Am I evil?

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I'm diagnosed Aspergers and I'm not sure I have even the affective emotional response to either people or animals.

I have no desire to hurt anyone, or torture animals (well not mammals anyway, I will admit to pulling the legs off a few spiders when I was a child and squashing a few flys) so I don't think I'd qualify as a sociopath, but I also don't seem to be emotionally affected by other peoples emotions or physical pain.

I was brought up in a fairly religious environment so I was taught early on to 'treat others as you would like to be treated', 'two wrongs don't make a right', 'don't rise to it', and always wondered why it seemed that other people did not adopt the same system of morality.
I thought if I adopted a 'don't bother them any they won't bother you' stance people would eventually notice that I was no threat to them and leave me alone.

I never wanted to hurt anyone, but a lot of people seemed to want to hurt or at least upset me.
On the very few occasions when I did eventually do something to relatiate I always seemed to be caught and the incident was treated seriously when other people found it easy to avoid being caught or to blag their way out of what to me seemed to be much more offensive actions that I would never even contemplate.

I spent a long time thinking, 'I'm a nice person, why don't people notice' and wondering how the people that went around beating other people up, or slagging them off for fun managed to have so many friends while I who never felt the desire to insult or to hurt anyone had none.

In fact it's left me trying to be so careful as to be paranoid.
I never seem to get angry, I never shout or swear at anyone, I always try to be polite etc so much that I think I probably don't seem to have any personality at all.

I go out of my way to avoid arguing, hardly ever press my case to get what I actually want out of a situation. I'd actually tend to wait 10 minutes, or take a large detour to avoid even saying 'excuse me' to someone in my way.

I also don't seem to bond much with our dogs, so that walking them is nothing but a chore. While I haven't spent much time around cats recently I don't remember them having much of an emotional impact either. Sure you can stroke them, but what does that do for you?
Just things you have to constantly feed and clean up after, I prefer robots which just need the occasional recharge.

Logically I know that people being hurt is bad, and I don't want to actually be, or be seen to be, the cause of it. I think this is partly because I don't want to be punished, partly because I don't want people to think badly of me, and partly because I know I wouldn't like being hurt so that I shouldn't do it to other people.

But if people are hurt by other means it doesn't seem to have any impact on me and I have no idea how to act in a comforting way towards them.

I know this is a very immature attitude to have aged 28, but I don't really see how I can do that much about it. You either feel something for other people or you don't.

I also feel like I suffered a fair bit at the hands of other people and no one seemed to care about me.
I've don't seem to have much of an idea how to go about emotionally caring for other people.

It's just kind of 'not my fault, not my problem, other people know better how to help them than I do'. ;-(

Do I have ethics? I think so at a cognitive level. Probably actually to self-righteous for my own good.
I don't know how hard you can push without risking upsetting someone so I tend not to try pushing anyone at all.
If I do through action or inaction cause someone to be upset I'll also tend not be apologetic, or at least not in a way that makes it appear to them I am actually remorseful.

Mostly it's 'I'm sorry you got so upset' rather than 'I'm sorry for what I did/didn't do'. Partly that's a reaction to not having actually intended any harm in the first place and feeling unjustly criticised for an accident/oversight.

Do I therefore have any empathy?
It would appear not actually. Does that automatically make me a bad person?

We are much alike and no human being is perfect, yet nothing you have shared would cause me to begin thinking you even *might* be a "bad person".

When I was younger I used to think of myself as chaotic neutral. To this day when people tell me I am a good person I question this. I don't know for me if it is the depression or the asperger's that makes me feel like life is a penance.

Perception is the only reality you and I have to go on. If you feel the need to perceive the world as someone else you are never going to be content. Therefore accept that you are not a people, dog, or cat person. Who knows in the future maybe you will bond with one of these creatures or not. Why obsess about it?

I tend to live by the warrior code so when it comes to people I give them respect if they give me respect. If they attack I defend myself. There is nothing evil about defending your person and belongings.

Yes, you have empathy. You're just not recognising it as empathy. When you say a statement like "I have no desire to hurt anyone" that's an empathetic statement. That may sound like a neutral statment, but it's not. You are aware that you can hurt another person--that they can feel pain from you actions--and you've internalized that awareness to the degree that ou associate it with your own choices about your own behavior. You think of the idea of hurting someone, and you have a moral or emotional response that you have articulated as "I have no desire to do that."

You even go as far as to say you've thought about people who do hurt others, and wonder why they have that desire while you don't.

The way a sociopath thinks is quiet different from that. In fact, they don't think about it at all. That you would stop and think "Am I a sociopath" and then compare your behavior to behavior that's demonstratively hurtful shows you are concerned about how your actions affect others. Thats'called being conscientious--you defer to your conscience about how to act towards others--and to be coscentious, you have to have some degree of empathy, of being able to understand how others feel.

A sociopath doesn't act conscientiously. they just act. They do lack empathy, and so they don't have an conscience nagging them about how others might feel if they did this or that. They certainly wouldn't come ot a public forum and ask whether they are a decent person or not.

Now about this:

OK, that's jokingly called a "non-apology apology." Politicians do this all the time-- "I'm sorry if my comments offended anyone." That sort of thing. It doesn't mean you aren't empathetic, but it does show you aren't quite willing to be fully accountable for your actions, and so it's just an insincere apology that says to the person "I won't be accountable for myself, so I just blame you for getting upset." Usually it's because a person get sdefensive when they are confronted with the negative results of their actions and try to rationalize it as not being the result of their actions, like saying it was just an accident.

If you can be aware the person's upset, then you're empathetic. But if you feel squeamish or waffley or evasive or defensive about being accountable for your actions openly, forthcomingly, honestly, that's another issue. That's immaturity. A mature person is accountable for their actions, even if there are results that they didn't intend or foresee happening as the result of their actions. They don't try to make out as the other person's fault for getting upset. A mature person owns their actions, takes responsibility for them and seeks to correct any harm done, even if they didn't intend it. A mature peson would say "I'm sorry for what I did. I did not see that it would hurt you. That was not my intention, but I am sorry that it hurt you." That is an apology.

An apology is taking responsibilty for your actions and all the consequences, intended or unitended, without exception. Anything else isn't really an apology. But not being able to genuinely apologise doesn't mean you lack emathy--it just means you need to grow up. And you can't blame Asperger's for that. Sorry. There's nothing about having Asperger's that would prevent you from becoming an mature adult who take full responsiblity for your actions.

I don't think this is always a matter of not being accountable. Especially for people with AS, who miss social cues and whose own behavior is so often misinterpreted. If someone gets upset with me for something I'm not even aware that I did, or that was not done for the reasons they assume that it was, then I don't actually feel that I owe them an apology at all, and I'm certainly not going to grovel over it. Why should I be held accountable for an offense that either I didn't commit at all, or was not aware WAS an offense in the first place?

I think its just that sort of thing spread over the course of a lifetime, that tends to make Aspies prone to depression. A person can only endure so much frustration and resentment before life itself becomes an endless chore.

I wonder what side I am on too, good or evil. In the eyes of others like my family, I am an Angel. But deep inside I can sometimes have very evil thoughts, like if I had superpowers I would immediately destroy those who taunted me. I spend many hours imagining all the possibilities of death to the people I hate, and feel good about it.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-u-HCHCuHMg[/youtube]

I've known for a long time that it's impossible for me to be morally neutral. Depending on the choices I make, I will either end up being capable of giving my life to save someone else, or else end up being capable of casually murdering another human being. No in-betweens. Good or evil. I don't know why this is; it just seems like I am being forced to take a side, whether I like it or not. Either I value other human beings immensely, or else I don't value them at all. In-between ethical systems in which you are doing nice things because people will like you or not punish you just seem so illogical to me that I'm incapable of following them. As a result of this tension between moral extremes, I'm deeply frightened that one day I may lose my moral compass and flip from one side to the other... that one day I will lose my respect for life and desire to make the world a better place. I am entirely without society-based morality, and have been working from basic philosophical principles ever since I became capable of understanding them at about six or seven years old. That means that I don't work in the framework of society; I don't do good things because other people like them, and I don't do evil things because other people encourage them. Nothing but my own conscience is preventing me from doing something truly horrible... and that frightens me because I know just how fallible I am.

If you can say you don't want to hurt others, because you understand you wouldn't want them to do it to you, you're not evil. This is, for Christians, sort of like the definition of "not evil" actually. If you understand "do unto others" and believe in it, it will never steer you wrong morally. If everyone followed this rule as resolutely as you seem to be, I firmly believe we would live in a much better, and kinder world.

Just because you don't love cats and dogs, or cry at funerals, doesn't make you evil. Evil has to do with what is in our hearts, our minds, and our actions, and I don't see anything remotely evil about you based on what you've stated. There are a whole lot of rapists, murderers, and psychopaths that will swear up and down they aren't evil, but their actions speak otherwise. That you are concerned about it enough to ask the question of yourself speaks to the fact that you have an active and dutiful conscience. You may not have an instinctive emotional response to some things that others do, but evil and good aren't really about emotions. Emotions are neutral, they can be used for good or evil.

Sociopaths don't see anything but objects. There's no difference between another person and a potted plant and a bag of marbles. They're all just objects, and the sociopath is only interested in them if they can give him something, be it entertainment, pleasure, money, or whatever else. You may not have any emotional response to a person or a cat or dog, but you at least realize that they are living things like you capable of feeling hurt. Sociopaths don't know or care one way or the other.

An evil person does not care about what they could possibly do to others, in fact, an evil person would do very harmful things others just to get what they want without even bothering to think that they hurt them. To the evil person, people and animals are mere tools to get what they want or if they get in their way of what they want, the other's their suffering is what they want.
An evil person does not understand that living beings have the right to live and let live. An evil person is so self absobed that they cannot think about anything but themself and no amount of suffering that they cause others will make them feel remorse for what they done, the only remorse they have is that they were not satisfied in doing so.

You do not seem this way at all, quite the opposite actually

Just because you dont feel that emotional connection does not make you evil, it makes you a person with ASD.

If you were evil, you would think a conscious was a handicap, not ethics to live by

I have known three people [similar in a lot of ways] who had extreme reactions to art or poetry. Show them a painting, read them a poem and they go into ecstasies, eyes shining, voice filled with awe, OH!! !! So INCREDIBLY marvellous. Doesn't it just pull your heart into the picture, all like that there.

Somebody else - leave me out of it, I am talking 99% of the people I have ever known - looks at the same painting, likes it. Maybe says Really nice, which I could do that, she is one great painter.

Don't tell me only the first group has artistic sensibilities.

Empathy I got. I know pain, I recognize pain in others at least as much of the time as they recognize it in me, I avoid causing it and try to alleviate it in people I care about and at times strangers.

What I do not do is communicate empathy the way some do.

Anyhow - it is easy to do bad, in fact impossble to avoid it all the time, but it takes work to be evil.

I'm very identified with this post, sometimes I feel the same things. I always try to be educated, polite and gentle, but sometimes I think that I'm too "cold" and that can offend or bother the people, giving then a mistaken impression about me, thinking that I'm a narcissist, a mean person and things like that, because all the mentioned I'm usually isolated in the school and other places where the social interaction is important.

I have learned with the time to read and understand the emotions of the people, but I'm very bad to express then myself. It's annoying because if you don't express many emotions you pass as a bad or unfriendly person but if you do your best try to be expressive, most of the time you look "weird", lame and ridiculous. I honestly prefer to have the first picture from the people than the second, althought when it doesn't represent the real me.

I happens me exactly the same thing as you. For my family and some old friends, I'm a very good and talented person, but inside me I feel many times good for nothing and angry for many problems that I have through the life, and I even think in horrible things like killing people (that I hate and has hurt me of course) or the destruction of the humanity, and even I started to think that I would enjoy the last one (even if that would cost my life too XD).