Hacker News Reader

Comment by shaftoe | Hacker News Reader

You don't see much evil to handicapping the entire human race?

You don't see much evil in the absence of strategic intelligence required to avoid terraforming your own planet to make it less habitable?

Evil needs agency, so no, I don't see evil in the absence of something.

For one, societies do have agency. People decide every day, with who they elect, where they spend their money, how they live. You don't need a conscious goal of X to act in a way that brings X. And if you know that your actions are part of the problem and you still doing them, that's even worse.

Second, evil needs agency only when we talk of evil deeds.

An outcome can be evil in itself though - not evil-doing, evil, in the sense of bad, ominous, deleterious, etc.

A convenient abdication of responsibility, isnt it? We we not responsible for plane crash/ financial crysis / climate change, it just happened!

I was talking about evil, not responsibility.

What about the absence of resistance to evil? Perhaps not evil per se, but one could call it absence of good.

That depends on your definition of 'good', I guess. I wouldn't say that you have to fight evil to be good.

"Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing."

Emphasize on "good men". They're not evil for doing nothing.

No, I don't see "moar stuff, moar tech" as the ultimate reason of the human race.

I'd rather the human race is happier, more self-fulfilled, friendlier, with more solidarity, and better allocation of its resources, than it expanding forever...

If anything, I see much evil in "not handicapping" the human race, and ruining the planet, the animal life, and the human race in the process.

I do, and that's what cancerous infinite growth on every dimension will eventually do to us (or is already doing?)

We need to constrain growth to science and efficiency, and pull back on population and land use.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com