Hacker News Reader

Comment by iguana | Hacker News Reader

I highly doubt the motivation of the past and current administration are "evil". I highly doubt that Bush or Obama wanted a massive surveillance state and a "minority report" type of future. The problem is that righteous and shortsighted people are rarely aware of being shortsighted. They built an infrastructure of turnkey tyranny to protect us from what may very well be a real threat, and swear that there's a system of checks and balances to protect us not because they are "evil" but because they are righteous. Their righteousness blinds them to their shortsightedness.

So, no, I still can't see them as evil. Just foolish.

View on HN

Who is, by this definition, evil? You could probably call Hitler or anyone else "righteous and shortsighted, and thus not evil." It makes the word useless, because it no longer refers to anything that exists in reality (just in fairy tales.)

I believe that evil only exists in fairy tales. There are better words to describe the immoral actions of others, including Hitler.

But the evil in fairy tales is only the way it is because the characters who perpetrate it are purposefully one-dimensional, their motivations and justifications left unrevealed so as to not give the reader too much empathy for them. Even their evil, on level-headed scrutiny (ignoring the story narrator's attempt to sway you to one side of an us-vs-them debate with rhetoric), is "righteous and shortsighted." Which is to say--even their evil isn't "evil."

And if you've reduced a word to signifying nothing at all, perhaps you're just trying to run away from allowing the things it does signify to be labelled? If the "evil" in fairy tales is, deep down, the same kind of justified, empathizable action that real people in our real world do every day, then why can't the thing the real people do also be called evil?

I'm guessing that, after a few rounds of clarification, your real problem with the term might be its true definition: evil is basically a useful bit of meta-ethics jargon meaning "something that is subjectively offensive to the part of my utility function I assume my culture shares with me, as evidenced through mythos and communicated social norms." It's that "subjective" part that people get tripped up by--"evil" (and its opposite "good") are only defined given a utility function and a culture of empathizable peer-beings who share some part of that utility function. Without the utility function, you might have something unclipperific[1], but not something evil. Without the empathizable peers, it might be something you find personally offensive, but this feeling won't be shared to others via sympathetic anger (offense at losing in a fair competition, for example, feels like "rage", not like "observing an evil being perpetrated.")

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/fv3/by_which_it_may_be_judged/

I go the other direction. I believe a person can be evil and do evil while believing themselves good. The results of your actions are what matters, not what you thought when you committed them.

It seems to me that "evil" is such a poorly defined word that any argument that depends on a particular definition will fail to compel anyone who doesn't already see things the way you do. All the turnkey tyranny and righteous shortsightedness seems like a (perhaps fairly banal) type of evil to me, but it really just comes down to using different definitions of the same word.

Evil is a very poor word to use outside of some sort of metaphysical sense or fairy tale.

I think the use of the word "evil" to describe the actions of our well meaning but thoroughly righteous and shortsighted government is counterproductive. If evil exists outside of fairy tales, it does so inside of us. All of us.

If evil exists outside of fairy tales, it does so inside of us. All of us.

Yes, and? You seem to think you're making quite the profound point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com