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It turns out Mark Twain didn't say the quote that I was thinking of. Instead, it was Clarence Darrow who wrote the original version: "All men have an emotion to

It turns out Mark Twain didn't say the quote that I was thinking of. Instead, it was Clarence Darrow who wrote the original version: "All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction."

unsupp0rted 4y ago
I'd wager not all men. I have never read an obituary notice with great satisfaction and I hope I never do. Some men realize that life is fleeting, there is no good and evil, and when things go badly enough with someone all you can do is shrug and walk away. Violence doesn't help (unless you're a nation-state) and, for me at least, there's no relief nor joy in vengeance. Revenge is a dish best not served.
- fooster 4y ago
  "there is no good and evil" That is a very very strange sentiment. There certainly are good and evil people. There certainly are good and evil acts.
  - mjr00 4y ago
    > There certainly are good and evil people. An extremely small percentage of people throughout history have been purely good or purely evil. The vast, vast majority are somewhere in the middle. Unfortunately, too many adults have been raised by Marvel movies and want to label everyone in the world as "good" or "evil" with no nuance.
    - scottLobster 4y ago
      The argument put forth isn't that there's a spectrum of good and evil, it's that good and evil don't exist. Presumably along the naturalist lines that we're all just animals doing animal things and morality is a useless fictional construct. An idea I find rather naive.
      - marginalia_nu 4y ago
        What is the measure of an idea though?
        kelseyfrog 4y ago
        The measure of ideas are whatever people can be convinced they are. The trick is to make it sound like it's not you that's saying it. We launder it through God, society, reality, and it comes out sparkling clean to everyone who's gullible enough to believe it. It's a trick, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work.
      - ryandvm 4y ago
        You lay it out so nicely and then rebut with "nah"?
        scottLobster 4y ago
        I'd argue that it's a form of nihilism, and that nihilism itself is at best benign and at worst destructive. You can't build a functioning society or legal code based on "good and evil don't exist, we're all just animals". Even acknowledging that partial truth you eventually have to choose a subjective value system to make moral decisions. Perhaps it's a somewhat useful perspective in evolutionary science/research, but that's as far as it goes. I wouldn't recommend it as a life philosophy unless you just want to be an ascetic hermit, and there's a reason ascetic hermits are viewed as more zoo animals than anyone of importance, and they aren't very common or influential. Not that a true ascetic would care, their entire existence is eating their own tails to feel superior.
        unsupp0rted 4y ago
        > You can't build a functioning society or legal code based on "good and evil don't exist, we're all just animals" Of course you can. As long as the animals we are have the ability to understand the consequences of their actions, to themselves and others, and make rational choices about that. I wouldn't put in prison or on death row a person who killed even a hundred people but functionally has an IQ of 45. That person likely couldn't make rational choices and couldn't understand what they were doing, why they were doing it, or what would happen next. Whereas I would incarcerate a person with a 100 IQ who drove drunk in a well populated city, whether or not they hit someone. Good and evil don't have much to do with either case.
  - Tr3nton 4y ago
    [dead]
  - theredfury 4y ago
    I believe this is known as ethical subjectivism and it’s not entirely uncommon. What you’re expressing is ethical objectivism. Both are fine and common viewpoints, but I’m not sure it’s accurate to express either with complete and utter certainty. Hopefully someone with more depth in the matter can correct me or add color.
  - TexanFeller 4y ago
    I'd agree there is no good and evil in the sense that we don't have any universal agreed upon secular principles to base our morals/ethics on. There are exceptions to almost moral rule you can imagine.
    - gdulli 4y ago
      https://nitter.net/dril/status/473265809079693312 https://nitter.net/dril/status/473265809079693312
    - fghsqwads 4y ago
      The morals and their exceptions are all people's opinions, and we now live in times where it's practically an act of courage to bother making a fucking decision on whether or not XYZ is morally okay. The bug-brained stance is to just agree with moral relativism. "Oh gosh stealing/assault/murder is okay if you're poor," etc. Fuck that shit.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    I think that depends on your view of evil. One could conceptualize it as the absence of good. It's a subtle distinction, but its implications are far reaching.
    - ASalazarMX 4y ago
      That would be a strange definition. Good is deliberately helping others, evil is deliberately harming others. If no one helped others, but also didn't harm them, life would be still be much better without people doing evil things. For example, no volunteer would clean a beach of other's trash, but also no visitor would pollute the beach intentionally.
      - unsupp0rted 4y ago
        > evil is deliberately harming others Oh I can think of plenty of evil acts that don't involve deliberately harming others. But at the end of the day the evil-doer doesn't think they're evil and nothing I say will convince them otherwise. And indeed I can't be sure they're an evil person or a person merely committing evil acts or a person committing neutral acts that seem evil to me. All I can be sure of is that I don't want or need to be around them. It does me no good to hate them or revel in their misfortune. I can be relieved when they stop doing whatever was objectionable to me though.
        ASalazarMX 4y ago
        Yes, there are plenty of edge cases to philosophize about, but for the overwhelming majority of situations, if you intentionally harm others, you're being evil, regardless of how you rationalize it. This implies that everyone is both evil and good to some degree. Even if you debate the edge cases forever, most of the situations where significant harm was purposefully done would be clearly evil.
      - marginalia_nu 4y ago
        > evil is deliberately harming others I don't think this definition of evil survives the trolley problem.
  - vernon99 4y ago
    Good and evil are constructs in the realms of morals and ethics, which are also constructs produced by society. And so on. If you continue delving into these constructs, you will discover that the only ultimate truth is your firsthand emotional, physical, and mental experience. Yes, you can map these manifestations to those end-of-the-chain constructs, but does it make them true or real? Or are they merely your personal, fuzzy classifications based on your experience and programming? Viewed from this perspective, there is neither evil nor good indeed.
    - rwmj 4y ago
      That's an absurdly reductionist viewpoint. You might as well say there are no people, only particular groups of molecules that can be fuzzily classified into humans.
      - vernon99 4y ago
        It's reductionist, but what makes you say "absurdly"? It's a matter of personal choice which viewpoint to use, and I was just commenting on the original point and the viewpoint provided. I personally find this reductionism quite helpful in seeing through these layers of constructs and making it my own choice which ones to adopt, rather than simply accepting them all as given. Edit: typos
    - ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
      subjectiveness across a large enough populace constitutes morality*, as much as those non-conformists may object * "according to who?" you may ask: well, according to the populace, ultimately the only measure that matters
    - fzeroracer 4y ago
      Viewed from this perspective, reality itself is subjective. Math doesn't exist, neither does physics or anything else we assume grounds us in reality. It's a rejection of common reality and not worth engaging with because it's an argumentative dead end.
      - 4y ago
  - MattPalmer1086 4y ago
    Good and evil are subjective judgements. They do not objectively exist. One person's good is another person's evil.
    - nateb2022 4y ago
      I would beg to differ. One person's good is another person's evil. It would appear you are falsely equivocating benefit (which is indeed, subjective) with good; it therefore follows that you also equivocate injury with evil. While indeed, something beneficial is often considered "good," this does not imply that all good consists in benefit, or that all benefit is inherently good. It would be evil, for instance, for one to benefit by exploiting another. Contrariwise, their mutual co-operation would be good and result in their mutual benefit. The distribution[0] of your major and minor terms is of great importance when reasoning upon matters as grave as a system of objective morality. One may benefit from good or evil actions. To equivocate between good and benefit in toto is to possess a fundamentally mistaken idea of the principles of objective morality. In so doing, you do not reject objective morality, but rather your misunderstanding thereof. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_proposition#Distributivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_proposition#Distri...
      - MattPalmer1086 4y ago
        Thank you, that was illuminating. I was not in fact saying that good must always involve benefit and evil injury. It is obvious that acts which some will categorise as evil can provide benefit, and vice versa. I was merely saying that there is no objective definition of good and evil independent of human judgement and people do differ in how they ascribe those labels.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  > there is no good and evil > Revenge is a dish best not served. If the first statement is true, then you have no basis for saying the second. I believe the second statement, not the first.
- moolcool 4y ago
  I used to think that revenge was a dish best served cold, but then I learned that it means "getting back at someone".
  - RangerScience 4y ago
    Dargo taught me that revenge is best served immediately!
- TexanFeller 4y ago
  Violence and revenge are useful tools in many environments. The advantages they provide are why evolution made them prominent in our nature and pretending otherwise instead of accounting for it seems unwise. Our primate cousins famously practice war, genocide, infanticide etc.
  - donatj 4y ago
    Violence in most cases just begets more violence. It's really not a very useful tool. No one's opinion was changed because you injured them or their friends.
  - unsupp0rted 4y ago
    A big chunk of what evolution programmed me to do is counter-productive at best
- scottLobster 4y ago
  Someone who says there's no good and evil has never experienced the presence of evil. That's a form of privilege that rarely gets discussed. There are some people the world is objectively better off without. The issue of course is who gets to decide that, and under what circumstances. But there's no denying that violence, properly applied, can solve many problems very efficiently. I was quite relieved when Rush Limbaugh died, for example. I will feel a great deal of relief when Putin and Xi eventually kick the bucket. I feel no need to piss on their graves, but only because I have better things to do.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > There are some people the world is objectively better off without. “Better” is always subjective, so this is false. > The issue of course is who gets to decide that This is an issue exactly because better is always subjective.
    - scottLobster 4y ago
      If you zoom out far enough reality itself is logically subjective. And you can sit still and starve yourself secure in the knowledge that you have logically derived truth and you're not actually hungry, it's just a bunch of chemical signals that signify nothing of importance. From a more practical perspective, we can all agree that there are more and less desirable states of human life, and that is the context where the term "objectively" is used in common parlance. I reject your nihilism and substitute my subjective values as a superior model.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - dragonwriter 4y ago
        > If you zoom out far enough reality itself is logically subjective Maybe, but value is subjective even when you zoom in. > I reject your nihilism and substitute my subjective values as a superior model. I never expressed nihilism, I stated that values are subjective, and describing them as objective is incorrect and obscures the source of the practical problem you yourself described with implementing them.
- UncleOxidant 4y ago
  > Revenge is a dish best not served. But the quote isn't talking about revenge, it's talking about schadenfreude.
- jfengel 4y ago
  when things go badly enough with someone all you can do is shrug and walk away Unfortunately, some people can't shrug and walk away. You can't walk away from racism; you carry your face with you. You can't walk away from an abusive home if you have no money. You can't shrug off the next blow when you're a victim of violence. Being able to shrug and walk away is an ability to be treasured. Not everybody has it.
  - unsupp0rted 4y ago
    I have walked away from racism on multiple occasions. Obviously if someone is actively striking you or detaining you that's a different category, which is well outside the context of my comment.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
      Let's not be disingenuous. I'm sure you understood what was meant.
      - unsupp0rted 4y ago
        I guess I didn't understand what was meant. When I encountered problems based purely on my physical characteristics / ethnicity / nationality I was very upset and my response was to give up and go home for the day. I didn't try to harm the other person and I wouldn't have wanted them harmed. But nobody ever beat me with a baseball bat. That's a different category of racism that I haven't commented on and that obviously is different from the topic at hand.
        HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
        Fair enough. As a black person living in America, let me offer my interpretation of GP's statement, then. You can't walk away from racism, because it's always there. It will follow you whether you want it to or not. It's pervasive to the point that even if it's not immediately visible, you can rely on it to surface sooner or later. Your options are either to exit society altogether or learn to live with it. It doesn't require being beaten with a baseball bat for racism to have a significant impact on your life.
LAC-Tech 4y ago
I felt the same way about twitter before Musk
cplusplusfellow 4y ago
So you dislike when people with whom you may not entirely agree have a voice, yeah? That’s cute.
- kgwxd 4y ago
  Yeah everyone, just shut up and let these people express their opinions by making laws against basic human rights, telling you what's best for you and your children, violently attacking you, marrying 12 year olds, and destroying democracy at ever turn. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Except you of course, you're not allowed to defend yourself.
- wpietri 4y ago
  I get why people build straw men. It saves them from having to deal with complexities; they get the pure feeling of being right. But I think it's especially ridiculous in this context. What's the point of supposedly being strongly for free speech if you're not going to listen to what anybody's actually saying?

unsupp0rted 4y ago

I'd wager not all men. I have never read an obituary notice with great satisfaction and I hope I never do. Some men realize that life is fleeting, there is no good and evil, and when things go badly enough with someone all you can do is shrug and walk away. Violence doesn't help (unless you're a nation-state) and, for me at least, there's no relief nor joy in vengeance. Revenge is a dish best not served.

fooster 4y ago
"there is no good and evil" That is a very very strange sentiment. There certainly are good and evil people. There certainly are good and evil acts.
- mjr00 4y ago
  > There certainly are good and evil people. An extremely small percentage of people throughout history have been purely good or purely evil. The vast, vast majority are somewhere in the middle. Unfortunately, too many adults have been raised by Marvel movies and want to label everyone in the world as "good" or "evil" with no nuance.
  - scottLobster 4y ago
    The argument put forth isn't that there's a spectrum of good and evil, it's that good and evil don't exist. Presumably along the naturalist lines that we're all just animals doing animal things and morality is a useless fictional construct. An idea I find rather naive.
    - marginalia_nu 4y ago
      What is the measure of an idea though?
      - kelseyfrog 4y ago
        The measure of ideas are whatever people can be convinced they are. The trick is to make it sound like it's not you that's saying it. We launder it through God, society, reality, and it comes out sparkling clean to everyone who's gullible enough to believe it. It's a trick, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work.
    - ryandvm 4y ago
      You lay it out so nicely and then rebut with "nah"?
      - scottLobster 4y ago
        I'd argue that it's a form of nihilism, and that nihilism itself is at best benign and at worst destructive. You can't build a functioning society or legal code based on "good and evil don't exist, we're all just animals". Even acknowledging that partial truth you eventually have to choose a subjective value system to make moral decisions. Perhaps it's a somewhat useful perspective in evolutionary science/research, but that's as far as it goes. I wouldn't recommend it as a life philosophy unless you just want to be an ascetic hermit, and there's a reason ascetic hermits are viewed as more zoo animals than anyone of importance, and they aren't very common or influential. Not that a true ascetic would care, their entire existence is eating their own tails to feel superior.
        unsupp0rted 4y ago
        > You can't build a functioning society or legal code based on "good and evil don't exist, we're all just animals" Of course you can. As long as the animals we are have the ability to understand the consequences of their actions, to themselves and others, and make rational choices about that. I wouldn't put in prison or on death row a person who killed even a hundred people but functionally has an IQ of 45. That person likely couldn't make rational choices and couldn't understand what they were doing, why they were doing it, or what would happen next. Whereas I would incarcerate a person with a 100 IQ who drove drunk in a well populated city, whether or not they hit someone. Good and evil don't have much to do with either case.
- Tr3nton 4y ago
  [dead]
- theredfury 4y ago
  I believe this is known as ethical subjectivism and it’s not entirely uncommon. What you’re expressing is ethical objectivism. Both are fine and common viewpoints, but I’m not sure it’s accurate to express either with complete and utter certainty. Hopefully someone with more depth in the matter can correct me or add color.
- TexanFeller 4y ago
  I'd agree there is no good and evil in the sense that we don't have any universal agreed upon secular principles to base our morals/ethics on. There are exceptions to almost moral rule you can imagine.
  - gdulli 4y ago
    https://nitter.net/dril/status/473265809079693312 https://nitter.net/dril/status/473265809079693312
  - fghsqwads 4y ago
    The morals and their exceptions are all people's opinions, and we now live in times where it's practically an act of courage to bother making a fucking decision on whether or not XYZ is morally okay. The bug-brained stance is to just agree with moral relativism. "Oh gosh stealing/assault/murder is okay if you're poor," etc. Fuck that shit.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  I think that depends on your view of evil. One could conceptualize it as the absence of good. It's a subtle distinction, but its implications are far reaching.
  - ASalazarMX 4y ago
    That would be a strange definition. Good is deliberately helping others, evil is deliberately harming others. If no one helped others, but also didn't harm them, life would be still be much better without people doing evil things. For example, no volunteer would clean a beach of other's trash, but also no visitor would pollute the beach intentionally.
    - unsupp0rted 4y ago
      > evil is deliberately harming others Oh I can think of plenty of evil acts that don't involve deliberately harming others. But at the end of the day the evil-doer doesn't think they're evil and nothing I say will convince them otherwise. And indeed I can't be sure they're an evil person or a person merely committing evil acts or a person committing neutral acts that seem evil to me. All I can be sure of is that I don't want or need to be around them. It does me no good to hate them or revel in their misfortune. I can be relieved when they stop doing whatever was objectionable to me though.
      - ASalazarMX 4y ago
        Yes, there are plenty of edge cases to philosophize about, but for the overwhelming majority of situations, if you intentionally harm others, you're being evil, regardless of how you rationalize it. This implies that everyone is both evil and good to some degree. Even if you debate the edge cases forever, most of the situations where significant harm was purposefully done would be clearly evil.
    - marginalia_nu 4y ago
      > evil is deliberately harming others I don't think this definition of evil survives the trolley problem.
- vernon99 4y ago
  Good and evil are constructs in the realms of morals and ethics, which are also constructs produced by society. And so on. If you continue delving into these constructs, you will discover that the only ultimate truth is your firsthand emotional, physical, and mental experience. Yes, you can map these manifestations to those end-of-the-chain constructs, but does it make them true or real? Or are they merely your personal, fuzzy classifications based on your experience and programming? Viewed from this perspective, there is neither evil nor good indeed.
  - rwmj 4y ago
    That's an absurdly reductionist viewpoint. You might as well say there are no people, only particular groups of molecules that can be fuzzily classified into humans.
    - vernon99 4y ago
      It's reductionist, but what makes you say "absurdly"? It's a matter of personal choice which viewpoint to use, and I was just commenting on the original point and the viewpoint provided. I personally find this reductionism quite helpful in seeing through these layers of constructs and making it my own choice which ones to adopt, rather than simply accepting them all as given. Edit: typos
  - ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
    subjectiveness across a large enough populace constitutes morality*, as much as those non-conformists may object * "according to who?" you may ask: well, according to the populace, ultimately the only measure that matters
  - fzeroracer 4y ago
    Viewed from this perspective, reality itself is subjective. Math doesn't exist, neither does physics or anything else we assume grounds us in reality. It's a rejection of common reality and not worth engaging with because it's an argumentative dead end.
    - 4y ago
- MattPalmer1086 4y ago
  Good and evil are subjective judgements. They do not objectively exist. One person's good is another person's evil.
  - nateb2022 4y ago
    I would beg to differ. One person's good is another person's evil. It would appear you are falsely equivocating benefit (which is indeed, subjective) with good; it therefore follows that you also equivocate injury with evil. While indeed, something beneficial is often considered "good," this does not imply that all good consists in benefit, or that all benefit is inherently good. It would be evil, for instance, for one to benefit by exploiting another. Contrariwise, their mutual co-operation would be good and result in their mutual benefit. The distribution[0] of your major and minor terms is of great importance when reasoning upon matters as grave as a system of objective morality. One may benefit from good or evil actions. To equivocate between good and benefit in toto is to possess a fundamentally mistaken idea of the principles of objective morality. In so doing, you do not reject objective morality, but rather your misunderstanding thereof. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_proposition#Distributivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_proposition#Distri...
    - MattPalmer1086 4y ago
      Thank you, that was illuminating. I was not in fact saying that good must always involve benefit and evil injury. It is obvious that acts which some will categorise as evil can provide benefit, and vice versa. I was merely saying that there is no objective definition of good and evil independent of human judgement and people do differ in how they ascribe those labels.
AnimalMuppet 4y ago
> there is no good and evil > Revenge is a dish best not served. If the first statement is true, then you have no basis for saying the second. I believe the second statement, not the first.
moolcool 4y ago
I used to think that revenge was a dish best served cold, but then I learned that it means "getting back at someone".
- RangerScience 4y ago
  Dargo taught me that revenge is best served immediately!
TexanFeller 4y ago
Violence and revenge are useful tools in many environments. The advantages they provide are why evolution made them prominent in our nature and pretending otherwise instead of accounting for it seems unwise. Our primate cousins famously practice war, genocide, infanticide etc.
- donatj 4y ago
  Violence in most cases just begets more violence. It's really not a very useful tool. No one's opinion was changed because you injured them or their friends.
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  A big chunk of what evolution programmed me to do is counter-productive at best
scottLobster 4y ago
Someone who says there's no good and evil has never experienced the presence of evil. That's a form of privilege that rarely gets discussed. There are some people the world is objectively better off without. The issue of course is who gets to decide that, and under what circumstances. But there's no denying that violence, properly applied, can solve many problems very efficiently. I was quite relieved when Rush Limbaugh died, for example. I will feel a great deal of relief when Putin and Xi eventually kick the bucket. I feel no need to piss on their graves, but only because I have better things to do.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > There are some people the world is objectively better off without. “Better” is always subjective, so this is false. > The issue of course is who gets to decide that This is an issue exactly because better is always subjective.
  - scottLobster 4y ago
    If you zoom out far enough reality itself is logically subjective. And you can sit still and starve yourself secure in the knowledge that you have logically derived truth and you're not actually hungry, it's just a bunch of chemical signals that signify nothing of importance. From a more practical perspective, we can all agree that there are more and less desirable states of human life, and that is the context where the term "objectively" is used in common parlance. I reject your nihilism and substitute my subjective values as a superior model.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > If you zoom out far enough reality itself is logically subjective Maybe, but value is subjective even when you zoom in. > I reject your nihilism and substitute my subjective values as a superior model. I never expressed nihilism, I stated that values are subjective, and describing them as objective is incorrect and obscures the source of the practical problem you yourself described with implementing them.
UncleOxidant 4y ago
> Revenge is a dish best not served. But the quote isn't talking about revenge, it's talking about schadenfreude.
jfengel 4y ago
when things go badly enough with someone all you can do is shrug and walk away Unfortunately, some people can't shrug and walk away. You can't walk away from racism; you carry your face with you. You can't walk away from an abusive home if you have no money. You can't shrug off the next blow when you're a victim of violence. Being able to shrug and walk away is an ability to be treasured. Not everybody has it.
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  I have walked away from racism on multiple occasions. Obviously if someone is actively striking you or detaining you that's a different category, which is well outside the context of my comment.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
    Let's not be disingenuous. I'm sure you understood what was meant.
    - unsupp0rted 4y ago
      I guess I didn't understand what was meant. When I encountered problems based purely on my physical characteristics / ethnicity / nationality I was very upset and my response was to give up and go home for the day. I didn't try to harm the other person and I wouldn't have wanted them harmed. But nobody ever beat me with a baseball bat. That's a different category of racism that I haven't commented on and that obviously is different from the topic at hand.
      - HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
        Fair enough. As a black person living in America, let me offer my interpretation of GP's statement, then. You can't walk away from racism, because it's always there. It will follow you whether you want it to or not. It's pervasive to the point that even if it's not immediately visible, you can rely on it to surface sooner or later. Your options are either to exit society altogether or learn to live with it. It doesn't require being beaten with a baseball bat for racism to have a significant impact on your life.

LAC-Tech 4y ago

I felt the same way about twitter before Musk

cplusplusfellow 4y ago

So you dislike when people with whom you may not entirely agree have a voice, yeah? That’s cute.

kgwxd 4y ago
Yeah everyone, just shut up and let these people express their opinions by making laws against basic human rights, telling you what's best for you and your children, violently attacking you, marrying 12 year olds, and destroying democracy at ever turn. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Except you of course, you're not allowed to defend yourself.
wpietri 4y ago
I get why people build straw men. It saves them from having to deal with complexities; they get the pure feeling of being right. But I think it's especially ridiculous in this context. What's the point of supposedly being strongly for free speech if you're not going to listen to what anybody's actually saying?