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Comment by immibis | Hacker News Reader

> Asking if a person or a company is good or bad isn't a question that can ever have a well-defined answer: the answers we give are rounded according to our own values.

Counterexample:

Was Hitler bad?

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Good/Bad are consensus votes. Its hard to escape their use just because of how deeply ingrained the programming is. We just think it makes "sense" and is "obvious" because its a meme that is already in our head. There is nothing inherently evil or good about any past/present/future animal on this planet.

I hate this website.

Lots of people do.

So, was Hitler evil?

Yes, most people and most countries are evil. In todays age I'd say the US has the largest concentration of evil.

That really depends if you ask a neo nazi or not.

Due to chaotic effects of causality, most of us would not exist if any significant event from that long ago had happened differently.

How is that related? Other people would exist then. So what?

If the answer is yes, does that mean a junior web dev who implements user tracking on a shopping portal is equivalent to Hitler? Or is every who does less evil than Hitler "not a bad person"?

I don't think it's useful to say "Hitler was bad." Hitler did a lot of specific evil acts that are more useful to analyze. If anything, it's counterproductive to say "Hitler was bad," because lots of people do bad things and then say "well, at least I'm not Hitler."

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