the utter horror they produced. When compiling the good list, I also considered the number of people killed by the followers of the "good" person during the person's life time.

For both the good and evil list, I also asked myself the question, "With whom would I least like to be in a room, and with whom would I most like to be in a room?"

If you are not happy with this list, drop me a line, because the list changes in response to suggestions from my readers. If you had scales and put Stalin's massacres on the left side, what could you put on the right-hand side to balance it? Extreme kindness and attempts to alleviate suffering? Curing cancer? Ending world hunger? Charity? Elevating the thinking of humankind with respect to human rights? Perhaps the very best people don't seek publicity for their good deeds; these are the unknown heroes who work tirelessly with the poor and the sick. When considering religions leaders, do we need to consider possible negative results that evolved, such as fundamentalist groups that suppress women, or wars or violence motivated by religion or relgious beliefs? If the Inquisition arose out of Christianity, need we consider this in assessments we make?

Repeat: Do not take these good & evil lists too seriously. They are meant only to encourage discussion. Obviously, there are no right or wrong answers, and obviously one person's evil person is another person's good person, and vice versa.

The Top Ten Evil

1. Tomas de Torquemada (pictured here) - Born in Spain in 1420, his name is synonymous with the Christian Inquisition's horror, religious bigotry, and cruel fanaticism. He was a fan of various forms of torture including foot roasting, use of the garrucha, and suffocation. He was made Grand Inquisitor by Pope Sixtus IV. Popes and kings alike praised his tireless efforts. The number of burnings at the stake during Torquemada's tenure has been estimated at about 2,000. Torquemada's hatred of Jews influenced Ferdinand and Isabella to expel all Jews who had not embraced Christianity.

Note: Every Romanian who contacted me said I should remove Vlad from the list. They said he was not evil and seemed to like him. In an effort to understand how our views of evil can be so different, I reproduce an exchange I had with Marius who was born in Romania. Perhaps this will help us understand more generally how the perception of evil can differ from person to person. Other strange discussions on this same web page focus on Bill Clinton and those people who truly believe Clinton was more evil than Adolf Hitler who exterminated millions. (Repeat: Do not take these good & evil lists too seriously. They are meant only to encourage discussion. Obviously, there are no right or wrong answers, and obviously one person's evil person is another person's good person, and vice versa.)

8. Idi Amin - Idi Amin Dada Oumee (born in 1924 in Uganda) was the military officer and president (1971-79) of Uganda. Amin also took tribalism, a long- standing problem in Uganda, to its extreme by allegedly ordering the persecution of Acholi, Lango, and other tribes. Reports indicate torture and murder of 100,000 to 300,000 Ugandans during Amin's presidency. In 1972, he began to expel Asians from Uganda. God, he said, had directed him to do this. (Acutally, he had been angered by the refusal of one of the country's most prominent Asian families, the Madhvanis, to hand over their prettiest daughter as his fifth wife.) Over the years, Ugandans would disappear in the thousands, their mutilated bodies washing up on the shores of Lake Victoria. Amin would boast of being a "reluctant" cannibal - human flesh, he said, was too salty. He once ordered that the decapitation of political prisoners be broadcast on TV, specifying that the victims "must wear white to make it easy to see the blood". One of Amin's guards, Abraham Sule, said: "[Amin] put his bayonet in the pot containing human blood and licked the stuff as it ran down the bayonet. Amin told us: 'When you lick the blood of your victim, you will not see nightmares.' He then did it."

9. Joseph Stalin - Born in 1879. During the quarter of a century preceding his death in 1953, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin probably exercised greater political power than any other figure in history. In the 1930s, by his orders, millions of peasants were either killed or permitted to starve to death. Stalin brought about the deaths of more than 20 million of his own people while holding the Soviet Union in an iron grip for 29 years. Stalin succeeded his hero Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in 1924. From then on, he induced widespread famines to enforce farm collectives, and eliminated perceived enemies through massive purges.

10. Genghis Khan - The Mongol Temjin, known to history as Genghis Khan (born 1162) was a warrior and ruler who, starting from obscure and insignificant beginnings, brought all the nomadic tribes of Mongolia under the rule of himself and his family in a rigidly disciplined military state. Massacres of defeated populations, with the resultant terror, were weapons he regularly used. His Mongol hordes killed off countless people in Asia and Europe in the early 1200s. He was "known for killing boys and men of captured cities; and kidnapping the woman and girls..." Steven R. Ward (Georgetown University Press) wrote, "Overall, the Mongol violence and depredations killed up to three-fourths of the population of the Iranian Plateau, possibly 10 to 15 million people." Genghis told his comrades: "Man's greatest good fortune is to chase and defeat his enemy, seize his total possessions, leave his married women weeping and wailing, ride his gelding, use his women as a nightshirt and support, gazing upon and kissing their rosy breasts, sucking their lips which are as sweet as the berries of their breasts." (Quote source: "101 People You Won't Meet in Heaven" by Michael Powell and "The Lucifer Principle" by Howard K. Bloom.) "During three years, the Mongols destroyed and annihilated all of the major cities of Eastern Europe with the exceptions of Novgorod and Pskov."

11. H. H. Holmes - built a hundred-room mansion complete with gas chambers, trap doors, acid vats, lime pits, fake walls and secret entrances. During the 1893 World's Fair he rented rooms to visitors. He then killed most of his lodgers and continued his insurance fraud scheme. He also lured women to his "torture castle" with the promise of marriage. Instead, he would force them to sign over their savings, then throw them down an elevator shaft and gas them to death. In the basement of the castle he dismembered and skinned his prey and experimented with their corpses. He killed over 200 people.

Basil the Bulgar Slayer blinded 14,000 prisoners. Heinrich Himmler was the architect of the "Final Solution." Tallat Pasha decreed there must be no Armenians on the Earth. 1.5 Million Armenians were beaten, raped, robbed, and killed.

The Top Ten Good

9. Mohandas Gandhi -- Indian nationalist leader, who established his country's freedom through a nonviolent revolution. (Repeat: Do not take these good & evil lists too seriously. They are meant only to encourage discussion. Obviously, there are no right or wrong answers, and obviously one person's good person is another person's evil person, and vice versa.)

Note that "zygotic personhood" (the idea that a fertilized egg is a person) is a recent concept. For example, before 1869, the Catholic church believed that the embryo was not a person until it was 40 days old. (Aristotle agreed with this 40-day threshold.) Thus, the church did not believe a human had a soul until day 40. Pope Innocent III in 1211 determined that the time of ensoulment was anywhere from 12 to 16 weeks. This means that the Catholic church, for centuries, did not equate abortion with murder. (Pictured at left is a two day old human embryo at four cell stage of development, magnified 260 times.)

Adding to the Evil List

Responses from Readers

For me, when it comes to the most important Good figures throughout history, one has to measure not just their Goodness but, IMO, the degree to which their Goodness inspired or changed others around them. Would this planet be distinctly different had they never impacted either those around them or those coming after them to the same significant degree?

By that yardstick, I'm not quite sure that Baha'u'llah, much as I admire him, would qualify among the top ten, what with the dozens of candidates who have demonstrably done Good for their fellow creatures throughout history. He is certainly among the top twenty, yes, but I don't feel that his influence, salutary as it has been and hardly insignificant, quite rises to the level -- yet -- of a Gandhi, a Moses, a Jesus, or a Buddha. Ultimately, of course, one is dealing with a snapshot of the planet at a given moment only. That picture could always change. But right now, the planet as a whole, while impacted to a degree by Baha'u'llah, does not display his impact to the same degree that it does that of certain others (would that it did!).

Similarly, when it comes to the degree to which certain benefactors may be contingent upon the cultural context in which they arose, I'm more prone to single out figures who more clearly, IMO, established a more or less unprecedented pattern of altruism in their benevolent concerns than in those who may have taken singular advantage of a role already afforded them. Thus, IMO, I might suggest that, for instance, the Dalai Lama could not have existed without Buddha himself, nor Mother Teresa without the example of Jesus himself, nor Abraham Lincoln without the challenge of those cultural pathbreakers in the 17th and 18th-century who first made the political soil rich enough for the American Experiment to spring up in the first place.

Given these parameters, while they might disqualify candidates like Baha'u'llah, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, or Abraham Lincoln, they distinctly reaffirm the centrality of Buddha, Jesus Christ, and Moses. Gandhi and King we'll put aside for a moment.

We have here three definite Titans (with seven slots still to fill):

Moses was one who significantly amplified the moral obligations intrinsic to law itself in a code that still resonates in many respects today, although generally assumed to have been established way back around 1200 B.C.E.! Many maintain that law itself as a concept would look altogether different today were it not for this man's example.

The first well-documented figure to live out an apparently blameless life and to do so in tandem with an espoused ethical doctrine that urged harm to no one -- thus a figure who acted and said precisely the same in all weathers within a context of caring always for the other -- was probably Siddhartha Gautama, known better as Buddha, 6th-5th centuries B.C.E.

And Jesus was unique in an outlook that encompassed the moral obligations of each individual human being toward each and every other human being without exception. Thus, on an individual level, he seems more willing to give every person, no matter her/his past, a second chance to an extent that is arguably greater than any other comparable figure. Jesus is at as selfless a level as anyone in this lineup. Only a tiny, tiny number in this group are within hailing distance, IMHO.

What of the remaining seven slots? Well, the first legislator who formulated the principle that those who cannot help themselves ought to be protected from -- at least -- _avoidable_ harm, if possible, through the protection of the law -- a law in which the weak would be given some protections against the strong -- was Urukagina, a Sumerian lawgiver from ca. 2300 B.C.E. I'd say Urukagina would be the earliest figure who ought to be viewed as being "unique" in his own way.

A figure as apparently as upright as Buddha who both walked and talked his doctrine faithfully within a context of public life, not just of the individual, was Confucius, a contemporary of Buddha's.

And, for many, the great pioneer in formulating a systematized approach to ethics itself would be the Athenian philosopher Socrates, of the late 5th century, B.C.E. He too appears to have "walked the talk" of an upright life and doctrine before his summary execution.

Around the middle of the first millennium A.D., Mohammed's life traces a remarkable transformation, from increasingly impatient warrior, to a life centered on violent raids and general aggression, to an unexpected return to Mecca, where he refuses to carry a weapon of any kind or to allow his followers one and ends up, at great danger to himself, changing the region where he lived from one convulsed by endless feuds to one where people could live in relative harmony.

Roughly a thousand years later, John Locke appears to have been the first in the second millennium C.E. to urge an empirical approach to experience. Implicitly rejecting an obligation to accept knee-jerk assumptions of any majority, Locke urged study and contemplation for oneself. He also urged the importance of certain freedoms we view as fundamental today. Democracy today could not exist as we know it without the contribution this man made to the human comedy. So I would view Locke as a more central figure than Lincoln ultimately.

In the nineteenth century, wars grew more and more apocalyptic as technology grew more and more fiendish in its pursuit. Deeply alarmed, a new way was urged by a Russian genius who was both an inspired author and an upright human being: Leo Tolstoy. A pioneer in the philosophy of non-violence, Tolstoy established a pattern of peaceful co-existence that flourished in the example of a few others in the twentieth century, including Gandhi and King.

We now have 9 figures in all. They are, in chronological order:

Urukagina

Moses

Buddha

Confucius

Socrates

Jesus

Mohammed

Locke

Tolstoy



For some, the most profound utterance on the human condition is the Hindu text, the Bhagavad-Gita. The date when this was written is in dispute (6th/5th century B.C.?), but some ascribe this to a certain (apparent) genius at synthesizing many different concepts and ideas, Vyasa.

Perhaps the first figure to articulate political freedom in a way and a context one can relate to today was Solon, the Athenian lawgiver, who also lived around the same time, I believe(?).

In the C.E. era, we have perhaps the first figure to maintain outright that all are equal, in so many words: the Roman jurist Ulpian. "So far as the Civil Law is concerned, slaves are not considered persons, but this is not the case according to natural law, because natural law regards all men as equal." This may be the first known formulation of the concept of natural law, which has come to function (sometimes) as a counterpoise to tyranny. He also enunciated the principle: "The precepts of the law are the following: to live honorably, to injure no one, to give to every one his due." For its time, it was something new to place these as paramount concerns rather than merely guiding ones.

And now for Gandhi and King: In the first half of the twentieth century, a simple man in India, Mahatma Gandhi, brought one of the great empires in world history to heel through non-violent means. His example, partly influenced by Hindu philosophy in texts like the Bhagavad-Gita and partly by the example of Leo Tolstoy, inspired a whole nation to throw off an imperialist yoke and live free.

Finally, a whole people who -- to the country's shame -- did not live free, though dwelling in an assumed democracy, were finally afforded greater rights than their forebears (although still not made entirely equal to their compatriots) through the tireless efforts and eventual martyrdom of an apparent follower of Gandhi, of Jesus, and of Locke: Martin Luther King, Jr.

To choose just one amongst these towering six altruists may be impossible. One could perhaps argue that, with Hammurabi being an arguably transitional figure between Urukagina and Moses, Hammurabi is probably to be relegated to the next ten along with Mother Teresa and so on.

However, Vyasa is certainly a strong candidate, being a profound synthesizer of one of the chief global religions and a philosophical forebear of Gandhi.

Solon is in many ways the Ur-democrat (small "d"), making him arguably as essential as Locke.

Democracy could not exist without the concept of equality, so Ulpian is pivotal here, too, although one could argue that Ulpian could not even have been possible without the prior example of Athenian democracy -- hence, Solon.

Gandhi is the first one who had to carry out the Tolstoy philosophy on a practical globally transformative level, so one could claim him as central to the human condition today, even though Tolstoy was partly conditionally foundational for Gandhi in turn.

King, arguably, has three distinct forebears already: Jesus, Tolstoy and Gandhi.

That leaves us, IMO, with at least two figures whom I find it impossible to ignore: Vyasa and Solon. This is why I am pretty much stumped in my choice of either one as the tenth. If I were choosing a dozen instead of ten, both Vyasa and Solon would be easy, but then the 12th would become a difficult choice between Ulpian and Gandhi -- possibly Gandhi, but.........