[Serious] Good vs Evil

[The Grand Nudger]

Then there you have it.  You don't believe in the existence of moral improvement, so what point would having a discussion on moral improvement either in life or throughout history be with you?  

Sometimes I wonder if you've ever actually taken the time to tally up the sorts of shit you don't believe in next to the shit that you do.  Consider all that you've told us as truth over the years... but moral improvement?

No, none of that, anywhere, ever. I actually find it difficult to believe that even you could believe that. Nevertheless you implore us to believe this. It's a heavy lift, and it's going to take more than vague references to whatever part of pop culture you detest to make that charge stick as a pessimistic comment on humanity. Or, to be frank, to put it in any light or context where it isn't false on it's face as a claim.

Have you considered the commitments such a position places on you in context of your own remarks or even your own faith? What is the value of harping on moral depravity, or, hypocrisy..or jesus, for that matter..if there is no moral improvement? No better answer or better understanding? What's left for you to tell us, but to believe or burn? We couldn't improve ourselves by believing in your god, if what you tell us about such improvement is true.

Can you understand why I find it difficult to believe that you will adhere to this notion when you expound upon christ? Or why I find it so novel that a person who has been blessed with so much good fortune in the people around him, as you tell it, would have an even darker view of human beings and human endeavour than someone like myself? Do you really see nothing in humanity but a bunch of worms eeking out a wretched existence with no moral compass between the lot of us, nor even the possibility of betterment?

[SenseMaker007]

How do you define good and evil?

Something is morally good if it reduces or ceases suffering and something is morally bad if it increases or initiates suffering. And I think that 'evil' is too loaded of a word to be useful to ethics.

Do you think anything is objectively good or evil? If so what?

I think what I stated above is an objective matter.

What do you think drives people to aim for what they believe is good and away from what they believe is evil?

People naturally start wanting what is good and bad for themselves and they then project both their self-love and self-hate onto others.

[Angrboda]

How do you define good and evil?

Something is morally good if it reduces or ceases suffering and something is morally bad if it increases or initiates suffering. And I think that 'evil' is too loaded of a word to be useful to ethics.

My ethics group discussed Bentham's ideas yesterday. Apparently, morality is measure according to the dyad of pleasure and pain. An increase of the former or decrease of the latter. I think many people would be sympathetic to that assessment. I have my doubts whether pleasure is the driving motivator in any behavior. My theory is that we are driven by pain avoidance and so you can drop the seeking of pleasure out of the calculus without loss, as you have done. It's not that I'm confident that pleasure has no role, so much as I just haven't found out how to make it accord with behavior that is primarily driven by pain avoidance, and pain avoidance seems primary. Pleasure as a motivator seems more of a post hoc explainer than anything.

A couple useful points from our meeting.

In Bentham's framework, pleasure and pain are all encompassing, if someone does something, then according to Bentham, it must have been motivated by one or the other. Which makes the definition of Bentham's morality a bit hollow. Everything satisfies Bentham's framework because Bentham asserts that, definitionally, everything fits his framework.

The other point, mine, as a good Taoist who knows the chapters which assert that pain exists because pleasure exists, beauty, because ugliness exists, and so on, suggests that you can define the motivations as either consisting only of pleasure seeking or only as pain avoidance. For example, suppose that I observe that someone is motivated to get a college degree so that they can get a better job and live a better quality of life. That would seem to be seeking pleasure, without question. Yet one can turn that around and say that the person is seeking a degree so that they can avoid the pain of spending the rest of their lives serving fast food at McDonald's. Ultimately it is simply arbitrarily definitional. That seems to happen a lot with hedonist ethics. The definitions start doing more work than the original intuition when you start defining things such as "being virtuous" as something motivated and meaningfully consisting of pleasure. That's probably a side effect of the fact that, philosophically, hedonistic ethics is a zero sum game. Any thing that can't be explained as a function of pleasure or pain counts as a big strike against the moral theory. So the motivation is to exclude the possibility that there may be more to life than pleasure and pain. When you do that, you end up with such a distorted definition of pleasure and pain that the original intuition about morality consisting of a calculus involving the two becomes strained and difficult to maintain without a charge of equivocation.

[Lightbearer]

How do you define good and evil?
Do you think anything is objectively good or evil? If so what?
What do you think drives people to aim for what they believe is good and away from what they believe is evil?

I see good and evil as what the vast majority see as evil is evil and what the vast majority sees as good is good i.e. if 6 million Jews are killed the opinion would be world based not German based.
 
One of the only problems I see in that concept is religion i.e. atheism can be seen as evil but that is solved by the fact different key religions see each other as evil and couldn’t therefore come together to form a unified opinion just as Christianity could be voted evil, Muslims could be voted evil on a world wide basis so the safest observation is belief or non belief in gods cannot be evil unless it is evil done in that gods name or in the name of atheism.
 
The other problem you face is, if a god existed e.g. Sally could be walking down a dark lane, she is attacked, raped and beaten to death by a group of men. If the omnipotent god concept existed, Sally could be unafraid, feel no pain and wake up remembering nothing the next day. In that case the group of men would not be evil as there was no suffering.
 
If gods exist, they could either choose suffering or no suffering meaning, if a god exists, evil is a choice of that god and therefore, if evil exists it must be created by that god.

[The Valkyrie]

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