4 ms·

The judge should quote Eliphas Levi on what evil is. IIRC, Levi argues that evil is about abandoning reason, for reason is what makes us different from animals.

• SeanLuke 5y ago
  Wait, what does reason mean precisely then? This sounds half-baked. Let's say I have the preverbial lever which kills someone but gives me a million dollars. Is it reasonable for me to increase my own utility by pressing the lever? Thus would Levi say it's not evil to do so?
  • addingnumbers 5y ago
    My beliefs aside for the sake of argument, one could claim the evil all falls to the person devising that contraption and issuing the reward for that decision.
    • SeanLuke 5y ago
      That seems to let one off the hook. Suppose that if person X dies you inherit his million-dollar wealth. We're out camping and you have the opportunity to do him in. So YOU'RE not evil in taking that opportunity: but rather, what, the campground is evil for making the opportunity happen, or the legal system is evil for permitting inheritance and not universal surveillance?
  • akomtu 5y ago
    Exactly. What you've described isn't evil. What would be evil is creating a society for those people where all truth is suppressed, all irrationality is praised, good deeds are punished and amoral behavior is rewarded. Basically, making that society as backwards as possible. And if in a few generations people there will embrace that order, because they don't know any better, and start descending into animalism, that would be an example of evil. In other words, evil operates at the soul level, so if you reject the idea of soul, you won't be able to come up with evil or good plans: all acts will be superficial.
• adventured 5y ago
  Eliphas Levi is wrong then. That premise is far too thin to stand, it drops scope. Stalin [insert very bad historical person here] could have certainly utilized reason in the course of pursuing evil actions for example. The scope there is narrowed down to specific actions. If you broaden back out, you can say that Stalin is acting irrational by committing heinous acts in the first place, but that's only the case if you're defining the standard of what is good on his behalf (as opposed to what he may consider good to be). You'd be imposing your standard, the foundation of your morality, on him. Morality depends on first defining the standard of what the good is. From there you can extrapolate the rest, you can construct a system forward. Stalin and I will disagree on the standard of what the good is, and as such we'll reach different conclusions on a lot of things. From his standard, he can take rational actions, make rational decisions that align with his aims - they're rational as it pertains to what he's pursuing, what his standard is. One can entirely disagree with the standards that someone else holds, of course. Their behavior may be evil by your standard for example, and vice versa. You could argue that there is one objective standard for The Good (thus everyone else not following that is immoral to the degree they diverge), however good luck convincing most people to go along with that (it'll never happen). Is putting these people in a gulag rational? Well that depends on what you're trying to accomplish.
  • akomtu 5y ago
    That's some very elaborate dialectics here, but you need to keep in mind that Levi wasn't a modern philosopher, he was a famous occultist and in those circles good and evil are defined very clearly, like the north and the south poles.