[a separate response, since my other reply is absurdly long, and deals with only one issue ... ] > There's your mistake. You think that bad outcome implies bad

[a separate response, since my other reply is absurdly long, and deals with only one issue ... ] > There's your mistake. You think that bad outcome implies bad intentions. It doesn't. I don't for a moment think bad outcomes imply bad intentions. But I do think bad (e.g. exploitatively avaricious) intentions are more likely to lead to bad outcomes than good intentions are. What I meant was that I was inferring not-good intentions from all the raping, killing, and violent suppression of dissent. > How do you know that they didn't honestly think that killing a lot of people would result in good? I am taking it as necessarily true that it is not-good to kill people who are not an imminent personal existential threat. Thus most atrocities are not genuine instances of "doing good". > You seem hung up on Stalinism. While it does have the record in shear numbers, it isn't the winner in percentages. Evidence? > And, there are plenty of other folks who will go the same route. For example, it's not hard to find environmentalists who are hoping for a population crash. Do you really believe that none of them would push things in that direction? Depending on what you mean by "crash", it's not hard at all to find such people -- I'm personally hoping that the world's population ethically decreases to more sustainable levels. But I'm not hoping that anyone dies prematurely. I'd just rather that people chose to have fewer kids. This doesn't even entail that I "know better" -- when people are richer and have easy access to birth control they use it and birth rates go down. As for "pushing in that direction": you actually think environmentalists who have an actual influence on policy would work to bring about a population crash, by e.g., encourage starvation in Africa or an increase the spread of AIDS?