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Comment by Stranger43 | Hacker News Reader

I think we’re making a mistake in conflating stupidity with irrationality as it’s the latter that's truly dangerous.

And irrationality doesn’t correlate with stupid in any meaningful way as people can be intelligent up to the point where some dogmatic instinctive belief means that their raw unfiltered emotions suddenly guides their decision process.

And lets be honest most actual genocides are committed by smart(often very moral) people acting on irrational fears or dreams of an utopian future that can only happen after the world is purified of some specific evil.

Selfish bastards aren't nearly as dangerous and fanatical zealots chasing some utopian dream but being fanatical don't mean your ignorant just that at one point your emotions take over from logical reasoning.

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> And lets be honest most actual genocides are committed by smart(often very moral) people acting on irrational fears or dreams of an utopian future that can only happen after the world is purified of some specific evil.

People who commit genocide to try to establish a utopia are not moral. They may be "moral" - that is, they may claim adherence to a moral standard, and be able to articulate it and defend it - but they aren't moral. In D&D terms, they're lawful evil. But they think they're lawful good, because they are following their moral code. They never stop to think that, if their moral code calls for killing all these people, maybe they should be questioning their moral code.

But if doing evil(killing) is always the work of evil/amoral people can you actually have "good" soldiers? given that the work of a soldier at war involves killing, especially as modern mechanized armies use weapons that makes it nearly impossible to avoid collateral damage.

Im of cause using moral in the relative term here as following an "code of ethics" and acting in "the interest of the common good" as described in that code rather then simply acting from hedonistic/sadistic impulses.

The problem with absolute morality is that it's of absolutely no use to an rational actor dealing with an real world that don't conform to the idealized/simplified model that such moral codes tend to depend on for logical constituency.

Soldiers in war are rather different than genocide. The Geneva Convention makes this quite clear.

The problem with following a code of ethics rather than simply acting on hedonistic or sadistic impulse is that you can pick a code of ethics that lets you act on those impulses - even encourages or demands that you act on them. Worse, those who most want to be hedonistic or sadistic are most drawn to those kinds of codes of ethics.

I assert that if a code of ethics calls for you to commit genocide, that code of ethics is itself evil.

>They never stop to think that, if their moral code calls for killing all these people, maybe they should be questioning their moral code.

They certainly do think about it. The logic is invariably:

1. These are people who are holding back progress towards a future in which (according to my ideology) everybody is happy / equal / free / (insert vaguely defined ideal state here)

2. Therefore they must not want people to be happy / equal / free / (insert vaguely defined ideal state here)

3. Only an evil person would not want people to be happy / equal / free / (insert vaguely defined ideal state here)

4. Therefore they are evil

5. Therefore I am morally obligated to annihilate them

6. I am a Good Person because I am so devoted to ensuring that everybody becomes happy / equal / free / (insert vaguely defined ideal state here)

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