Does Evil Exist?

During our discussion of Grendel I brought up this question. I think that there is no such thing as evil. For example, a murderer does not act without his own justifications. All of us have a threshold where we would begin to commit terrible crimes if we were pushed to that limit. These murderers simple posses a different threshold than we do. This simple means that they have a different values set than we do. This means that every action taken by the murderers is justified in their own mind, even if they acted to hurt someone else they feel justified in their action. They did not do it simple for the fun of it, but instead found a reason to commit the crime. Since they have personal justification I think that it stripes them of being evil. It just means that they hold different values than we do and different thresholds for when they use violence.

Another scenario that is brought up in a discussion like this is the killer that kills for the hunt. These kinds of people do not respect life. In their own twisted minds the life of a human is not worth preserving. In many ways a lot of us have a similar problem, when most of us see a cockroach our first instinct is to kill it. In other words, we do not respect the insect's right to life. In the same manner the unemotional serial killer kills humans. Since he has no empathy he does not understand the pain he puts people through and thus is unable to understand the extent of his crimes , thus he is not evil. The serial killer just holds different views on the value of life.

So if this is the case why would we call people who behave like this evil. Well, we do it because they committed one crime, they deviated from the values that a human must posses in their society, for example I think that the definition of evil was different 10,000 years ago, mass slavery was socially acceptable but try that today.The word evil is defined by each society and is then used to produce a judicial code. In other words laws are meant to encapsulate the values of the majority and exclude the values of the people on the extremes. Those that are on the margins is what we like to call "evil".


P.S.

I am not justifying acts of violence, I am simply defining evil. Since I live in this society I would have to define the killers described above as evil but only in the context of their society because only their society can label them as evil, In other words evil is another way of saying outlier in a society.