[Serious] Good vs Evil

[Rhizomorph13]

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.

[Chad32]

If a young child runs up to a group of people, and blows them up with a bomb, they're as much an innocent victim as the people they blow up. The evil ones are the adults who convinced a kid to carry an explosive, and detonate it. Granted, someone could be born a sociopath, and go the Michael Myers route, and get a kick out of causing pain, but those are some small odds.

Would I be able to shoot the kid? Maybe not. That's why my job doesn't entail holding a firearm, and making those kinds of decisions. It would likely be my last act in the armed forces if I absolutely had to pull the trigger.

[Smaug]

I won't say anything new but still here are my two cents:
Firstly I think that comcepts of 'Good' and 'Evil' are purely relativistic. I'm surprised why it's so hard to comprehend for some.

But not only these concepts are relativistic, they are heavily dependant upon the wording. This is the issue that makes things difficult in more complex discussions. For example consider a lion and a gazelle. "Getting proper nutrition" sounds fairly good for both. But going into further details and saying "having a successfull hunt" starts to sound worse for the gazelle while it's still good for the lion.

The other important thing is that the 'goodness' of good and 'badness' of evil are dependant upon the consequences for the individual.

With human society it gets much more complex. The society if taken as a whole has its own 'goods' and 'evils' and they obviously do not always coincide with those of the individuals. These 'social' virtues and evils are defined by the most basic needs and habits which most of the individuals agree on. It's understandable that most people would prefer to be safe from sudden acts of murder, or violence, or theft or such. Thus the 'commandments' and taboos are born. The heavier the concequences the more serious the taboo is. But it's not always the case. But even the most general taboos are not universal. Competing individuals and groups are always looking for the ways to get around them. For example it's fairly clear from history that there are many ways to get around the 'do not kill' taboo (and I'm not speaking of capital punishment here).

[Alan V]

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.

Emotions like happiness come and go, but the conditions which can make us happy from time to time are what allow us to thrive.

I agree that "good and evil" are objective but relative to human interests.  The problems with such words are the hangover connotations from religious-style thinking about them.

[Smaug]

P. S. speaking of 'why it's hard to comprehend'... I guess it's hard to settle with 'Good' and 'Evil' being relative because it makes the world seem much more brutal. No absolute justice, no higher help etc.

It's also very important how one acts to be in line with his moral ideals. There's hardly something worse than killing and thieving for the 'Greater Good for All'.

[Alan V]

If I had to define good and evil in terms of good people or bad people I'd say
good = a degree of empathy that spurs selflessness
evil = a degree of selfishness that comes from a lack of empathy

and if you want me to factor in my religious perspective, since this thread is in that forum:

natural evil= The axiomatic degree to which people act against God's will
natural good= The axiomatic characteristic of God's empathetic and compassionate nature towards positive outcomes for the most people

moral good = the ethical correctness of God's revealed will
moral evil = sin (going against God's will)

The problem with selflessness is that it can easily become evil against oneself.  Why not think of oneself as if one were another person?  We certainly can do more good for ourselves than most anyone else.

I consider "natural evils" to be such things as spontaneous abortions, earthquakes, diseases, and so on, for which no one is to blame unless God exists.  If God exists, he has to answer for natural evils.

From an atheistic perspective, "sin" so defined doesn't exist without a God existing, though evil still does.  Good and evil are defined in terms of human interests.

[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?

---

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.

[Smaug]

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.

It may be horrifying to some but it's basically the way it is. The society and its members set checks and balances. Among other things, that's why Germany ended up with National-Socialism in the 30's. Poverty + Populist propaganda made it happen.

Also while Goebbels was a horrible person not anything he said was objectively wrong. For example he was totally right about propaganda being able to corrupt and subdue an entire nation. Although priests had known about it waay before he was born

[Drich]

If a young child runs up to a group of people, and blows them up with a bomb, they're as much an innocent victim as the people they blow up. The evil ones are the adults who convinced a kid to carry an explosive, and detonate it. Granted, someone could be born a sociopath, and go the Michael Myers route, and get a kick out of causing pain, but those are some small odds.

Would I be able to shoot the kid? Maybe not. That's why my job doesn't entail holding a firearm, and making those kinds of decisions. It would likely be my last act in the armed forces if I absolutely had to pull the trigger.

you are speaking to a state of mind of the child. something you can not know, unless you look at history. you assume because children you know of that age are open books of blank sheets Child soldiers are like other children. Child soldiers are not atomotons blindly carrying out acts they can not understand the consenquences of... they have been trained to think and out maneuver their enemies. enemies who have been targeted since they could walk.

There is little to no difference between a child soldier and one who is of 'fighting age.' The civial war bore this out, the revolutionary war also bore this out. They fought bled and died just like their older counter parts, they faced death they faced hardship and pain, the same hardship and pain the veterans faced. Granted their jobs may have been different (drummer or fife player) but the drums where critical in fog of war communication. in essence they order the company or sometimes the battalion to fire a volley, free fire, advance bayonet charge or retreat. these 'boys' where given a monumental task of litterally pulling the trigger on hundreds of weapons just by playing the orders given. or f the messed up they could have cause the deaths of hundreds of their fellow soldiers. so to say a child soldier is like the ones you are familiar with is nuts.

Just look at some of the documentaries of the warring tribes currently in africa who employ child riflemen. some as young as 8. those kids are war harden monsters who could dispatch any of us before we knew it.

My point is evil know no age limitations. if their is consciousness evil can exist.

only the biggest fools wrapped up in their own self righteousness pretend evil can not exist. if people could just be honest with them selves they could label the men who train children to be combatants that put them in harms way or to be sacrificed as human bombs, if the self righteous could be honest they could see those men who do this sort of stuff as evil. But because the self righteous aligned themselves with evil inorder to invalidate God's righteous standards they can not identify anything evil as evil, which means they are only able to identify God's righteousness as evil.

Which is consistent with what the bible says about the last days. The evil men will change the standards of 'morality' and good will be come evil and evil will become good.

---

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.

It may be horrifying to some but it's basically the way it is. The society and its members set checks and balances. Among other things, that's why Germany ended up with National-Socialism in the 30's. Poverty + Populist propaganda made it happen.

Also while Goebbels was a horrible person not anything he said was objectively wrong. For example he was totally right about propaganda being able to corrupt and subdue an entire nation. Although priests had known about it waay before he was born

only a nation without a absolute standard. 

Look at the 2016 election. look at all of the anti trump propaganda put out there heck look at how far (2+ years later) and just now we are putting things to bed. yet the nation was not subdued by propaganda because most of the voters adhere to the standard set fourth by the US constitution, and could still see clinton for what she was about and the changes she was promising to make to the judicial system and to the constitution. 

In this case the governmental standard saved trump's campaign as he vowed to maintain the standard as written while she vowed to change the standard to fit modern propaganda expectations

If 1930's germany had a strong standard or foundation that had been proven to see though and provide for the people and their needs Goebbels words like much modern fake news would have hit the wall with little to no effect.

The problem is with self righteousness you have abandoned any possible standard/rules that are static and do not change. you carry right and wrong along with popular thought. which makes pop morality a joke. as it by defination can not be a standard but a base line for pop values. And again every society who has elected pop morality over absolute standard has consumed it self and fallen to societies with absolutes and discipline in their guidelines. Look again at the last election if you do not believe me. the alt left fell to Trump of all people. The joke of reality tv took the presidency away from 1/2 a nation of self righteous/pop moral people in all of their best efforts despite having complete control and authority in almost every media outlet and news source along with pop celebrities. Despite the left having all that power and influence/goebbels type of influence) that half of the country fell to a clown 1/2 ass waving the absolute standard this country was founded on.

do you understand my point? the self righteous have a histroy of falling to the side who maintain standards.

Greece Rome Japan USSR ottoman empire even the great british empire is a shadow of it's former self. All great societies who drop their standards (good or evil) fall to those who maintain them. on a macro level as in reichs or countries or on smaller scales like presidential candidates or even down to the family unit themselves.

[Smaug]

Germany actually had 'absolute' standards in the 20's and 30's. Like 'Deutschland Ueber Alles' or good-old 'Gott mit Uns' (God is with us). Moreover, all totalitarian countries tend to have a set of very strict 'absolute' standards, often backed up with Religion.

If the Ten Commandments are the absolutes you mean then they are not so absolute, too. Per say, the most strict taboo placed upon murder is so omni-present only because it's generally agreed that living without a threat of sudden deadly attack is much better for the most people and because the consequences of murder are irreversible. And yet there are exceptions to this taboo. The most prominent one is of course War. More often then not even a strictly offensive war is a'ok with the Religion. Just look into a history book or watch the news from the Middle East. Under certain conditions even peace-time murder is encouraged by the Religion - see stoning people to death for things that are not even crimes by today's standards. So the commandments are relative even within borders of a single faith. They have too much fine print under them.

Also even the confessions of a single religion cannot agree on their standards. Some say that you cannot kill under any circumstances, some tolerate or even encourage manslaughter for the name of God.