Does Evil Exist?

[Atheist-Lite]

Most acts of brutality and criminality can be explained by context and circumstance taking into account the behavioural characteristics of human beings as primates. To move beyond this and see some acts being so monstrous as they should be classed as 'evil' is to invoke other paradigms, and a slippery slope into religous nonsense. And yet on days like this, and thinking about the irreversible damage being done to the biosphere(the place with the only known habitable life is rapidly and knowingly being made uninhabitable).....these bring into them something beyond mere 'human behaviour doing its thing' surely? This is the question of evil....does it exist?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siRzVkcB ... re=related[/youtube]

[Hermit]

No. Not in the sense you are proposing it.

Next: Does Goodness Exist?

[Schneibster]

Most acts of brutality and criminality can be explained by context and circumstance taking into account the behavioural characteristics of human beings as primates. To move beyond this and see some acts being so monstrous as they should be classed as 'evil' is to invoke other paradigms, and a slippery slope into religous nonsense.

I think it's more in the eye of the beholder. For example, a shark is evil if it's chewing on me.

I think that in terms of prioritizing them for destruction, I'm going to put a mad bomber in front of a strangler, but it's simply a matter of how many lives are at risk, nothing more. It's the same decision as the two planes and one runway, one -plane with a heart attack victim and the other almost out of fuel. Ethics 101. Using that kinda-standard, then, being out of fuel is "more evil" than a heart attack.

And yet on days like this, and thinking about the irreversible damage being done to the biosphere(the place with the only known habitable life is rapidly and knowingly being made uninhabitable).....these bring into them something beyond mere 'human behaviour doing its thing' surely? This is the question of evil....does it exist?

I don't see anything more than the same ethical problem writ large. And it's still Ethics 101: a quarter of the human race is more important to save than ten percent of it.

This is the ultimately banal definition of evil. I gotta say, it really does put things in perspective.

Here's an interesting question: how many lives is it worth to prevent one person from being tortured to death, to give them a clean death?

[Schneibster]

No. Not in the sense you are proposing it.

Next: Does Goodness Exist?

Define "goodness." More closely than the implicit definition you've already given, the opposite of "evil," and note that by implication, no, if evil doesn't. I assume you intended it that way.

ETA: At first I said, well, by my definition, yes; but again, it's banal, greatest good of the greatest number and so forth, various saving these folks, sacrificing this or that or even one's existence; but thinking a bit longer I think this is a deeper question than it appears at first, because evil ultimately is just nonexistence (at least for an atheist, assuming of course that we're right), whereas good can be the absence of evil, or it can be actively good. One might try to extend evil to simply the absence of good, but I'm pretty sure most people would consider neutral to be OK as long as they could make it better somehow or other, over time.

[Atheist-Lite]

Goodness is another thread. I suppose in a real world situation you can't afford to use too many 'voodoo' words. Thinking about the common mans currency and how 'evil' is the ubiqitous response of the masses to any out of range monstrosity....is this so easy to ignore later in retropsection? Having 'characterised' the situation doesn't the most earnest secular thinker have to take into account what the crowd as done? or risk having their reasoned response overwhelmed by the wild hysteria of the masses?

[Schneibster]

I think you'd confuse most of "the masses" by asking them whether a shark eating someone is more evil than a plane running out of gas and falling out of the sky and killing everyone aboard. I suspect a lot of answers would count up the number of deaths without ever considering the horror of being eaten alive by a shark. And if horror isn't evil, what is?

[Atheist-Lite]

I think you'd confuse most of "the masses" by asking them whether a shark eating someone is more evil than a plane running out of gas and falling out of the sky and killing everyone aboard. I suspect a lot of answers would count up the number of deaths without ever considering the horror of being eaten alive by a shark. And if horror isn't evil, what is?

Yes, although in both cases the day after is not so horrific for the victim(s), only for their relatives.

[Schneibster]

Yet...

A shark is about the stupidest predator alive. They're incredibly sophisticated, but so completely automatic that they'll keep eating another shark while a third shark is eating them, inside a feeding frenzy. That's about as banal as evil can be. And there's no intent behind the plane's problem, either (or if there is, it's not a consideration). So that's banal too.

Where's the evil?

[Atheist-Lite]

Yet...

A shark is about the stupidest predator alive. They're incredibly sophisticated, but so completely automatic that they'll keep eating another shark while a third shark is eating them, inside a feeding frenzy. That's about as banal as evil can be. And there's no intent behind the plane's problem, either (or if there is, it's not a consideration). So that's banal too.

Where's the evil?

It is a element of the story telling narative that consolidates the incident for onlookers. More likely to be seen in a mass media description of the incident than a scientific description of events. Nothing to do with the reality of a situation....just a way of amplifying a emotion of disdaine so the incident is recalled? Maybe more important in a culture with no written form....it is derived from ancient PIE upelo/huwitt etc, changed it's meaning quite a bit in modern times always centered on disdaine? Just me conjecturing....a sketch of where I'm going with this?

[hackenslash]

I think that a better question is 'Is evil a useful construct?', to which I would answer 'no'.

One of the problems, I think, is that 'evil' is fairly dismissive. When we classify something as evil, we've closed the door to any thought of context, which is always dangerous.

Further, and as Seraph has implied above, it can only be robustly defined as a measure of goodness, which is always going to be subjective. The only objective measure of anything is the universe itself, and the universe has no use for these concepts.

[Schneibster]

Yet...

A shark is about the stupidest predator alive. They're incredibly sophisticated, but so completely automatic that they'll keep eating another shark while a third shark is eating them, inside a feeding frenzy. That's about as banal as evil can be. And there's no intent behind the plane's problem, either (or if there is, it's not a consideration). So that's banal too.

Where's the evil?

It is a element of the story telling narative that consolidates the incident for onlookers. More likely to be seen in a mass media description of the incident than a scientific description of events. Nothing to do with the reality of a situation....

So, subjective. That's acceptable; humans make subjective constructs to make sense of the world. So evil is one of those constructs, a way we organize random events to make some sense of things.

It seems, though, like we tend to allow ourselves, sometimes, to treat these subjective constructs as if they are real. "The Devil." And, of course, "God." Ancient, less sophisticated peoples had whole pantheons full of gods.

These are not useless myths. But they're not real. We need to learn the difference between real and not-real. Once we're free of those chains, then we can start to talk about the uses myths are to us. We can accept these subjective constructs for what they are, and get the use of them without the really nasty drawbacks they have, like hate, and prejudice, and torture. But until we work these drawbacks out, they will do more harm than good.

Sorry for breaking your sentence. There was an inflection right there, for me.

just a way of amplifying a emotion of disdaine so the incident is recalled? Maybe more important in a culture with no written form....it is derived from ancient PIE upelo/huwitt etc, changed it's meaning quite a bit in modern times always centered on disdaine? Just me conjecturing....a sketch of where I'm going with this?

I hadn't read this before I wrote that ^. It's clear I agreed with the connection before I did either; but I don't think it's disdain, I think it's a deeper feature of human thought, that it's about our subjective organization of the world into separate things, and our pattern-recognition leading us to construct patterns that aren't there; like "evil." What we're calling one thing here is a number of different ones whose only connection to one another is "bad stuff happened to some folks." Some with conscious intent, some not. But it's how we organize things in our heads.

A good athlete can compensate for their blind spot. It's a skill, you can learn it. We can learn to compensate for our mental blind spots, too. But we have to want to. And we have to see why not doing so could destroy us.

[Schneibster]

I just realized something; I just said that religion is the world's largest and oldest conspiracy theory.

[apophenia]

In answer to your question, "No. Yes. Maybe."

(By the way, the biosphere will be just fine. We may not be, but that's irrelevant. Or something.)

("I thought an irrelevant was an animal with a long nose and big floppy ears?")

Someone wanna get the lights on the way out?

[Atheist-Lite]

In answer to your question, "No. Yes. Maybe."

(By the way, the biosphere will be just fine. We may not be, but that's irrelevant. Or something.)

("I thought an irrelevant was an animal with a long nose and big floppy ears?")

Someone wanna get the lights on the way out?

I suppose if 5% of life remains in time things might rejig, that'll do just fine?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

In answer to your question, "No. Yes. Maybe."

(By the way, the biosphere will be just fine. We may not be, but that's irrelevant. Or something.)

("I thought an irrelevant was an animal with a long nose and big floppy ears?")

Someone wanna get the lights on the way out?

I suppose if 5% of life remains in time things might rejig, that'll do just fine?

As far as humans go, we hit one bottleneck where there were maybe 10,000 people. That may be the bottom limit, or we might be able to go lower. The rest of the life on the mud ball will have to see how bad we fuck the place up.