Is most evil the product of good intentions?

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For example, genocide was seen as a 'necessary evil' by the colonialists and Nazis in order to build the kind of world they saw as ideal. The Inquisition was seen as necessary to save souls. Cruel and unusual punishments have been implemented as punishment because people saw/see them as justice and necessary to keep the peace. War is seen as a pre-emptive measure of defense.

Do you think most evil is born of well intentions rather than selfishness? I mean, all behaviour can be viewed as selfish in some way or another.

It's often explained as being the result of good intentions, but I doubt it.
Some people organisations, politicians, unethical corporations and such are extremely transparent.
They don't even make the effort of properly pretending to be interested in the good of the people under their control.

At the moment, we have a premier who is highly questionable in terms of competence and intentions.
His policies have led to our economic situation rapidly deteriorating, but he explains it as 'something for the greater good that will turn out better in the end'.
It's very obvious when he's lying, though, and he certainly is. Basically, I think he's looking at trying to sit out his term without a vote of no confidence.
There are no good intentions in that.

I think that that is how the people who start it will justify it, but at the end of the day I think that they are just horrible, cruel, dare I say evil, excuses for human beings.

But that applies mostly to the leaders. The "Greater Good," be it based on religion, communism, fascism or some other ideology or creed, is a good way to control the average people who actually run the concentration camps, prisons, torture chambers and what have you. It allows them to see the victims not as other people but as The Enemy. It demonizes and dehumanizes them. So you are no longer hurting a human being, you are hurting an inferior being.

Summary: The Greater Good is not the reason that these atrocities are started, but it is how the leaders control the masses and make them participate.

Good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion, which is often used to justify the most heinous of atrocities by invoking "The Greater Good".

The richest fertilizer for evil behavior is the belief that it exists, beyond being merely an abstract concept.

We see evil as a hateful and vile thing that we ought to feel hostile toward. We see it as something that we ought to fight against and inflict harm on. Indeed, we may develop a concept that evil ought to be turned upon evil. We thereby not only justify doing evil, as long as it is being done against evil, but evil then becomes a moral imperative. When we then decide that a person is evil, it therefore becomes a moral imperative to do evil against that person, whether or not that person is actually evil. We then lose sight of why we decide that certain things or certain kinds of people are evil, so we have then created a system of morality that does evil.

If the adherents of such a system have convinced themselves that good is their moral system, and they have become convinced that evil is anything that challenges or thwarts any aspect of their moral system, these people become doers of evil. Their moral system becomes one that is little else but evil. Evil is therefore bred from that which was mistaken for good.

On the other hand, I have found from long, hard experience that most people are fairly well-meaning, once you have scratched beneath the surface, even if they were jerks on the surface, even if they were jerks a fair distance beneath the surface before you got to the quick, even if they still have jerky qualities once you have gotten to know them. I think that the human race is not only capable of being rehabilitated, but I think that the human race is filled with nothing but promise, in the long-run.

And that, I think, is my strongest safeguard against becoming a doer of evil: that is to simply believe, deep down, that people are good, even when I am confronted with considerable evidence to the contrary.

Most evil is caused by a mindset that says "the end justifies the means" if we look at the evils of the various communist offshoots they were all done under the pretense that the evil was justified since they were working to create a completely egalitarian utopia. The authoritarian sooner or later results in an "the end justifies the means" thereby creating evil under the pretense of doing good. One of the core sayings of Christianity is "The Lord works in mysterious ways" which is a religious way of saying "God does evil because it will create greater good in the end".

Let me put it to you like this, if witches in fact do exist and witches kidnap babies, cause plagues and torture people, then it is logical to seek out witches and prevent them from doing so. However, if witches do not exist, you are in fact killing human beings because of a wrongful premise.

Even a serial killer I think, will justify their act by thinking human beings or in some cases a certain kind of human being are evil or somehow not worthy of being cared about.

It all depends on what's evil to you. if something is motivated by selfishness or even shallowness, i'm bound to think worse of it than someone who truly believes they're doing good. If someone just pretends they're doing good, though, i'd consider it twice as evil than people who don't claim to have such motives.

(The road to) Hell is paved with good intentions. This proverb may have its roots in a statement in French by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (c.1150): "L'enfer est plein de bonnes volontés ou désirs." ("Hell is full of good intentions or desires.")

Good intentions do not make an act good; nor do bad intentions. An action is good or bad based on its consequences. Utilitarians (like J.S. Mill) would ask whether an action led to a net increase in happiness (however that's defined) for people. If so, it was a good action.

Most evil is the product of malice under the guise of good intentions. This is called having an agenda. Some evil may be the product of good intentions, but more often than not the refusal to adjust accordingly to unintended consequences is because one stubbornly refuses to change his/her worldview in fear of hurting their pride or their sense of certainty. This is called willful ignorance. Although it isn't nearly as bad as having an agenda, it is still pretty self-serving.

at least most people with an outspoken agenda are aware of that fact,