257: The Psychology of Evil

More at http://philosophytalk.org/shows/psychology-evil. True evil seems easy to recognize: the killing of innocent children; assigning whole populations to death by gassing, or napalm, or aerial bombing. These acts go beyond the criminal, the mean, the bad. But what is the psychology of evil-doers? Are they monsters among us just like the rest of us, with one screw a little loose, or are they radically unlike us? John and Ken probe the evil mind with Simon Baron Cohen from Cambridge University, author of "The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty."