5 ms·

That's the point. What the Paris attackers did makes them bad people. It's not up for debate.

bitslayer 11y ago
Surely you can see that they think the exact opposite. In order to do something like that, they have to convince themselves that they the good guys, and it has to be done to "purify the evil in the world" or something. The truth is that people are not inherently bad. Evil feeds on itself; if you insist on calling them bad, then you are falling into the same trap that they did. Hopefully you wouldn't act in such a heinous manner, but Western societies kill thousands of innocents all the time, and it is masked with the same rationalizations; if a drone strike kills someone, we define them as a bad guy.
- pavel_lishin 11y ago
  > The truth is that people are not inherently bad. I don't know about that. I'd argue that most people don't think of themselves as bad, but it doesn't make them not-bad. And humanity definitely has base instincts - if we didn't, we wouldn't need governments and police.
  - delish 11y ago
    > but it doesn't make them not-bad. I disagree. I've never found a coherent absolute ethical framework. Not even "Don't kill people." When anyone is arguing that something is bad, that person has to appeal an authority or belief. Often the reasoning leads to utilitarianism: "If we want society to continue, we should ban murder." But that's still an if/then statement. Beneath the if/then is an appeal that society is good or desired. > And humanity definitely has base instincts - if we didn't, we wouldn't need governments and police. This viewpoint becomes popular with Hobbes in the 1600s. I disagree with the term "base instincts," which negatively connotes those things. I'll change it to "randomness"; i.e. in a society of nondeterministic people, some will try to kill the others. Government and police try to reduce that kind of randomness. But from that same randomness we get music, science, justice. I'm speaking loosely of course. I think of my American government as social contract, not as protective parent.
    - johncolanduoni 11y ago
      > I'll change it to "randomness"; i.e. in a society of nondeterministic people, some will try to kill the others. I think "randomness" is even worse, because it makes it sound like these actions could be expected from anyone at anytime. Statistically, a small portion of the population is responsible for most of the violence, through repeat offenses. Also, in many situations there are clear warning signs (e.g. mentally ill with clear homicidal ideation, member of a gang). Are you really arguing that a dice roll is a good fundamental model for human behavior? Nondeterminism (assuming humans are truly nondeterministic) doesn't really matter here, except for the fact that we don't have a way of precisely predicting people's behavior (and may never have one). If it turns out that humans are just complicated, deterministic machines that we can not feasibly predict, the reasons for which we have developed societal structures do not disappear. > But from that same randomness we get music, science, justice. I think it's pretty easy to distinguish between the first two and violence. I agree that the third is a bit trickier. If what you mean is that the exercise of both these and the dispositions-formerly-known-as-base-instincts are a result of allowing for a significant measure of personal freedom, I'll agree with you. But writing human behavior off as having no more structure than a random number generator ignores a lot of predictive and explanative power that we do actually have.
      - Retric 11y ago
        Depending on what you mean by premeditation a large percentage of US murders are more or less random. #Pollution #Cars
        Syrup-tan 11y ago
        GP's point was that human's thoughts and intents are a lot different from randomness. It isn't likely that most people intend on running into pedestrians whenever they get in their car.
        Retric 11y ago
        When someone drives a car into a farmers market there not exactly choosing there victims. In extreme cases you have things like people flying airplanes into someone's home. Sure, they did not intend to crash, but choosing to risk others lives is considered a reasonable thing to do. Assuming your not overly blatant about it.
  - pauloday 11y ago
    Well if you want to get really pedantic, nothing is inherently anything because all meaning is constructed in our minds. Evil is a word humans use to categorize things, not a description of objective reality. I would agree that most people don't think of themselves as bad, but since there's no objective 'bad', wether or not they're 'actually bad' is up to the observer. When a person is labeled as 'evil' it's not a description of them as a person but a description of what the describer thinks of them. Hitler wasn't evil because he killed millions of people, he was evil because the general consensus is that doing the stuff he did makes you an evil person. If one loses sight of this and starts think of evil as objective reality, they're taking their biases and opinions as objective reality, and down that path lies ruin.
    - bad_user 11y ago
      I would argue that, while "evil" cannot be defined in precise terms, you can definitely say that evil acts are unnatural acts that only humans are capable of. Why? Well for one because a natural foodchain is balanced and biased towards long term survival of all the species it involves and towards further creation of life. It's a little ironic that human beings are the only ones in the entire animal kingdom that can choose how to live, we are the only ones able to choose what are, our intellect transcending our DNA coding, yet we are also the only ones destroying our habitat and each other. Isn't that funny? But back to Hitler, if you're trying to make the case that his evilness is subjective, I mean no offense but that's a really dumb argument. Hitler was in no small part evil because his actions were, on one hand irrational, fueling and amplifying his people's potential for hatred and destruction and on the other hand detrimental to the survival of our species and of Earth itself. And again, genocide is not natural. You see, in nature animals kill to eat, but that's to satisfy a basic necessity and not out of some wicked sense of justice and animals can definitely not kill on an industrial scale like we do. Whatever definition for "evil" you find, genocide on an industrial scale is pure evil by definition. And if that doesn't sound objective enough, consider that culture is a part of who we are. We aren't DNA-coded to eat certain foods, or to live in a certain place, or in a certain way. Compared with rats, we can rely on the wisdom of our elders in order to survive. And we've survived this way for a long time. As an example, our rich culture, which includes preconceptions and taboos, is what prevents us to eat each other, or to have sex with our siblings, or to bring human sacrifices to our gods. Actually some preconceptions are more subtle and newer than others - for example the notion that children are fragile beings that need to be loved and protected, instead of someone's property, is pretty new, being popularized by Christianity. So you know, if popular conception is that doing this or that is evil or toxic or taboo, there's a high probability that such judgments are correct, helping us to survive and thrive. Even with all the false positives (which tends to be the lack of tolerance towards people that are different from us), dismissing our heritage would not be wise. Plus usually the guidelines are simple, like being a murdering maniac counts as evil, though somebody should tell those jihadists.
- PKop 11y ago
  Ideas can be bad, which is why we have to be honest with ourselves and call the idea that leads people to conduct evil acts evil.
AlexB138 11y ago
Actually, that's an entirely subjective statement. While I think they're monsters, many people feel that western culture is immoral and downright evil. To people who have seen nothing but the West waging war in their region, these people may appear to be freedom fighters dying for a noble cause. Good and Evil are entirely a matter of perspective.
smcl 11y ago
I'm not sure what you're trying to say or what you think the OP and GP are, but saying "the Paris attackers were bad" doesn't really add much so you might need to clarify.
caoilte 11y ago
In the spirit of rapprochement, how about we say bad vs bad people?
- vmattos 11y ago
  Depends on what you consider as bad people. One could easily say that both east and west worlds are bad or evil
fukusa 11y ago
The problem is that by calling them 'bad people' you imply that they committed the crime because they were 'bad people'. And that's the core of the problem. They were not 'bad people' before they committed the crime. They were just people in need of help. By focusing on how they were 'bad people' you make it seem like you haven't contributed to the problem and there is no other solution then to fight them (using violence) while in fact there are many things we could have done differently and many things we still can do to prevent these crimes from happening. The fact is that it's much easier to blame it on them for being 'bad people' then to look at the consequences of our own actions.
- TrevorJ 11y ago
  This sounds uncomfortably close to victim blaming.
  - fukusa 11y ago
    I am not blaming the victims at all. For example: You could call many people living in the hood 'bad people' because of the crimes they commit but are they really 'bad people' or do they eventually commit these crimes because of the situation they grow up in and the disadvantages they have had in life? By stating this, am I blaming the victims of armed robberies, of theft of murder? Of course I am not. I just think we should have a nuanced rational discussion about how we can prevent crimes instead of discussing about offenders and victims, bad people and good people.
    - TrevorJ 11y ago
      That's fair, I think I see where you are coming from now. I do think, however, that we have to be careful not to remove personal responsibility from the equation. Circumstances can certainly motivate behaviour but we are still responsible for our actions. Suggesting otherwise seems compassionate on the surface, but it can also be incredibly disempowering and corrosive.
      - mercurial 11y ago
Lawtonfogle 11y ago
They carried out a successful military action that furthered their goals. And they killed far fewer people than many of the military operations we have engaged in. They are only bad because they didn't follow our rules of war and weren't us. (We often defend our own who don't follow our rules of war; see all those defending torture of detainees.) They are bad, we are bad. The only not bad involved in all of this is the little children who we both have hurt, and even then those children will grow up and become what the other side considers bad.

Surely you can see that they think the exact opposite. In order to do something like that, they have to convince themselves that they the good guys, and it has to be done to "purify the evil in the world" or something. The truth is that people are not inherently bad. Evil feeds on itself; if you insist on calling them bad, then you are falling into the same trap that they did. Hopefully you wouldn't act in such a heinous manner, but Western societies kill thousands of innocents all the time, and it is masked with the same rationalizations; if a drone strike kills someone, we define them as a bad guy.

pavel_lishin 11y ago
> The truth is that people are not inherently bad. I don't know about that. I'd argue that most people don't think of themselves as bad, but it doesn't make them not-bad. And humanity definitely has base instincts - if we didn't, we wouldn't need governments and police.
- delish 11y ago
  > but it doesn't make them not-bad. I disagree. I've never found a coherent absolute ethical framework. Not even "Don't kill people." When anyone is arguing that something is bad, that person has to appeal an authority or belief. Often the reasoning leads to utilitarianism: "If we want society to continue, we should ban murder." But that's still an if/then statement. Beneath the if/then is an appeal that society is good or desired. > And humanity definitely has base instincts - if we didn't, we wouldn't need governments and police. This viewpoint becomes popular with Hobbes in the 1600s. I disagree with the term "base instincts," which negatively connotes those things. I'll change it to "randomness"; i.e. in a society of nondeterministic people, some will try to kill the others. Government and police try to reduce that kind of randomness. But from that same randomness we get music, science, justice. I'm speaking loosely of course. I think of my American government as social contract, not as protective parent.
  - johncolanduoni 11y ago
    > I'll change it to "randomness"; i.e. in a society of nondeterministic people, some will try to kill the others. I think "randomness" is even worse, because it makes it sound like these actions could be expected from anyone at anytime. Statistically, a small portion of the population is responsible for most of the violence, through repeat offenses. Also, in many situations there are clear warning signs (e.g. mentally ill with clear homicidal ideation, member of a gang). Are you really arguing that a dice roll is a good fundamental model for human behavior? Nondeterminism (assuming humans are truly nondeterministic) doesn't really matter here, except for the fact that we don't have a way of precisely predicting people's behavior (and may never have one). If it turns out that humans are just complicated, deterministic machines that we can not feasibly predict, the reasons for which we have developed societal structures do not disappear. > But from that same randomness we get music, science, justice. I think it's pretty easy to distinguish between the first two and violence. I agree that the third is a bit trickier. If what you mean is that the exercise of both these and the dispositions-formerly-known-as-base-instincts are a result of allowing for a significant measure of personal freedom, I'll agree with you. But writing human behavior off as having no more structure than a random number generator ignores a lot of predictive and explanative power that we do actually have.
    - Retric 11y ago
      Depending on what you mean by premeditation a large percentage of US murders are more or less random. #Pollution #Cars
      - Syrup-tan 11y ago
        GP's point was that human's thoughts and intents are a lot different from randomness. It isn't likely that most people intend on running into pedestrians whenever they get in their car.
        Retric 11y ago
        When someone drives a car into a farmers market there not exactly choosing there victims. In extreme cases you have things like people flying airplanes into someone's home. Sure, they did not intend to crash, but choosing to risk others lives is considered a reasonable thing to do. Assuming your not overly blatant about it.
- pauloday 11y ago
  Well if you want to get really pedantic, nothing is inherently anything because all meaning is constructed in our minds. Evil is a word humans use to categorize things, not a description of objective reality. I would agree that most people don't think of themselves as bad, but since there's no objective 'bad', wether or not they're 'actually bad' is up to the observer. When a person is labeled as 'evil' it's not a description of them as a person but a description of what the describer thinks of them. Hitler wasn't evil because he killed millions of people, he was evil because the general consensus is that doing the stuff he did makes you an evil person. If one loses sight of this and starts think of evil as objective reality, they're taking their biases and opinions as objective reality, and down that path lies ruin.
  - bad_user 11y ago
    I would argue that, while "evil" cannot be defined in precise terms, you can definitely say that evil acts are unnatural acts that only humans are capable of. Why? Well for one because a natural foodchain is balanced and biased towards long term survival of all the species it involves and towards further creation of life. It's a little ironic that human beings are the only ones in the entire animal kingdom that can choose how to live, we are the only ones able to choose what are, our intellect transcending our DNA coding, yet we are also the only ones destroying our habitat and each other. Isn't that funny? But back to Hitler, if you're trying to make the case that his evilness is subjective, I mean no offense but that's a really dumb argument. Hitler was in no small part evil because his actions were, on one hand irrational, fueling and amplifying his people's potential for hatred and destruction and on the other hand detrimental to the survival of our species and of Earth itself. And again, genocide is not natural. You see, in nature animals kill to eat, but that's to satisfy a basic necessity and not out of some wicked sense of justice and animals can definitely not kill on an industrial scale like we do. Whatever definition for "evil" you find, genocide on an industrial scale is pure evil by definition. And if that doesn't sound objective enough, consider that culture is a part of who we are. We aren't DNA-coded to eat certain foods, or to live in a certain place, or in a certain way. Compared with rats, we can rely on the wisdom of our elders in order to survive. And we've survived this way for a long time. As an example, our rich culture, which includes preconceptions and taboos, is what prevents us to eat each other, or to have sex with our siblings, or to bring human sacrifices to our gods. Actually some preconceptions are more subtle and newer than others - for example the notion that children are fragile beings that need to be loved and protected, instead of someone's property, is pretty new, being popularized by Christianity. So you know, if popular conception is that doing this or that is evil or toxic or taboo, there's a high probability that such judgments are correct, helping us to survive and thrive. Even with all the false positives (which tends to be the lack of tolerance towards people that are different from us), dismissing our heritage would not be wise. Plus usually the guidelines are simple, like being a murdering maniac counts as evil, though somebody should tell those jihadists.
PKop 11y ago
Ideas can be bad, which is why we have to be honest with ourselves and call the idea that leads people to conduct evil acts evil.

AlexB138 11y ago

Actually, that's an entirely subjective statement. While I think they're monsters, many people feel that western culture is immoral and downright evil. To people who have seen nothing but the West waging war in their region, these people may appear to be freedom fighters dying for a noble cause. Good and Evil are entirely a matter of perspective.

smcl 11y ago

I'm not sure what you're trying to say or what you think the OP and GP are, but saying "the Paris attackers were bad" doesn't really add much so you might need to clarify.

caoilte 11y ago

In the spirit of rapprochement, how about we say bad vs bad people?

vmattos 11y ago
Depends on what you consider as bad people. One could easily say that both east and west worlds are bad or evil

fukusa 11y ago

The problem is that by calling them 'bad people' you imply that they committed the crime because they were 'bad people'. And that's the core of the problem. They were not 'bad people' before they committed the crime. They were just people in need of help. By focusing on how they were 'bad people' you make it seem like you haven't contributed to the problem and there is no other solution then to fight them (using violence) while in fact there are many things we could have done differently and many things we still can do to prevent these crimes from happening. The fact is that it's much easier to blame it on them for being 'bad people' then to look at the consequences of our own actions.

TrevorJ 11y ago
This sounds uncomfortably close to victim blaming.
- fukusa 11y ago
  I am not blaming the victims at all. For example: You could call many people living in the hood 'bad people' because of the crimes they commit but are they really 'bad people' or do they eventually commit these crimes because of the situation they grow up in and the disadvantages they have had in life? By stating this, am I blaming the victims of armed robberies, of theft of murder? Of course I am not. I just think we should have a nuanced rational discussion about how we can prevent crimes instead of discussing about offenders and victims, bad people and good people.
  - TrevorJ 11y ago
    That's fair, I think I see where you are coming from now. I do think, however, that we have to be careful not to remove personal responsibility from the equation. Circumstances can certainly motivate behaviour but we are still responsible for our actions. Suggesting otherwise seems compassionate on the surface, but it can also be incredibly disempowering and corrosive.
    - mercurial 11y ago

Lawtonfogle 11y ago

They carried out a successful military action that furthered their goals. And they killed far fewer people than many of the military operations we have engaged in. They are only bad because they didn't follow our rules of war and weren't us. (We often defend our own who don't follow our rules of war; see all those defending torture of detainees.) They are bad, we are bad. The only not bad involved in all of this is the little children who we both have hurt, and even then those children will grow up and become what the other side considers bad.