[Serious] Good vs Evil

[Drich]

Since I made the thread, I’ll answer the questions. (Also, not really sure why I posted this in the religion forum, can’t remember lol)

I don’t believe in good and evil really. Not like that. I think subjectively things can be good (better than neutral) or bad (worse than neutral). Good is a word I use often. Just to mean something I like or something I think benefits myself, others, or the world. Evil is a word I never use. The concept of evil is silly to me, because it seems to imply some sort of supernatural meaning to the word bad.

The thing is I think everyone is good by their own terms. No one sets out to be bad. No one chooses to be a bad person. I think I read once that human beings tend to base their morals on what they want to do rather than basing what they want to do on their morals. So there’s a lot of justifying that goes on, with all of us. But I think everyone tries to do good based on what they believe to be good. This is likely an evolutionary trait? I’m assuming. Being “good” and doing “good” gives us a better shot at surviving and at happiness I guess.

So to you there is no evil?

Yet if I take my wild child who is being abusive and destructive in a public setting and give him a controlled and measured spanking each and every time he steps over a line, then I become evil.

But if a child takes an rpg and blows up a squad of marines because his mother conditioned him to hate americans/anyone not muslim. The child retains his innocences and the mother is not a bad or evil person....

Seriously?!?!?

Spanking breaks the line of evil  but training children to be jihadist murders is "good?"

Again you have some sort of working definition of evil, can you please explain how spanking a child is evil but training a child to be a murder is not.

or are we back to self righteousness? where you are the measure of good and evil, meaning anything you do not like is evil and anything that does not directly effect you can be considered a form of good?

If that is the case can you see how self righteousness can be the heart of all things evil?

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I do not value the words good and evil. They are largely just rhetoric used for virtue signalling.

I believe in objective morality in the sense that, given a set of circumstances, any rational agent would be able to point out the course of action that would result in the greatest amount of well-being. This is predicated on the idea that we are all working toward the goal of obtaining the maximum amount of well-being, for the most people.

I see a lot of mention of happiness which is something of value to people, but certainly not the highest goal. We spend so much time doing things that bring us very little happiness to maximize our well-being i.e. working out, working our job, having a tooth removed, keeping silent when someone is being an asshat, or even flossing. For this reason I think well-being is the best descriptor for what drives people.

Said propaganda minister goebbels...

Those who do not know the past are doomed to repeat it.

Your rational is that of 1930's germany where basic human rights on a specific sect of the population was compromised for the greater good citing a similar mantra. This is what cause a break from the vatican and any form of main stream christianity and the adoption of state sponsored "positive Christianity." Positive Christianity loosened the restrictions of right and wrong good and evil and made the state the penultimate point of service and sacrifice. 

Know it or not you have described and subscribed to self righteousness. where you or the state/soceity sets an ever changing standard of right and wrong with no checks or balances in place. there are no limitations besides popular thought and time. given enough time everything will become permissible, or so say the societies whom already have fallen down this path.