Revenge is a dish best not served.
That is a very very strange sentiment. There certainly are good and evil people. There certainly are good and evil acts.
An extremely small percentage of people throughout history have been purely good or purely evil. The vast, vast majority are somewhere in the middle.
Unfortunately, too many adults have been raised by Marvel movies and want to label everyone in the world as "good" or "evil" with no nuance.
The trick is to make it sound like it's not you that's saying it. We launder it through God, society, reality, and it comes out sparkling clean to everyone who's gullible enough to believe it. It's a trick, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work.
Of course you can. As long as the animals we are have the ability to understand the consequences of their actions, to themselves and others, and make rational choices about that.
I wouldn't put in prison or on death row a person who killed even a hundred people but functionally has an IQ of 45. That person likely couldn't make rational choices and couldn't understand what they were doing, why they were doing it, or what would happen next.
Whereas I would incarcerate a person with a 100 IQ who drove drunk in a well populated city, whether or not they hit someone.
Good and evil don't have much to do with either case.
That's not to say there aren't consequences to rejecting them as such, we have a whole system for social fact enforcement that includes social, physical, and mental punishment, but that doesn't mean that one can't appreciate them as social facts either.
Would evil exist in the natural world absent humans? If not, then evil is a property contingent on humans in one way or another.
The bug-brained stance is to just agree with moral relativism. "Oh gosh stealing/assault/murder is okay if you're poor," etc. Fuck that shit.
If no one helped others, but also didn't harm them, life would be still be much better without people doing evil things. For example, no volunteer would clean a beach of other's trash, but also no visitor would pollute the beach intentionally.
Oh I can think of plenty of evil acts that don't involve deliberately harming others.
But at the end of the day the evil-doer doesn't think they're evil and nothing I say will convince them otherwise. And indeed I can't be sure they're an evil person or a person merely committing evil acts or a person committing neutral acts that seem evil to me.
All I can be sure of is that I don't want or need to be around them. It does me no good to hate them or revel in their misfortune. I can be relieved when they stop doing whatever was objectionable to me though.
Even if you debate the edge cases forever, most of the situations where significant harm was purposefully done would be clearly evil.
I don't think this definition of evil survives the trolley problem.
Also, if you don't intervene, you don't have to answer to the police about why you deliberately killed a man. Murder is murder, even if your intentions were good.
> Yet it reflects the natural reaction of not deliberately killing someone for the greater good, because people judge that more evil than the neutral position of not intervening.
is quickly disproven through the Trolley problem, since it's literally about deliberately killing someone for the greater good - and the average respondent DOES deliberately kill someone for the greater good.
Yes, you can map these manifestations to those end-of-the-chain constructs, but does it make them true or real? Or are they merely your personal, fuzzy classifications based on your experience and programming?
Viewed from this perspective, there is neither evil nor good indeed.
I personally find this reductionism quite helpful in seeing through these layers of constructs and making it my own choice which ones to adopt, rather than simply accepting them all as given.
Edit: typos
* "according to who?" you may ask: well, according to the populace, ultimately the only measure that matters
It's a rejection of common reality and not worth engaging with because it's an argumentative dead end.
One person's good is another person's evil.
One person's good is another person's evil.
It would appear you are falsely equivocating benefit (which is indeed, subjective) with good; it therefore follows that you also equivocate injury with evil.
While indeed, something beneficial is often considered "good," this does not imply that all good consists in benefit, or that all benefit is inherently good. It would be evil, for instance, for one to benefit by exploiting another. Contrariwise, their mutual co-operation would be good and result in their mutual benefit.
The distribution[0] of your major and minor terms is of great importance when reasoning upon matters as grave as a system of objective morality. One may benefit from good or evil actions. To equivocate between good and benefit in toto is to possess a fundamentally mistaken idea of the principles of objective morality. In so doing, you do not reject objective morality, but rather your misunderstanding thereof.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_proposition#Distri...
I was not in fact saying that good must always involve benefit and evil injury. It is obvious that acts which some will categorise as evil can provide benefit, and vice versa.
I was merely saying that there is no objective definition of good and evil independent of human judgement and people do differ in how they ascribe those labels.
> Revenge is a dish best not served.
If the first statement is true, then you have no basis for saying the second. I believe the second statement, not the first.
There are some people the world is objectively better off without. The issue of course is who gets to decide that, and under what circumstances. But there's no denying that violence, properly applied, can solve many problems very efficiently.
I was quite relieved when Rush Limbaugh died, for example. I will feel a great deal of relief when Putin and Xi eventually kick the bucket. I feel no need to piss on their graves, but only because I have better things to do.
“Better” is always subjective, so this is false.
> The issue of course is who gets to decide that
This is an issue exactly because better is always subjective.
From a more practical perspective, we can all agree that there are more and less desirable states of human life, and that is the context where the term "objectively" is used in common parlance.
I reject your nihilism and substitute my subjective values as a superior model.
Maybe, but value is subjective even when you zoom in.
> I reject your nihilism and substitute my subjective values as a superior model.
I never expressed nihilism, I stated that values are subjective, and describing them as objective is incorrect and obscures the source of the practical problem you yourself described with implementing them.
There is no pink, only salmon. Got it.
Correct, they should not.
Where the statement without “objective” is uncontroversial and the discussion touches on nothing else to which objectivity vs. subjectivity is important, it adds nothing but pointless inaccuracy, when the claim is controversial or offered in a context where objectivity vs subjectivity actually matters in some other way, it is harmfully misleading.
There's nothing "objective" about this at all--this is an extremely Western/US-centric view of the world. Most of China does not consider Xi Jinping an evil person who the world would objectively be better off without.
I'm not sure we have any data on this either way. Most of China doesn't feel like they have the freedom to say anything negative about Xi in any sort of public or recorded way so taking a poll on Xi in China isn't likely to give you a true picture of how people there actually feel about him.
If Xi is pure evil, you should be worried about how much investment American companies are receiving from evil CCP-affiliated entities, as well as how much money gets America is spending on evil CCP-sponsored manufacturing...
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/10/06/unfavorable-vi...
Sure, and I can be relieved too when specific people, who cause great suffering, die and therefore stop.
Relief is a different thing than taking great satisfaction in it. It's not schadenfraude I feel about their death: it's relief about having one less thing to worry about, not relief at finally getting my vengeance.
I don't think so. For example, when a family member's biopsy comes back clear, I feel relief but not satisfaction.
I wonder if seen in brain chemistry and vital signs these emotions exhibit differently. I'd guess they would.
But the quote isn't talking about revenge, it's talking about schadenfreude.
Unfortunately, some people can't shrug and walk away. You can't walk away from racism; you carry your face with you. You can't walk away from an abusive home if you have no money. You can't shrug off the next blow when you're a victim of violence.
Being able to shrug and walk away is an ability to be treasured. Not everybody has it.
Obviously if someone is actively striking you or detaining you that's a different category, which is well outside the context of my comment.
But nobody ever beat me with a baseball bat. That's a different category of racism that I haven't commented on and that obviously is different from the topic at hand.
As a black person living in America, let me offer my interpretation of GP's statement, then. You can't walk away from racism, because it's always there. It will follow you whether you want it to or not. It's pervasive to the point that even if it's not immediately visible, you can rely on it to surface sooner or later.
Your options are either to exit society altogether or learn to live with it. It doesn't require being beaten with a baseball bat for racism to have a significant impact on your life.
But I can walk away from a situation in which I'm being treated with racism, or a situation in which a narcissist is playing their zero-sum game against me.
I don't hate the narcissist and I wouldn't enjoy their suffering. I just don't want anything to do with them. Nor the racist.
I press life's "restart" button to get a different interaction with a different person, and that has worked well. Even where restarting is massively inconvenient for me. Because ultimately most people don't treat others with racism and most people don't treat others with "evil", so I'm more likely to get a reasonable person on my next attempt.
That’s cute.