When we think of good and evil the picture appears obvious. The side of good is attractive, righteous and persuasive while the bad side is ugly, flawed and fallible. But does the way we intuitively expect good and evil to work line up with how it is portrayed in popular fiction and the arts? Are literature and film teaching us that might is right or is something else at play?

In this week’s episode, we discuss baddies with special guest Jamie Lear. We speak about Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Thomas Midgley, consequentialism and deontological philosophy, Rousseau and Hobbes and Nick presents a taxonomy for good and evil. Finally, we reveal our favourite fictional baddies.

A few things we mentioned in this podcast:

• Hobbes vs Rousseau: are we inherently evil?
• TV Tropes: Always Chaotic Evil
• How do Orcs breed?

For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email [email protected]

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph and our special guest, Jamie Lear. And this week we're discussing good and evil. Nick, can you help me out for a sec? Who's this guy? Well, he looks

eerily familiar. There's something about this chap I'm not sure about. Who is he? As you know, I'm good, so I thought we'd better get someone evil on. Jamie is a friend of the podcast and actually son of Chris Lear. But the thing is, the reason he's here is that he's a massive geek and has posed a really interesting question, which is about the nature of how we perceive good and evil. I might hand over to him to kind of explain what that is, and then I think we'll move into analysing it. Yeah, it feels like a biggie. Jamie, you have the floor. Yeah, sure.

So the question, I guess, is the way we intuitively expect good and evil to work. Does that line up with how good and evil actually is portrayed mostly in literature, but also in other things? So more specifically, the expectation is that people would expect good to be attractive and kind of righteous, and evil to be this military ugly thing. But frequently in classic literature, the good side is very militaristic, whereas the evil side is actually very persuasive. And that doesn't necessarily line up with what at least my intuition is about how these things should work.

Yeah, so I think we should get some examples so we can put some flesh on this bone.

Yeah, so let's go with Lord of the Rings as a kind of canonical fantasy. So the consensus is that Sauron is the bad guy and Gandalf, say, is a good guy, which I think is pretty unambiguous. And Sauron, you might think of as this military power, but actually he's very good at persuading people. So Denethor and Saruman, and also all throughout the first and second ages as well, the evil side is persuading people to join them despite being A, evil, and B, the kind of weaker side in a lot of ways, whereas Gandalf has on his team a lot of quite strong powers. So Saruman and Denethor, who were good, are very powerful, they have a lot of influence. There's also the high elves and so on. So actually, Gandalf does good via military strength in many capacities. His method of achieving goodness is by exerting military force, whereas Sauron's method of achieving evilness is via sort of corruption and sort of underhanded tactics like that. Okay, here's my question before we get into analysing

this. And it goes the same with the Emperor as well. They always tempt people to the dark side, to the side of evil. What's their programme? What's in it for me to become evil? Because that's what I never really quite... Yeah, and that's what's weird about this is you would

expect good to be much more persuasive because good seems like it benefits people more. But actually, that doesn't seem to be how it works in things like Star Wars and in Lord of the Rings. And similarly, in quite a lot of other things, it's the case that people seem drawn to evil.

Yeah. So I don't know if I'm jumping ahead here, but all this is very assumptive, this kind of narrative, this kind of model. And it seems to me that the assumption is we're good, right? So people, it's like you're being drawn away from what you naturally would be. And so I guess it starts with a very kind of maybe simplistic view of the world. Well, I think you are jumping into

analysis again. Oh, wait, way ahead. Okay. Yeah, I think. But I mean, no, just narrowly, what is the programme? When you sign up with Sauron, what do you get out of it? Exactly. And yeah.

Well, because I was going to say in what's that Al Pacino and guy who did Johnny Utah, Good Looking Hawaiian bloke, Keanu Reeves. Okay. They were in a film where Al Pacino is the devil, right? Right. He's actually disguised as a lawyer. Go figure. But what's in it for him is tempting. It's basically lots of really good times. Yeah. So and I think it is true. The devil plays all the good

sex and drugs and rock and roll kind of thing. Yeah. There's usually a sweetener. Yeah. Of some sort. Like for when the emperor is tempting Darth Vader, it's about revenge, isn't it? It's more about health care benefits. There's the health care benefits. Yeah. There's the power thing. And there's also, there's some kind of revenge on the not being given. And for other people, it's about. Offers to save Padme. And also just sort of general long-livedness. Yeah. But it's also for other people, it's like accelerating their abilities to be stronger than they would otherwise be, you know. The classic deal with the devil. Yeah. Yeah. It's that. So it's very much playing on their human frailties. And also they're in competition with their peers. They're not as good naturally as their, you know, they're not as performant as their peers. So they want to get ahead. And sometimes it's just kind of lying or deceit in some methods. So the Anakin example, I don't think Palpatine was genuinely trying to convince Anakin by offering to save Padme or whatever. That was a lie, but it's nevertheless very capable of getting the results. So maybe it's just the case that the good side is just less good at lying about their, or less good at kind of achieving their goals by convincing people because they just don't. Yeah. They don't lie about it. So. Yeah. Well, because to be good, you have to be pious. You have to be true. So you can't. So you can't lie. You can't say, I'll give you this when you're not. There's no hope of getting that. You've got to want to be good for the goodness's sake. Right. In order to be.

Well, okay. So the first thing I think we want to talk about is what actually does good just

mean on our side, right? Well, one thing I've noticed about goodness is. In real life or in fiction? In fiction this is mostly, but there's potentially parallels to real life is there's the intent of doing goodness. And then there's the, the like actual act. So if you do good, if you do good things to achieve a good goal, that's good. But if you do evil things to achieve a good goal, that's evil. And if you do good things to achieve an evil goal, that's also evil. Right. I'm not sure. If you're a consequentialist, you disagree with that. Yeah. I mean, it's, there's debates about it in real life, but in, in, in, in sort of fantasy, it's often the case that doing evil things to achieve a good goal. Isn't that an antihero? Seems like it's sort of corruptive in some ways. So when you're trying to do a good thing and you, you kind of slip a bit and you do something slightly evil, that's, that's putting you on the path to evil.

Yeah, I think one thing we do need to make sure we're not talking about is people who, who accidentally achieve the wrong goal, the wrong end. Right. So you've, everyone's heard of Thomas Midgley, who was an inventor and core and created both CFCs and leaded petrol, for example. Now he, he created an enormous amount of problems in the world, but he wasn't intending to. And I don't think we want to talk about evil people who set out to do harm and then accidentally do good. I, we do need to think about motivation, but let's, let's just assume that we're talking about people who's, who broadly achieve what it is they're setting out to do, which, you know, most people in fiction and real life sort of do. I'm not sure. I'm, I think there might be a bit more to it. Jamie's saying that if you're, if you do evil to ultimately to create some good end, that makes you evil. But I think that is simply an anti-hero because like actually killing millions of orcs

and things or blowing up a death star, they're naughty things to do. More modern, uh, like, more modern works will tend to, will tend to kind of let you get away with, with having more leeway there. So maybe that's just a change in opinions over time. Um, but the, the killing orcs isn't, isn't an evil act in, in Lord of the Rings. That's good people kill orcs, orcs are evil

and it's good to kill them. Yeah. Um, yeah, I mean, I mean, I, I, and I think, I think, I think it, you know, it makes weirdly, that just makes sense to me, even though it doesn't actually,

when you think about it. But, but there's a nice, there's a simple, uh, legibility to that simple construction of good and evil. So, so I, but, but I, but I want, orcs made or create or given birth to. They, um, so Morgoth in the first stage twists elves into orcs and then they, they're, there's a bit, but they, they, they're kind of a race. They can, they can exist on their own.

They breed, they have families. Can you get baby orcs? Yeah. I just think they give these poor little baby orcs. But they never chose, they never chose to be orcs. They never chose

to be orcs. Baby orcs are always, are basically always evil. And there's, there's, there's no, there's no way of making orcs become good. Are they nice to other orcs? Are baby orcs,

are mummy and daddy orcs nice to baby orcs? Yeah. Well, maybe, but whatever it is that makes them

evil, they, they, they already have that. And there's no process for evil things to become good. We're getting at the, the inconsistency with this, this black and white, very plain.

Yeah. It isn't, it isn't a perfect model of reality. Well, look, sorry, I want to cut through all this by proposing a much simpler definition. Go on. You are evil if your actions cause suffering in a foreseeable way. If you don't do that, you simply are not going to be

able to join the evil gang. I feel like we're going to end up defining everything as evil.

No, in net terms, right? Do your actions in net terms cause suffering in a way that is foreseeable? That makes you evil. And you're good if you alleviate suffering. We're not talking about intentions. No, we are. Intentions are vital. We're assuming the intention anyway. I do want to talk about intentions, but I just want to get out of the way that by and large, someone who, and by intent, so whatever it is they're trying to achieve, assuming that they're kind of being successful, as I said, I don't want to talk about failing to achieve your goal, but you're, you're setting out to achieve something and you're broadly achieving it. If that thing in net terms causes suffering. Now, this is where I think we need, I've got, so basically, and this is based on looking at actual examples of evil people and fictional evil people. I think there are three categories of evil and the first, and I've got, I've even got rhyming names for them. They are pain, gain and campaign, right? So pain is people who are like psychopaths and their suffering is the end in itself, right? They actually want, they just do. So this category is like people who actively want to make their opponents suffer. They want to cause things that are bad, right? Now that, that is pretty rare in terms of, this is the pain one. So that's, there's not going to be many people in real life you would expect. In real life, but in fiction, we'll get to that in a sec, but the gain group, very common in real life. This is people who, they're not motivated by a bigger idea. They just want themselves to be powerful and have resources. Themselves or their in-group. So here you're going to put your Genghis Khan, you know, Mongols are cool and we should, we're going to take over the world and that's that. It's like the kind of political realism version of evil. It's like, look, you know, we just want to be big and powerful because we're Mongols. Why wouldn't we be? You could put in Kim Il-sung and everyone's favourite Hitler, Bashar al-Assad, and you know, like colonialists and imperialists in general. So we've got pain, we've got gain. And finally campaign. This is where you have an ideology that you're backing that is either itself bad or for which you are willing to commit just an overwhelming amount of suffering and atrocities to bring it about. But the point is the motivation is an ideology. And I think we do distinguish between people who are in it for themselves and people who are in it for an ideology in a way that we will get onto. But actually, this is quite common in real life as well. So real life baddies who are motivated ideologically would include perhaps Stalin and Lenin, Osama Bin Laden, Chairman Mao, Pol Pot, and all of your kind of ISIS type people.

How come Hitler's in two, not one? How come he's in gain, not campaign?

Yeah, because I don't think, I think German nationalism is very much we're the in-group and we're going to make Germany great again. It's not really a program of like economic reforms.

There's some conflation there though, because they do have some.

Yeah, there is going to be overlap. But I think, you know, broadly, I would say that, you know, nationalism is basically we're saying we deserve more stuff. And that's what we're doing it for. You could put Hitler, I think you could put Hitler in category one, arguably, because his kind of hatred of the Jews, for example, is a motivator, and he actively wanted to kill them, you know, so that is an end in itself for him. They're not just an obstacle in the way of German greatness. They're actually something that needs wiping out.

This is like, goes across all three categories.

So there's the... It's good to have Hitler in all three evil categories.

It would be bad if he turned up good in one of them. And I think you just reverse all those to get your good version. So I think you're, for which you get your sort of saints, who are the people for whom doing good is an end in itself. I've sort of thought of them as co-operators, but people who want personal gain, but not by impoverishing other people, not even necessarily selfless. You know, like Churchill wanted to beat the Nazis, not because he wanted, he didn't like the Nazis, but because he thought it was better for everyone if the Nazis lost.

They were a bit of an existential risk as well.

Yeah, but what I'm saying is like, he wasn't motivated by hurting Nazis.

Oh no, no, no.

The Nazis were motivated by something that was bad for everyone else. But Churchill wasn't motivated by being, wanting to be bad to Nazis. So, and then finally you've got your sort of ideology, I suppose, kind of people who are sort of philanthropists and trying to promote beneficial ideologies. So that's my category, basically six categories. It's those three. Is it pain, gain or campaign? And the reverse of those for good people. So, and then anyway, I'll just put that out there. So now we know what we're talking about. Let's classify Sauron.

Well, hang on. We're neglecting a different kind of evil. Oh, I feel like I've swept it all up. Well, you led with the assumption that it's consequentialism, that there's a net badness being created.

Okay, give me an example of an evil that creates happiness and pleasure.

So if you take a deontological approach for good and evil, there are inherently good things to do and inherently bad things to do. So you must not tell a lie, even if the person you're telling the lie to would be better off as a result, because the telling the lie is the bad thing.

Okay, I'm going to just come out and say, yes, I'm a consequentialist. And if you bring along a different ethics, like virtue ethics, I would rate that as good and evil based on what outcomes it produces. So for example, you know, radical Islamism, I think the outcomes when that is prevalent are worse. I just think people are worse off. So I don't care what it's based on, particularly, you know, I would say sort of, you know, Buddhism, probably net good, you know, if everyone's a Buddhist, I don't share the beliefs, but it probably has a net good outcome in terms of happiness. So, so yeah, no, I accept that PTS, I'm assuming consequentialism is the right way to judge the effect of someone's actions.

Just just one thing for later in the conversation is I just not, I mean, the parameters and the model that we've set there, I'm not 100% convinced, but I think it's missing some stuff. But anyway,

Okay, but I want to go back to Jamie, because I want to, I just want to use this to try and classify what is going on with your Saurons, your Darth Vader's, Saruman's, you know, the baddies, let's try and classify them. And let's also try and think about what the goodies are most about, because then I've got some real world examples of some of these people where we can, we can try and work out, you know, whether whether there's like, are there more of type A in real life than there are in fiction and so on. But Jamie, what is Sauron's thing?

So Sauron is up with that guy. Yeah. So Morgoth is the canonical evil in Lord of the Rings. And he's, he's kind of Sauron's boss, and he gets banished at the end of the first stage. And he's just evil for the sake of evil, so he'd be pain.

Right. He's just, and he, is he open about that? Does he say to people, listen, I'm just a really bad guy, and come and join my gang?

He does a lot of lying about, but he's, he's, he's just, like, he breaks away from Iluvatar, who's the kind of deity, just because he wants to, he, he wants to do his own thing, and he thinks the way they're doing it is wrong. So it's very much biblical at this point. It's very, and there's some Catholic stuff in there, because, because of Tolkien, but he's, he's just pretty much, I'm going to do, I want to just, just do my thing and, you know. Self-starting entrepreneurial stuff. I like it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Breaking away. Why does it have to be so different? I mean, why does it have to be the opposite? Why can't we all just get along? Why can't, rather than just having, like, a blue logo, why couldn't he just have a red logo? Yeah. Do the same thing. So, and then, and then Sauron has, has definitely got some of that. He's, he's also got more just kind of personal power. The rings of power thing is very much a, I want to have dominion over other people, and that's a kind of game thing.

Yeah, so just, Phil, just to remind me, I suppose, he makes the rings of power, he gives them to people in a, and claims that that will somehow make them better rulers. Or something.

So the rings of power are forged by the Elves, except the One Ring, and the Elves do it because Middle-Earth is fading. So Middle-Earth is becoming less, becoming, becoming less kind of magical. So it's becoming more mundane, and the Elves don't like that. The Elves kind of thrive on magic. So as, as this is happening, the Elves are working to prevent that, and they think these rings of power, these will give us the necessary capacity to maintain our magical power and do good in general.

But I mean, actually, it's really about gaining power, and they happen also to be good Elves, we think.

The Elves, yeah, it's, it's kind of about just gaining power.

It's. So the Elves, four, five, six, they're five of our matrix, of our thing, right? So they're, they're the, they're the good game, is that right? Yeah, gain but good, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that's probably the closest. The rings aren't meant to be inherently good. The rings are meant to just be a tool for which to then, the Elves can then do good.

But as it happens, they want to do good without harming someone else.

Yeah, the Elves, the Elves goodness is.

Yeah, they generally, they don't want to gain through harming someone, they want to gain potentially through helping.

And then Sauron makes the One Ring through which he has dominion over the others, and he gives out as many of the others as he can to as many people as he can to kind of ensure he has as much power as possible.

So he's definitely a gain guy. He's, but he, but he's not, he doesn't have some great ideological program where everyone's going to have collective farms and that kind of. No, but he's serving the guy who does have.

Well, he was for a bit, but that guy's been banished and he's never coming back.

So he's no longer anymore. But let's say that I'm a gain guy, and I know Morgoth is a pain guy. I'm supporting him really because I think he's powerful or he's going to become powerful and I think I can gain that way. Like, because he's not presumably on board with Morgoth's program.

I mean, there's not, I don't think there's a ton of work like dedicated to.

But I mean, like Sauron, but Sauron, he joins in with Sauron again. It's like, because I'm going to sign up with this guy because he's going to win and I can gain that.

He thinks he's going to win and he thinks it's the best he can do. And also he thinks this is the best way of getting a shot at grabbing the ring. So he thinks. He knows some stuff about where the ring might be, and he thinks the best way to get ahold of the ring is by making an army and going and going and fighting.

Yeah, and then we've got so we've got and then if we move to Star Wars, I guess Morgoth and Sauron is very like the relationship between the Emperor and Darth Vader.

Is that correct? Um, so the Emperor seems to just be in it for for just power. So he's yeah, obviously, everything he does is very likely. Everything he says is very likely to be a lie because that's his whole thing. So it's a bit unclear exactly.

What makes the Sith evil? Because everyone says they're evil. But what do they actually do that's evil? It's just officially evil. It just is.

That's just canonically the case is. The dark side is evil and the light side is good. And it's it's hard to I don't think there's a first principles argument in favour of that, except that the way the people backing each side act really.

But what does Darth Vader or the Emperor do?

Well, they do a bunch of invading, making an Emperor an empire and, you know, force choking people and generally they're not nice.

Right. So I guess they've signed up to a code of behaviour that's that's that's kind of is a bit unpleasant.

Yeah, but the the Jedi are fairly happy to execute the Emperor just just before Anakin becomes Darth Vader. And Anakin's saying, no, you can't do this.

That's he's got to be tried in a there's got to be an official process. Yeah.

And that is a weird case of the good guys just say, look, there's no we can't talk this over. The only solution here is military force.

So I think it is ideological, then the disagreement, because it's about what our code of behaviour should be. Almost. It's like it's almost Christianity versus something else. It's like, look, the Jedi think that we should all behave in this way. And the Sith actually have a totally different idea. We should we should do more force choking.

This is none of your options. This is Peter's one where it's it's not actually about the outcome. The good and evil is determined by. What you do. By by a kind of choice.

But no, because I think that would also that would also fits into my sort of consequentialist scale as well, because I think a world where we're all force choking each other is worse than one where we go through judicial processes. So I think that's just straightforwardly utilitarian better as well.

So right. But I think the arguments that the characters of Star Wars would make wouldn't follow yours that follow Peter's idea of this is just the correct thing to do because it is.

Okay. Yeah. Can I pause this for a moment? Well, I just think what I'm really interested in is why we've never really thought about this before. Perhaps I'm generalizing, but I just feel like it's so obvious that Darth Vader's a baddie and Luke Skywalker's a goodie that it amazes me that we never it doesn't seem to be natural for us to sit down and go, well, wait a minute, let's just hang on. Well, actually, how do we know he's a baddie? Which is interesting.

So which suggests if that's the case, that I think what we're saying is when you start to drill down into this, you kind of get some weird, uncomfortable inconsistencies and it's sometimes starts to feel a bit paradoxical and just doesn't feel quite right.

You have to suspend a lot of disbelief.

Yeah, which to me suggests, is it the case that we're looking at this through an incorrect lens or through the wrong framework, right? Because it suggests to me that it's all clear to us that good exists, good stuff exists, bad stuff exists, right? That's just a taken, right? We go forward with that. But I guess, you know.

Well, if you're a moral relativist, it's not so clear. Right.

But even the question of moral relativism suggests this idea of you're still divining good stuff and bad stuff.

I bet a moral relativist would rather someone gave them a nice chocolate cake than punch them in the face. You know, moral relativists have preferences about the way the world is.

What I'm saying is, to me, it feels that we're looking at this through very much the kind of Western, you know, we bring the baggage with us just naturally, right? I remember, so as an example, watching Spirited Away, okay, the Japanese anime film, where a lot of the time you're sitting there going, is this person good or bad? Are they bad? Oh, they've just done a bad thing. They're actually bad. And then go, oh, no, no. Oh, they're actually quite good. They're doing a good thing. And it was all quite ambiguous. And I just, all I'm saying is, are we in danger of just framing, are we starting in the wrong place? Because, and what brings me to that is the fact that when you do start drilling down to this right, wrong stuff, is it starts to just not add up. So therefore, are we using the wrong model? No, I think it adds up perfectly well.

I think it's great, because it's a simple, the literature and film, et cetera, is a good vehicle to explore these concepts. And then you realise it's just as ambiguous and meaningless in real world. Right. So having that cartoonish thing to examine it in.

Well, actually, that reminds me of a question I posed to my history teacher when I was looking at The Rise of the Nazis, which was, why is Hitler a baddie? Right now, hear me out, stop. I said, if Hitler hadn't, like, been so adamant about killing six million innocent people, would he actually have been that big of a baddie? He was kind of, I'll tell you who isn't considered to be as big of a baddie, Napoleon, a bit of an imperialist, you know, and you think, but like, Hitler's a proper archetypal evil guy.

He would have been the good guy if he'd won.

Yeah, I see what you're saying, Peter, he's being worryingly relativistic today. But well, look, I mean, the thing is, I don't think.

If we were all sort of happy Aryans, we'd have thought Hitler would have been a great

guy. But we might also be asking the same questions now as people are about the British Empire and the slave trade and all of those things. I don't think it's unambiguously the case that people, that bad people or evil people, in literature, this happens. In real life, I don't think evil people really exist in the sense of people who think I'm setting out to be bad. More Goths. I don't think there's very many of those, certainly not in parallel.

And yeah, the ones that are aren't the ones making the ones that are usually high profile evil decisions. Ones that are usually classified as clinically insane.

Yeah, but what I'm saying is if you were to say to Sauron, listen, it doesn't seem OK to me that you're kind of killing all these innocent people. He would probably go, I know it's not OK. It's a price you have to pay.

Yeah, Sauron could easily point at things, point to evidence and say, look, I've convinced all these people. I've brought these guys around to my point of view by just talking to them. I soft powered these guys and they love it. And, you know, they've chosen to stick with me. And the Orcs aren't all rebelling and joining the other team. Plus we've got a cool flag. All the guys on the other team, all the good guys, they keep joining my side because they hate the good side so much. We must be on the right side of this.

Yeah, and I feel like, so if we map that into the real world, I feel like that is much more of a common category of real world evil, in a way. But the ideology people, so I mean, going back to your kind of Stalin, Lenin type people, I think are capable of much worse things, in a way. Like, because they, well, actually, you could speculate. Oh, there's a shining, burning truth that they're following. I think the biggest atrocities, because you have to get a lot of buy-in to be able to do that.

And in order to get that, you need some kind of way to generate that.

Right, right. I think because there's so much on that side of the scale. Like, someone who's in it for themselves doesn't have that much on the kind of benefit side of the scale. Yeah, it's good. I want to be powerful. I want Germans to be powerful. Someone who's got an ideology as well on top of that can commit much bigger atrocities to balance the scale. Like, they've got a lot more that they can do to try and...

Yeah, if you say, I'm going to do what makes the Germans powerful, you can maybe get buy-in from Germans, but it's going to be tough getting it from anyone else because obviously you're not working their interests. But if you're saying, I'm going to do what empowers the worker, then there's significantly more workers to draw from.

Where are we? Because, again, I've got a couple of questions which I'd love to return to to pick over some of this, but I feel that we need to...

No, but there's... So in real life, let's... So actually, well, I've got two things. I've got two things. Tell me what you're going to move on to. Firstly, I want to just look at real life goodies and how they differ from fictional goodies. But I've also, I just want to think about in real life what makes people bad. And then we can, and then I think we can begin to wrap up. Yeah, yeah. Okay, go for it. Because I, because actually, I think where I might be going now is that actually these fictional examples actually map to real life, which makes it a bit more of a puzzle as to why we have this slightly misplaced perception. But yeah, so just the interesting, it's just interesting to me that, you know, saying like the psychopath type, the pain type baddie, much more common in fiction. People are motivated by just causing suffering. I think, you know, they're pretty rare in the pantheon of real life baddies. Real life baddies are much more likely to be, you know, nationalists who don't care that much about your suffering because you're not a German or whatever, than people who want to harm you, you know. Now, if you look at real life goodies, who have created lots of good outcomes? Well, they're actually like, you've got quite a lot of them are scientists and inventors and things who are really kind of good because they are pursuing a kind of life that has lots of positive benefits for other people. I put them in the co-operator kind of category.

You could argue between saints and people of the church.

William Wilberforce, Mother Teresa, you know, they're the very rare examples of people motivated to actually just do good. And, you know, and then you have ideal ideologues like Gandhi, Martin Luther King.

Fairly standard people are pretty much all universally in favour of Gandhi. Yeah, I mean, he's essentially a nationalist. You don't get a lot of people who everyone agrees is good who are kind of war hero type.

I don't know. I think you probably, but I want to say about Gandhi is that, you know, he is motivated by Indians, Indian nationalism, say. And, you know, I think what people like about that is he was nonviolent. But so he wasn't putting any suffering on the scale. He wasn't causing any suffering. He was trying not to.

Well, he was intentionally causing himself suffering on the other side of the scale.

Right. So, I mean, but I suppose the, but what I'm saying, I suppose to wrap up on this particular topic, I would say that in real life, people are not generally motivated by good and evil itself. But in fiction, they're much more likely to be. That's a good point. They're much more likely to want to be good or want to be evil. And that's an Indian.

Yeah, so Gandhi is good because of good.

Yeah, whereas Gandhi, good because, you know.

He has a much more.

It just got me thinking about this thing that, you know, you're someone who's done good things and spread goodness. It makes me think of, I know off the top of my head, Marie Curie, for example. Right. Yeah. What if she's an absolute nightmare in real life? It doesn't matter because she's caused. But no, she is. I mean, on balance, the net is lots of goodness. But if you're sort of her work colleague and, you know, and like, it's always you who makes the coffees, but she never does. Right. And actually, you've got, she does it on purpose. And I don't know. I just think this is all quite complex. Well, no, I think it's all quite confusing, potentially. But the other thing it makes me think of, have you ever seen there's a great cartoon book and it's Darth Vader being a dad?

Yeah. Great.

Yeah. Fantastic. It's really nice.

And I mean, as we were saying about Orcs, Orc mums and dads, I bet they still take their little Orc kids to the Orc park. You know, it wouldn't work, would it? If they were horrible and ate their children or something, then the Orcs would die out. So it's just not plausible. Look, to move on, I just. To move on and finish off, and then we've got a question, go for it. Actually, a couple of, there's something else first we need to do. Well, before the moving on.

Hang on, let's just stress this Orc thing, it's going to nag me otherwise. Yeah. Unless they are born sufficiently capable to look after themselves and there's no requirement for parental care, then you could have a society where, because there's plenty of species that will readily eat their own young as soon as they're born. The young just have to scatter and get out. Humans have done that. But keep going. No, I don't think it's a, it's a, it wouldn't be a stable human practice. It's a phenotype thing. It depends on how they're constructed.

No, but let's, but I think it's more the model that if you're evil, it's the evil thing to do is to be nice to another evil creature. That would make sense. If you're evil. The good thing to do would be to eat the Orc baby, but if you're evil, you want the

official evil action for an Orc to do is to raise Orcs to then go to evil. Times negative by negative. It's like it's a raising your child as a Spartan. It just makes them harder, more evil. By being evil to them, you're paying it forward.

So I just, I just, another key element of Jamie's question, which is important. So we've talked, we talked about the fact that in fiction, evil seems to be the tempting side and good is actually the side that, you know, struggles to get followers, but has to win militarily. What, so I had a quick look at what in real life, first of all, in real life baddies actually lose more often than not, not very many. You could say Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim, those, they were one of a few of the people who kind of, because the losers, you know, Hitler, Pol Pot, Tojo, Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Mussolini, Ceausescu, Osama Bin Laden, they all lost. How did they lose? Did their followers turn against? No, they lost because of the military, the good guys. So this goes back to the other bit of Jamie's equation, which is, you know, the military. Isn't it odd that, yeah.

Well, the best way of achieving good in Lord of the Rings and Star Wars is with a massive army. And that also seems to be, Nick is at least claiming that that seems to be the most effective way of defeating evil in real life. Yeah.

So, so now that's, but that's, that's, so that isn't what we would want it to be.

It certainly isn't what I would want it to be.

And I think also, because we, if you think about, and it's interesting, if you think about what's the story we tell ourselves about how we won the Second World War. Well, we're the underdog against the mighty German Wehrmacht, but we used cunning and we used our righteousness to defeat them. No, we were the overdog. We had the Americans on our side. We had the Navy, we had the bloody, we had the ships, we had the men, we had the Russians, you know, and, and what, plus, you know, we, okay, there was a bit of cunning involved, but, but by and large, you know, we were the overdog. Yeah. Poor old German's people we should be rooting for. No, but the, you know. We had the good guys like Stalin on our side, right? Yeah, exactly. So, but it's interesting that, that the narrative that we want is the one where, you know, is, is, is that where, where they're, they're Mordor and we're Gondor.

Interestingly, the reason that good occurs in those situations isn't because people are massively motivated by just doing good. People aren't, people didn't, you know, massively want to go fight Germany. In fact, there was a whole appeasement thing because no one wanted to fight Germany. We'd already done that. It was terrible for everyone. People fought Germany only when they had to sort of thing. So the, it isn't, it's hard to then say we, we sort of did good intentionally. We, you know, maybe evil loses just because evil is sort of unsustainable. People don't like evil happening. Right.

If that's true, then, you know, well that, then I guess this, this is where we probably want to end up now is ultimately, so, so the, the sort of reality matches up in certain ways to fiction, but it gets other things slightly wrong. But the question is, why do real life people get, what's more tempting in real life, good or evil? Discuss. How do you sell evil? And I think, you know, Morgoth just says, I'm evil, sign up and people go for it. In real life, you've got to offer people something else, I think.

Yeah.

And, and, and it's interesting. I can't remember who said it. Here's you, I think, Jamie. Come and join me. I'm Hitler. Germans are going to be great. I'm German. I'll, I'll, I'll buy that for a dollar. You know, join me, Stalin. I'm, I'm, I'm in favor of the workers. Great. You know, that actually people attempted by really a kind of practical consideration of what's, what's in it for them. So, you know, why didn't the French wholeheartedly embrace the Germans, even though they're occupied by them? Okay, there was the French resistance, but they were very much the underdogs. Why didn't everybody join the French resistance? You know, generally people were probably in favor of the French resistance instead of the Germans. But the, the, the point is what they weren't going to do is wholeheartedly start supporting Hitler because he's not offering them anything.

Yeah.

So, I mean, that's it. It seems like in real life, it is a bit more about a kind of competition between what's what's in it for me rather than.

And that definitely isn't what happens in fiction because in fiction, it's very much the case that the good guys do good. Yeah. Because of good. Yeah.

No, exactly. Exactly. All right.

Yeah. Interesting stuff.

I think we'll, uh, we need to wrap up at that point. However. However, I have one.

I'm sorry. I've got one. What? Well, I want to wrap all this together by suggesting why it is that we might have these sort of models that are, you know, these kinds of archetypes about, about temptation by good and evil. Well, I'll tell you, it boils down to this whole nature versus nurture, sort of Rousseau versus Hobbes views of human nature, right? I would characterize the Rousseau view as, you know, humans are basically good, but they're kind of made bad by society. So let's put it this way. If you're a Rousseauian, which, you know, be kind of fundamentally progressive sort of mindset, it's easy to get goodness and you have to work to get badness. And we live in a bad society that has specially configured itself to promote badness, capitalism, greed, et cetera. Whereas the Hobbesian view would be that people are naturally bad and it's hard to get them to be good. And that would promote a conservative attitude because you'd go, well, we pretty much got that sorted. People generally aren't evil to each other. So we should try and retain the institutions we have because they're holding back our, you know, evil natures. And I think this, those fictional stories about being tempted by evil are essentially promote that sort of conservative viewpoint, the Hobbesian view that, you know, without strong, without strength and without strong institutions to hold us back, we will descend back into the quagmire of evil.

But does Hobbes actually, does he talk about things being immoral or does he talk about stuff being amoral? I mean, is it, where does he go on that?

I think he wholeheartedly thinks that, you know, a world of the state of nature is a bad one.

But the evilness there that he's claiming people naturally have isn't an intentionally inflicting pain evilness. No, exactly. It's an intentionally benefiting myself evilness that just happened. It's a selfishness. It's not a human nature of pain.

It's not trying to promote evil. So there we are.

We really, really, really need to stop. However, however. We could go on though.

It's such a good topic.

Oh, we could, we could, we could. However, time for a quick, quick question. Oh, yeah. So it's got to be favourite baddie and it's got to be in fiction because I don't want to start talking about real people that we think are great. Who's your favourite baddie? Who's your favourite baddie? Go for it, Peter. Hans Gruber in Die Hard.

He's so stylish and has got this wonderful, who is he? Alan Rickman. Alan Rickman. Played brilliantly by Alan Rickman. This sort of stage presence. When he first meets him and he comes into that tower and they start taking over the place, he's got this air of sort of sophisticated calm about him. And everything goes like clockwork. He's obviously well drilled his team. They know exactly what to do, exactly when to do it. So he's organised, ruthless and efficient. And he's stylish.

Nice. I'm actually I'm going to sort of piggyback on to you there because I'm going to say The Sheriff.

Oh, so it's got to be our favourite bad guy played by Alan Rickman. Yeah. So you've got to choose Snape. I was going to go with Snape.

But also, I do remember seeing that film and I've not seen Alan Rickman anything. I had no idea who he was. And he's just by a long way the most entertaining thing in that film. But also, I think it also speaks to this thing about evil being quite attractive. Because he's who do you want to hang out with? Do you want to hang out with The Sheriff, Alan Rickman? He's having a great time. Or do you want to hang out with boring Kevin Watts's chops being Mr. Nice Robin? Boring. So yeah, that's my one. Let's have Nick, then Jamie.

Favourite bad guy. I actually and this is very pertinent. I'm going to go with the aliens from Aliens. I'm perhaps alien from from from Alien if I was limited to one or the Alien Queen. The argument being, well, I think they're interesting because I don't think the aliens are particularly evil. They're just animals doing things when no doubt, you know, a bunch of tigers would behave similarly. If you were trapped on a space station with a bunch of tigers, why you would do that? I don't know. But, you know, and yet we really the films really push you to anthropomorphize them. Yeah. And, you know, even their design and everything is designed to make you think of a kind of monstrous person. But, you know, if you thought if they looked cuddly, if they were furry and pink, I don't think they'd be as scary. But the point is, you know, they are such a great bad guy, the alien. But I mean, you know, yeah, think of think of it as an as a wild animal. Yeah. And, you know, maybe even more tempted to give it some cat food.

I don't know. Yeah. It's a good example that Gremlin's a very good bad guy.

Dragons in general are great bad guys. Smaug is probably the example that first comes to mind. Dragons are just really cool bad guys that they they're not human, which is I think I agree with Nick that having something that isn't quite human is good. But they have and they have this kind of greed thing and they have they're also powerful and dragons are just cool. So, yeah, I really like just the way dragons work in in kind of media and stuff is is really exciting to watch. And yeah, awesome.

And I think there's a there is a there is a theory, isn't there, that dragons are a kind of representation of our archetypical dinosaur model. And the reason we find them scary in every culture has invented them is because we have basically have ancient software in our brains to recognize dragons as scary. Yeah, that's pretty cool. They're essentially pterodactyls.

Yeah, it's a nice shout out to the bad guys at the end, though. I like that. Right. OK, let's stop there. Thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I've been here with Nick and Peter of Aleph. Oh, and a special thank you to our special guest, Jamie, for joining us. I want to find out more about you, but I've got quite a good picture. I think you have.

Yeah, I think you can extrapolate. I think I can. Yeah, yeah.

So thank you very much, Jamie. And until next time. Bye-bye.