3 ms·

"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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
    What is the measure of an idea though?
    - kelseyfrog 3y 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 3y ago
    You lay it out so nicely and then rebut with "nah"?
    - scottLobster 3y 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 3y 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.
  - kelseyfrog 3y ago
    Good and evil are products of the interpretive mind, one that absolve itself of its own interpretation which leads to the concepts appearing to stand on their own. They're social facts masquerading as common sense, "the way the world works", and reality. That's not to say there aren't consequences to rejecting them as such, we have a whole system for social fact enforcement that includes social, physical, and mental punishment, but that doesn't mean that one can't appreciate them as social facts either. Would evil exist in the natural world absent humans? If not, then evil is a property contingent on humans in one way or another.
Tr3nton 3y ago
[dead]
theredfury 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
  https://nitter.net/dril/status/473265809079693312 https://nitter.net/dril/status/473265809079693312
- fghsqwads 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
    > evil is deliberately harming others I don't think this definition of evil survives the trolley problem.
vernon99 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
  - 3y ago
MattPalmer1086 3y ago
Good and evil are subjective judgements. They do not objectively exist. One person's good is another person's evil.
- nateb2022 3y 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 3y 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.

mjr00 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
  What is the measure of an idea though?
  - kelseyfrog 3y 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 3y ago
  You lay it out so nicely and then rebut with "nah"?
  - scottLobster 3y 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 3y 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.
- kelseyfrog 3y ago
  Good and evil are products of the interpretive mind, one that absolve itself of its own interpretation which leads to the concepts appearing to stand on their own. They're social facts masquerading as common sense, "the way the world works", and reality. That's not to say there aren't consequences to rejecting them as such, we have a whole system for social fact enforcement that includes social, physical, and mental punishment, but that doesn't mean that one can't appreciate them as social facts either. Would evil exist in the natural world absent humans? If not, then evil is a property contingent on humans in one way or another.

Tr3nton 3y ago

[dead]

theredfury 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
https://nitter.net/dril/status/473265809079693312 https://nitter.net/dril/status/473265809079693312
fghsqwads 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
  > evil is deliberately harming others I don't think this definition of evil survives the trolley problem.

vernon99 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
- 3y ago

MattPalmer1086 3y ago

Good and evil are subjective judgements. They do not objectively exist. One person's good is another person's evil.

nateb2022 3y 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 3y 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.