Some points of clarification to my post on evil, in response to Paulie at Never Trust a Hippy.
First, it is not for me the crucial thing here (the 'outstanding piece of evidence') that many of the victims in Rwanda did not cry out but remained silent when facing the prospect of their own murder. That's just a fact that appears in the passage I quote from Theodore Dalrymple - a terrible fact, but one on which I passed no specific comment. Crucial for me is something different, and I'll come back to it.
Second, since Paulie wants to link me up with Catholic doctrine, I had better say that I don't regard evil as some sort of metaphysical force beyond those specific human impulses that I take to constitute it. It's the same as if I were to say that compassion exists. This doesn't mean that I think there's a supra-entity - 'Compassion' - over and above the compassionate dispositions and acts of individual human beings.
Third, Paulie says that 'Nurture obviously has the whip-hand over nature...'; but I make no claim one way or another about which of these has the whip-hand. I merely say that, in the matter under discussion, nurture isn't the whole story.
Fourth (what for me is the crucial thing), nurture can't be the whole story, because external conditions, socialization, acculturation, politics, whatever, could not work to produce the effects that they sometimes do on human beings - like genocide, murder, torture and other cruelty; hatred, envy, malice; being willing to take unfair advantage of others; being indifferent to the sufferings of others; being willing to betray them, defame them and much more of the same sort besides - if the nature of human beings as a species were not to some degree receptive, open, to these things. They could not, otherwise, have any purchase upon the human world. You can't get a cat to be a vegetarian or get a human to live solely on fresh air. At doing each other down, however, human beings have shown themselves to be richly talented. How could they have developed these talents if there were no corresponding inner potentialities within their make-up to build upon?