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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9735846" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Exactly. There is at least one more category. Possibly two.One is, "I couldn't be bothered." They are callous, not casually cruel--they are simply unmotivated by the suffering of others, or at least the suffering of others unlike them. Cruelty requires the desire to harm. Callousness simply requires sustained indifference. It is shockingly easy for ordinary people to be callous towards others, because genuine compassion is difficult to sustain, and empathy for people who are very different from you is a skill one must learn, not a guaranteed bedrock element of human behavior. (None of this is news to you, of course; it just needs to be said.)The other is the banality of evil, as a category. The people for whom doing monstrous things is a punch-clock affair, which they either compartmentalize so effectively it never hurts them, or genuinely feel no negative feelings about in the first place. Either way, they may even knowingly participate actively. From what I hear, we see this on display with the employees of Lex Luthor in the new Superman film. They are willing, active participants in several monstrous things, including being accessories to the outright murder of a completely innocent person killed solely because the man had a one-time positive interaction with Superman. They aren't innocent bystanders nor deceived ordinary people who will go back to being innocent bystanders once they realize the truth.Further, to be clear, at least in the United States, military officers and enlisted personnel are permitted (or, in many cases, legally obligated) to refuse orders which are illegal. So giving the excuse "I was just following orders", at least in the United States, is explicitly not a defense. That would in fact an admission of guilt if those orders are subsequently determined to be illegal in a court martial.</blockquote>

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