Do you have to be intelligent to be evil?

At the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's department of cognitive science, a research team explored the logic of evil by programming a computer character named "E" that "acted on" or was motivated by a definition of evil. The Rensselaer crew defined an evil person as one who decided to commit an immoral act without prompting and carry out the plan with the expectation of considerable harm. When reflecting on those deeds, the person would either find incoherent reasons for his or her actions or think the damage caused was good. (Of course, this isn't the only definition of evil. What's labeled as heinous behavior has absolutely no standard across cultures or even among different groups of people with a particular culture.)

The researchers then programmed the character to do something "evil": give a depressed boy a gun. And not just any gun, but the one that the boy's brother had killed himself with. Extremely morbid, and -- chillingly -- a real event used as a case study in the 1983 book "People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil." Note that in reality the people who gave the gun were the kids' parents. The researchers then proceeded to ask E why it would do such a thing. It was rather straightforward: The boy wanted a gun, so E gave him the one he had.

So an almost entirely logical explanation that basically either ignores or leaves out any kind of emotional response. Is that all evil is? It certainly matches up with some of the traits of psychopathic people, a subgroup of people with antisocial personality disorder who are commonly identified by a lack of remorse or empathy or are simply emotionally blank.

A 2009 study in the Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment of 840 cases of psychiatric patients found that "clients with psychiatric disorders who were [sic] lower verbal IQ scores were more psychopathic; patients with greater verbal intelligence were less psychopathic" [source: DeLisi et al.]. So we can't say for sure that intelligence, or at least verbal intelligence, is needed to plot and go through with an evil act -- if psychopathy is our definition of evil.

Which begs the question: How do we know what evil is?

It usually doesn't take long to watch a movie and figure out who the villain is. In pop culture, our villains are pretty cut-and-dried. They care about no one. They engage in acts that willfully hurt innocent people. If they have a chance to harm more people or inflict greater pain, they take it. They're also usually the less-attractive star of the movie, if you're really searching for a clue.

But in real life, evil seems much less clear. Naturally, people in different cultures -- and even within them -- have their own take on evil. If you're not buying it, imagine yourself on a jury. You have to decide if a criminal's horrid and debased actions deserve a harsh sentence, or if they deserve the harshest sentence. And what you see as the worst action -- just for an example, shooting a child -- might strike someone else as less evil than torturing an adult to death.

That's one reason that forensic psychiatrist Dr. Michael Welner is conducting a survey to determine a baseline for "depravity" in the criminal justice system. It hopes to establish a standard for how juries can determine depravity and eliminate bias in sentencing. In the United States and other nations, a particularly harsh sentence can be given to those who have committed acts the jury sees as especially heinous. Welner's site, DepravityScale.Org, invites people to take a survey that asks you to decide, for instance, whether intentionally disfiguring someone is more or less depraved than intentionally hurting a lot of people.

And this brings us right back to intellect. Could any act that much of society sees as unconscionable be considered "intelligent," considering the consequences of the action and the enormous social stigma attached?

We might not ever know if intelligence is inherent in evil, but perhaps we can at least determine how it's categorized and punished in our society.