(September 7, 2014 at 4:55 pm)Madness20 Wrote: What i'm saying is that obviously people that do that kind of crimes usually have a complete different psychology and prejudice and see themselves as actually doing a favor for humanity or their group. Be it mental diseases, irrational hatred, ideology, religion , or other foundation for such behaviour, the fact is most of them are mechanisms of survival, and without a doubt humans always did crimes because it's potentially evolutionary advantage, even animals kill offsprings of other males just for the sake of their own offspring.
Believe it or not, when the nazis put people in gas chambers, they trully thought it was a good idea.

Every advocate of an idea, no matter how factually erroneous or morally heinous others discern it to be, thinks their method and conclusion is right or good. How does that have any bearing on the question of the actual existence of evil?

(September 7, 2014 at 10:50 am)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: The ends do not justify the means, especially when human beings are viewed as the means.

What if ebola went super-viral, fully-airborne, and it was determined that the only way to eradicate it was to completely isolate every community with cases? And in each community, each block with a case was isolated, and in each block, each building with a case was isolated, and so on?

This would probably mean the death of those closest to victims, but could save the human species from as many as 3 billion deaths. Are you sure that isolating the victims would be wrong, even though it is essentially murder?

(September 7, 2014 at 7:44 pm)bennyboy Wrote: What if ebola went super-viral, fully-airborne, and it was determined that the only way to eradicate it was to completely isolate every community with cases? And in each community, each block with a case was isolated, and in each block, each building with a case was isolated, and so on?

This would probably mean the death of those closest to victims, but could save the human species from as many as 3 billion deaths. Are you sure that isolating the victims would be wrong, even though it is essentially murder?

Who/what and why are you charging responsible for the murders of the victims: the Ebola virus, the afflicted who fail to take it upon themselves to see that the appropriate precautions for minimizing the spread of the disease to those unaffected are enforced, or those mandating isolation so as to save the rest of the population?

There is certainly the possibility that all three parties will bear a measure of blame for whatever tragic consequences result. Given that we are not omnipotent beings, it's conceivable that in rare instances a necessary evil must be admitted because it is the lesser of all other present alternatives.

What if it's not guaranteed? What if, for example, killing a few suspected terrorists who are very possibly responsible for recent communications chatter about an imminent threat (but are not guaranteed to be: let's say it seems a 50/50 chance they are the ones) might save a city of millions? Is it more moral for me to commit the evil of killing a couple guys, not knowing but strongly suspecting they are the ones?

It seems to me that in the case of credible terror threats, almost any evil is worth committing, even if it changes the odds by a few percent either way. In other words, my killing act is probably a purely evil act-- maybe the guys weren't going to do it, maybe they were just goofing off and never had the means, etc., and I'm killing innocent people in the prime of their lives. However, the relative value of the million seems to skew any calculus I could make about it.

(September 6, 2014 at 1:45 am)XK9_Knight Wrote: Hey Esquilax, I hope your day went well? I've had a long day today, I'm tired, but I wanted to give you a partial response to our dialogue.

Yeah, I completely missed this. My bad.

Quote:The “Mr. Scientist” thing? Pffft! That’s my own personal incredulity; it’s not an argument. I do hope you understand my joke though? It’s an equivocation, “Mr. Scientist” might as well have said “just because.” Evolutionary psychology could not possibly be contradicted; it espouses unverifiable narratives of cultural and human behavior that amounts to nothing more than fluff and ‘ad hoc’ nonsense.

Unverifiable? I would argue that it has been verified, to the extent that it could be; we understand how evolution works and imposes upon the behaviors of animals, and we can observe this in nature. Rattle snakes evolve with the rattle, but without the instinct to use it, because in their given environment it's better to remain hidden. Hell, the best example I could give is birds in highly populated areas modulating their behavioral patterns to better take advantage of the humans around them.

We know it happens with other animals, and we're animals to, and so there's no reason to believe that it would somehow skip us. Now, there's an element of guesswork involved, sure, but let's not pretend that it isn't driven by evidence and data, here. When we can see other animals, even closely related species, selecting their mates based on certain markers pertaining to health and so on, why would we believe that there's one species out of the entire biological history of life that's for some reason immune to the same drives?

Quote:Yes, things evolve, I agree. I’m not arguing against evolution per se, I’m arguing about the substance of the mind and how evolutionary psychology has it’s propositions “profoundly backwards.”

If the mind is simply matter than the mind becomes nothing more than a mechanical process that reacts to certain stimuli in the brain, and it would mean that some form of determinism is true. If that’s the case, than anything we say or believe is the result of heredity and our environment; it would effectively nullify science because we would be measuring our own sense impressions, not the external world.

I disagree with your premise but, funnily enough, accept the conclusion. Though there's simply no reason to believe that emergent, advanced processes cannot arise from material mechanics as you suggest, we are only measuring our sense perceptions. Quite a lot of the scientific method is devoted to stripping out observer biases and nullifying the ways our senses can be fooled in order to more closely align the results of experimentation with reality. To presume that your senses present a one-to-one model of the real world in any case would be foolhardy, and besides, I spot a flaw in your model too: even if your mind is some special, magic thing that isn't a product of a material brain, it doesn't follow that this mind is at all connected to reliable sense organs. In the world as you perceive it, people still have non-functional sense organs sometimes, people still experience hallucinations, and they still need to correct for their faulty senses in other ways. Even if my mind is special magic, I still have to wear glasses to correct for the fact that my eyes still don't present an accurate view of the external world.

Not to mention, the idea of a non-material mind doesn't absolve anyone of the problem of hard solipsism either. We're all in the same boat here, materialist or not.

Quote:This isn’t “imperfect evidence,” you’ve totally switched to a metaphysical position about science. You might as well be appealing to your own cognitive ability on this one because you assume that other’s can be relied upon. You’ve exited ‘empirical rationalism,’ and entered into a metaphysical presupposition. It is one thing to infer from the past to all future cases, it’s another to be able to justify that position using science.

Observation lies at the heart of empiricism; when all the observations we've ever had point to consistent and reliable natural laws it is a bigger leap to expect that they won't continue the same patterns into the future. That would fly in the face of what data we can gather. Now, you might be inclined to point out that I'm still assuming the accuracy of my senses, my memory, so on and so forth, but I reject the problem of hard solipsism as useful at all. Regardless of the ultimate reality of my perceptions I'm still bound by the laws of the world, as are you, as are we all. We need to take some things as axiomatic in order to function, and this is true for all of us.

Quote:Help me out here; explain why you believe this to be a “dishonest equivocation?” Because it would seem you have some sort of double standard as to what’s “rational” to believe.

Within the context of the axioms that we are forced to use, we can gather data and observations that lead to conclusions; where it concerns the physical world we at least have a basis for thinking that it exists at all, and observations about how it behaves. These are things that we simply don't have for other considerations, like god.

Quote:It’s not that I’m simply not listening to you, it’s that I have reason to believe you’re wrong. Video recordings, writing, audio are all taken in as ‘sensory input’ and you assume that our cognitive faculties are capable of more than ‘sensory impressions.’ I’ve made this statement before; it’s a presupposition of science, we could not do good science apart from it. You have not provided “evidence of the reality of the past,” and my point still stands that apart from evidences it is rational to believe some things.

It's a presupposition of being alive. We've discussed axioms before.

Quote:Hey! how would you feel about an "open dialogue," we could make a new thread for you and I. Or, there's always the option of a private correspondence? In any case, you're bright guy; fun to talk to. If you're ever in the States (I'm assuming you live outside the States?), specifically Wisconsin we should get coffee, my treat.

Yeah, if you wanna make another thread go right ahead. There's even the debate area, if that's your bag. And I'm in Australia right now, alas.

(September 8, 2014 at 3:04 am)bennyboy Wrote: What if it's not guaranteed? What if, for example, killing a few suspected terrorists who are very possibly responsible for recent communications chatter about an imminent threat (but are not guaranteed to be: let's say it seems a 50/50 chance they are the ones) might save a city of millions? Is it more moral for me to commit the evil of killing a couple guys, not knowing but strongly suspecting they are the ones?

It seems to me that in the case of credible terror threats, almost any evil is worth committing, even if it changes the odds by a few percent either way. In other words, my killing act is probably a purely evil act-- maybe the guys weren't going to do it, maybe they were just goofing off and never had the means, etc., and I'm killing innocent people in the prime of their lives. However, the relative value of the million seems to skew any calculus I could make about it.

It sounds to me like the previous posts I was responding to and your remarks speak to three different questions altogether:

(1) Whether or not evil can be said to actually exist, (2) whether or not it can be meaningfully qualified and quantified in a universal sense, and (3) whether or not a lesser evil is sometimes necessary to avoid a greater evil.

I'd say yes to all three.

(September 7, 2014 at 5:33 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: Every advocate of an idea, no matter how factually erroneous or morally heinous others discern it to be, thinks their method and conclusion is right or good. How does that have any bearing on the question of the actual existence of evil?

The bearing it has, is the connection that there is nothing objectivelly evil. Morality can always distort to make things "holy" and others might regard as evil, but nothing is evil by itself, or rather "evil" motivated.
For every evil act, you might find an underlying dependence to survive in such acts, be it ruled by selection, instinct, moral values or simple profit, every "evil" act, as a background and a context in which it must be analysed.

You could argue that immolate false witches was and is an evil act, but the motivation behind it was actually "good" in theory, which was purging "demonic/satanist" threats on the world, which in their view was an entirelly correct assumption.

ISIS beheadings might be evil for us, but for those extremists, they're saving the world by purging infidels and satanists.

You could argue that nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were evil, but on US opinion it saved them from further wars with japan.

So it's hard to define what is an evil "intent". Evil acts are actually very subjective, and more based on what's socially undesirable, than the act in itself.

Even if notions of good and evil could only be established subjectively at best, it wouldn't amount to the claim that evil does "not actually exist" any more than it would entail other subjective qualities to be actually non-existent as well, such as beauty or love. Those states certainly exist as real, distinctive qualities of experience; the question as to whether they exist objectively or subjectively, however, is separate altogether. There could also be the possibility that evil or beauty are objectively quantifiable, yet we lack a comprehensive method to concretely establish such facts.

I don't think there's any fatal dilemma for the question of evil's existence in acknowledging that, to quote J.L. Mackie, "some kind of idealism has a played a significant part, providing some justification or excuse, however misguided," in most atrocities that one can cite from human history or the daily newspaper. To quote Francis Hutcheson, writing in 1725, "It is not a delight in the misery of others, or malice, which occasions the horrid crimes which fill our histories; but generally an injudicious unreasonable enthusiasm for some kind of limited virtue." (italics mine)

If we're deriving our sense of good and evil from human (and maybe some inferred animal) experiences of pleasure and pain, using scientific principles as our guide, I see no reason why evil cannot be considered objectively. Maybe you'll assert that this is already to assume too much, but I can conceive literally no other conversation, even that of discussing the truth of twice two equalling four, in which an opponent is restricted from feigning skepticism and doubt. At such a point it may be best to simply terminate said conversation.

(September 8, 2014 at 7:50 am)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: It sounds to me like the previous posts I was responding to and your remarks speak to three different questions altogether:

(1) Whether or not evil can be said to actually exist, (2) whether or not it can be meaningfully qualified and quantified in a universal sense, and (3) whether or not a lesser evil is sometimes necessary to avoid a greater evil.

I'd say yes to all three.

Okay, let's look at the OP with (3) in mind. Would you say that a person (or a God) who is capable of infallibly choosing the lesser evil, and is therefore constantly committing at least some evil, can be called all-good and all-powerful? Or would you say that a truly good creator God must necessarily have it in its power to prevent all evils?

(September 8, 2014 at 6:54 pm)bennyboy Wrote:

(September 8, 2014 at 7:50 am)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: It sounds to me like the previous posts I was responding to and your remarks speak to three different questions altogether:

(1) Whether or not evil can be said to actually exist, (2) whether or not it can be meaningfully qualified and quantified in a universal sense, and (3) whether or not a lesser evil is sometimes necessary to avoid a greater evil.

I'd say yes to all three.

Okay, let's look at the OP with (3) in mind. Would you say that a person (or a God) who is capable of infallibly choosing the lesser evil, and is therefore constantly committing at least some evil, can be called all-good and all-powerful? Or would you say that a truly good creator God must necessarily have it in its power to prevent all evils?

To the first question, no, to the second, yes. I see no compatiblity between the deity of traditional theism and the existence of evil whatever its quality.