/townhall/ - Townhall

Flower, you are forgetting to consider self-deception.

In real life, there are basically no villains who have ever thought of themselves as evil.

In order to avoid doing evil, one must have the courage to engage in self doubt over whether or not they are engaging in evil acts. Plenty of Nazis absolutely believed they were saving the world from the evils of the Jews when throwing them in the ovens. Do you have the courage to doubt your judgments about the reality you live in? Do you have to spine for the humility for it?

>>11456
No.
Evil isn't measured in individuals, but actions.
Authority isn't the only means by which to have justice.
Justice isn't about punishing evil besides.
Good being an option is irrelevant as far as an evil act is concerned

>>11457
Doubt isn't the item needed.
Not all doubt is good.
Consistency is the mainstay. And that comes through an application of logic.

Plenty of people doubt themselves and still do shitty things.
Worse, plenty of people doubt themselves, and use that as an excuse, saying they're only human.
Doubt doesn't distinguish between good and bad action besides. You'll just as likely falter on doing good as you will evil, should you doubt alone.

>>11457
This does seem to have the problem that to go against the NAZIs when they were popular would require moral confidence.  I think you mean to assert being effected by brainwashing is a choice, perhaps?  Those that choose to accept culturally transmitted evil are evil?

On authorities, I think it would follow you reject that the world is mostly just.  Is it correct to say injustice would be authorities punishing good and rewarding evil, or at least to a more than trivial or accidental degree?

I think even on a basic crime level there will be doubt and sometimes deflection on something else.

You may assault someone because they were rude to you. Maybe you feel that assaulting someone is evil because assaulting is evil, true, but if someone insults you / mocks you that's evil as well. So your assault is justified.

Or what if people choose to do evil, but could not resist a primal drive like anger or lust? Or felt that they had no option but to perform an evil deed, walled in by the circumstances?

They might objectively agree that they did an evil deed, but would argue that given the circumstances they had no better choice.

Justice is tricky. Because I feel like Justice can be whatever the lawmaker or the courts decide is correct.
If a dictator says that anyone making a public mockery of this will be sent to jail or executed, then somewhere a judge that carries out that sentence can fulfill justice.

I suppose justice can be whatever you want it to be.
Some think justice is murdering the guy who accidentally insulted them.

I do think there's a tangible and active worthy debate on justice and punishment of criminals.

That is for example the question on what the goal is for punishment in our system.
On one hand there is a sort of guttural desire to watch someone who steps out of line suffer. Only when we feel the criminal has suffered enough can we be satisfied to let them go. That is justice to us. But it's also very emotional and in some sense not logical.

On the opposite end, it is the idea that punishment should serve to allow a criminal to reflect on their actions and work towards a second chance, a new opportunity to reform themselves. I feel like lately that is often the logical side of things and I see people argue that in that way, our idea of jail time and locking criminals up is unnecessary and unproductive. But it's obvious that that won't satisfy ourselves on an emotional guttural level.

If my daughter is abducted, tortured, raped and murdered, I want the bastard to suffer. i don't want anyone to say "Hey, that was pretty bad, but it's no use locking him up because that won't help him come to his senses."

And I wonder, what is actually the best approach to deal with criminals here.

>>11458
So some set of actions are evil. Those that do evil are evil, those that refrain are good.  Is the definition of sets of evil subjective, that is, is it valid that something is evil or good, just depends on who you ask?

Some interesting food for thought:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/895quRDaK6gR2rM82/diseased-thinking-dissolving-questions-about-disease

Punishing evildoers deters other people from committing evil acts.

>>11460
>Maybe you feel that assaulting someone is evil because assaulting is evil, true, but if someone insults you / mocks you that's evil as well. So your assault is justified.

Is it not the role of authorities to settle what is evil in cases with disagreement?

>Or what if people choose to do evil, but could not resist a primal drive like anger or lust? Or felt that they had no option but to perform an evil deed, walled in by the circumstances?

My sense is this is not seen as evil generally.  Or you might say, if you can imagine yourself (assuming you see yourself as a good person) doing similar if dealt the same "deck of cards," people won't see it as pure evil.  Pure evil is something you (a good person) could never imagine yourself doing.

>If a dictator says that anyone making a public mockery of this will be sent to jail or executed, then somewhere a judge that carries out that sentence can fulfill justice.

This will be generally regarded as justice, yes.

>If my daughter is abducted, tortured, raped and murdered, I want the bastard to suffer. i don't want anyone to say "Hey, that was pretty bad, but it's no use locking him up because that won't help him come to his senses."

If evil is incomprehensible -- a matter of free will -- is there a rational response except to destroy evil?  There are no legitimate causes for these actions, likewise no state response that can have an effect on evil.

>>11461
>On one hand there is a sort of guttural desire to watch someone who steps out of line suffer. Only when we feel the criminal has suffered enough can we be satisfied to let them go. That is justice to us. But it's also very emotional and in some sense not logical.
But in another sense, I would argue that it is quite logical.  Tit-for-tat is a pretty good strategy at the iterated prisoners' dilemma.  In the long-term, from an evolutionary perspective, I would strongly suspect that our desire for justice and punishment of wrongdoers increases fitness.  Also, if humans didn't believe in justice or revenge, then MAD probably wouldn't work.

>>11464
>Is it not the role of authorities to settle what is evil in cases with disagreement
Yes, that is supposed to be their role, but they are not always perfect at it.  Sometimes the authorities themselves are evil, for example, when they impose and enforce gun-control laws.

>>11463
If you follow the blog post you don't see evil as a moral choice.  You would see it as behavior subject to conditioning.  Perhaps that's part of what is confusing to me, because the views of evil require totally different kinds of thinking.

If it weren't ME doing evil, someone else would be here doing it worse! My evil has scruples, and if I stopped doing it, that void would be filled by someone without those scruples!