this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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me_irl
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"I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I've come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It's the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy."
-- Gustave Gilbert (After interviewing Nazis post-WWII)
This is borderline using genetic arguments, ironic for Nazis. If people have learned to suppress their feelings the incapacity can be strong but is not genuine.
That's literally the whole field of behavioral economics.
Also, economists don't care about individual human behavior. That's not what economics is. Economics is the study of broad trends in large populations. And for the most part, modeling these trends as people trying to maximize their own utility function is a useful tool to explain things.
Also also, the point of science is to be measureable and falsifiable so that hypotheses can be tested and disproven, making the predictions of the field more accurate over time. Economists create falsifiable hypotheses. Often they are disproven. Economics gets better at modelling the real world over time. Economics is a science.
"All models are wrong; some are useful."
a lack of empathy isn't the source of corruption, money is. a lack of empathy is just a necessary pre-requisite.
If you want to understand evil you'll need to observe it in yourself. Secondhand observations will not do.