Re:Degrees of evil
« Reply #15 on: 2003-01-09 15:34:37 »
Different death-causing acts are best prevented using different means.
For pre-meditated murder, punishment might be the best way to scare would-be murderers from acting on their intentions. For negligent crimes, education and training might be a better way to go. For accidents, we might prefer to invest in preventive security devices.
This said, assuming that an act of molestation occured, there are always two sides to the story:
The victim will demand compensation from the aggressor, regardless of the intent. From the victim's perspective, the aggressor has caused an unwanted loss and, excluding emotions like anger and want of revenge, the victim doesn't (or shouldn't) care how or why the aggressor acted in a given manner.
The aggressor will receive a punishment from a society that wants to limit such acts of molestation amongst its citizenry. From the aggressor's perspective, the form of punishment is very important and has to be related to the aggressor's intentions or frame-of-mind in order to deterr the repetition of the behavior.
Re:Degrees of evil
« Reply #16 on: 2003-05-06 05:45:20 »
Quantifying evil:
If one person lives in a country where he knows that political dissidents are killed; and another lives in a country where nearly everybody wears shoes that were made by slave labour, how do we quantify the degree of evil involved?
Creating evil:
Blame & guilt (not justice, not right/wrong) have no sound philosophical basis because they are related to the problem of freedom which is still an open problem: If you are not (totally) free, you cannot be blamed - you were acting in a (partially) determined manner. If you cannot be blamed you cannot be guilty, you cannot be punished or changed. If you are free by degrees, then how blameworthy/guilty are you? Impossible to tell. How is justice then exercised? Only if we are absolutely free can we be totally accountable. Absolute freedom is a difficult concept to philosophically defend (see Sartre's Being and Nothingness for the best attempt).
Accountability only matters in terms of revenge. If ones theory of justice is base on rehabilitation, empathy, reconciliation, then accountability is useless - because accountability is a tool for *guilt* which in turn leads to punishment. Without blame & guilt, there is no clear sense of moral right/wrong, no justifiable route to punishment.
Morality then, is a method of enforcing blame/guilt/punishment. Without it, there would be no system of crime/punishment. This system assumes freedom & simplifies causes. I believe in a more complex view of human agency & that the requirements of justice are greater than this simple view which serves only the conservative elements of society.
I agree with previous statements about morality, and would add some of my own. I think morality depends on the idea that the Universe, or God, agrees with one's cultural prejudices. What seems like common sense to one person is absolute nonsense to another. Witness the fact that the first thing the "liberated" citizens of Iraq did was march down the street beating themselves with chans and slashing their scalps with swords. To us "enlightened" westerners this could be considered sick, or even evil.
So really, since it's not logicall possible to prove that the Universe gives a shit what we do, morality should be relagated to the same realm as Heaven and Hell: that of myth. Ethics, on the other hand, are simply based on avoiding undue harm to others. Obivously culture would play a role here, as well, but at least ethics don't depend on unprovable metaphysics.
Regaurding the death penalty: I have a big prblem with this. First of all, the jury of my peers notion bothers me. I have very few people I would consider peers outside of some very specialized interests. The idea of putting my life in the hands of average Americans, who beleive in a God who created earthquakes, black holes ,and supernovas, but is also concerned with the mating habits of primates on a pebble, scares the shit out of me.
Ultimatly, I think the conept of evil serves a primarily religous function. That is, it helps you ignore the real causes of an act or event, and dwell in a faerie land of moral superiority.
This is a bit rambling, but I'm trying to cover the bits from all the postings that struck me.
Ordiinary Human Experience
« Reply #18 on: 2003-08-31 13:31:15 »
Language is a limited tool. I might form a similar list to describe degrees of warmth:
tepid warm hot scalding
Nowhere on this list will be found a way to distinguish between the interior of a blast furnace, the surface of the Sun, and the center of a thermonuclear explosion. Specialists working with such things have their own lingo, and in absolute terms an arbitrary measurement scale is the last word.
The specialist lingo appears with regard to evil; the word evil is quite appropriate for low-rent evildoers like Jeffrey Dahmer, even though it doesn't distinguish them from high-class evildoers like Pol Pot. People who need to make such distinctions (such as criminologists) have their own classification methods which do not enter into common use.
If we disapprove of someone's behavior we have a variety of labels to express our displeasure. Here are some adjectives I've ordered from least to most bad. Can you think of others? Did I get the order right?
Re:Degrees of evil
« Reply #25 on: 2004-03-22 14:43:48 »
I don't mean to be "rude" for butting in,
but even the most evil have very different paths and styles of evil right? Certainly there is Evil that preys on a system. For instance, the law abiding developer or manufacturer who exploits and causes suffering for gain while staying within the laws of his society. Then there are those that, perhaps as Pinker and others have noted, that due to some type of brain damage - or lack of development - or genetic deficiencies, simply have no physical ability to recognize right from wrong and as such are violent, theiving and act without concern for others. Then there are those that simply take advantage of a given situation - for instance taking the last lifeboat for themselves while women and children on deck watch him float away as they are about to drown.
If I understand Kirk, then at least the factors of human nature and social good need to be taken into account, but I assume from looking over the list that everyone here already thinks within those bounds. Are we to assume for the purpose of this that people with physical limitations - lack of a particular brain function are exempt from being evil? Obviously if correcting the problem matters, we cannot treat these people the same as someone we might think of as "reformable". But what of the evil businessman who DOES know the difference? His evil is less tangible and many other people of less power must go along in order for such an evil person to succeed? Does this make such a persons' entire enterprise evil? Can such a person be reformable? Can Kennith Lay ever really account for all the people who will suffer as they age and are in hospitals and need treatment that they cannot afford due to his behaviour. Certainly the family at the bedside of such a person has reason to think of Kenneth as a killer - not a selfish executive.
The whole concept of evil seems to be wrapped up with intention. Just as any single act can have simultaneous positive and negative effects, an act can have simultaneous positive and negative intentions - i.e., choosing who gets the last parachute.
The whole concept of evil seems to be wrapped up with perspective. In order to label an act or a person as "evil", one has to at least momentarily lose all capacity for empathy. Are we not largely, if not entirely, controlled by our own meme complex? How can any of our actions be evil if we make our choices based on what our memes tell us? If our past controls our thoughts and actions, can any of us be held accountable for what we do?
-- "We are the masters in the precincts of our immediate selves and slaves outside of them. But neither of these assertions is of any practical value unless we accept the state of affairs as it is." Moshe Feldenkrais: The Potent Self
Re:Degrees of evil
« Reply #27 on: 2004-04-12 17:23:10 »
Quote:
Are we not largely, if not entirely, controlled by our own meme complex? How can any of our actions be evil if we make our choices based on what our memes tell us? If our past controls our thoughts and actions, can any of us be held accountable for what we do?
The attitude you express above seems to be putting the mental tools ahead of the executive - your mind - which is not all about memes. If our past were actually to control our future, then advancement would be impossible, and society would never have sprung up. We are not controlled by our meme complex - our meme complex is a part of us, not some sentient "ghost in the maching" pulling strings.
It seems to me that animals evolved memes simply as a means of survival. And by animals I mean all animals that can learn outside of instinctual behaviour, like a chimp learning to pull ants out of hole using a stick. When it comes right down to it, the memes you carry are there to deal with the things your brain is not intuitivly capable of.
But let's explore the notion that you are a meme carrying biological machine - and not really in control. If that were the case, then why can't the memes in me, punish the memes in you for acting up and posing a risk to the majority meme carriers? Isn't the end result the same? It's either the memes of the majority trying to limit the destructive memes of a tiny minority - or maybe - it's society trying to limit and correct abhorrent behaviour in other individials. The result is the same, is it not?
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