Michael Welner - The Depravity Scale

The Depravity Scale

Welner has pioneered a multilayered effort to achieve scientific-legal standardization of evil crimes and everyday evil acts. The Depravity Scale research, as it is known, is research which incorporates forensic science, law, and public input; it constitutes criminal sentencing research which incorporates public opinion. Through the Depravity Scale research, Welner has used public web-based surveys to weave public consensus into an evidence-driven Depravity Standard for distinguishing heinous crimes that warrant more severe punishment from those that do not. Many other psychiatric professionals, however, have questioned the logic of trying to codify a concept as inherently subjective as "evil".

Welner has also devised the CIEEO (Clinician's Inventory of the Everyday Extreme and Outrageous), a standard for application in clinical psychotherapy to distinguish everyday evil and intent that warrant clinical attention. "Most people's lapses into bad behavior don't qualify as evil, he believes. A normal person might exhibit some of Welner's criteria — ‘choices not to remedy another's suffering,’ for example. But it would be evil only in an extreme case, such as choosing not to help someone who had just been sexually assaulted".