(December 8, 2015 at 1:23 am)TheRealJoeFish Wrote: Essentially, it's like what god says in futurama: "Right and wrong are just words. What matters is what you do."
When I call a person "bad" that's shorthand for "a person who has done bad things in the past and/or seems likely to do bad things in the future." Same with "good." On a formal level, it's really something of an acceptable category error or, more charitably, a figurative description.
It's all part of the (disheartening) tendency of people to label each other with descriptors that describe each person's actions and beliefs and then bootstrap that descriptor into a content claim about some essential quality of the person.
I see what you mean.
But what I meant was on what we base our judgement to call a person bad? His actions probably. But for actions to be bad, there has to be a rule against it first, which brings us to the law. However the law is subjective and can be completly different in other society's.
For instance look at the US and Belgium: in the US, execution is permitted as a punishment but in Belgium it is not. An executionor in the US could be called a good person, since his job is within the law, but in Belgium he would be called a bad person, if he executed someone, since it is not. We now see good and bad is bound to a certain society which makes it useless on a global scale and makes it ridiculous to call someone 'bad inside', since even though his crime is not permitted now it might have been somewhere in history.
This all now also questions our system of punishing.
What are your thoughts on that?
whatever floats your goat
