noddy wrote:All this talk about dodging and primitive superstitions is rot and pablum.
fair enough, tho lacking in detail.
i cant say i believe in evil, so i havent been participating in this non conversation.
as above, i believe in things i think are disgusting/wrong or against my world, its not for me to declare them relevant to the entire universe.
A is NOT B.
ok, so the conversation needs to be about B and not A then.
things that work (tm) [patent pending] {detail goes ere}
I screwed up that post and the previous one- fixing it, it should read:
noddy wrote:evil as the absence of good is an intellectual dodge.
the hard part of the word evil is reconciling it outwards from humanity to the world and nature, plenty of things i would offhand declare evil are survival strategies for others so my main thought would be that you really can only have evil within the framework of humans being a god created, separate class of critter, to the rest of em.
otherwise its all just squabbling over resources, we all know anything goes in do or die warfare.
All this chatter about dodging and primitive superstitions is rot and pablum.
Privation, absence, darkness, depredations and degradations- moral, physical, and metaphysical evils- evil in the broad is a way to conceptually organize the sum of opposition which experience shows to exist in this universe to our needs and desires.
While I don't think it is so ably reduced to good choice/bad choice; is there anyone out there of sound mind and body who does not act and react with good and bad choices in mind? Once we are into this territory, we clearly operate as if there was truly evil in this world.
From there it gets murky without a divine command ethic, especially if we jump right towards moral obligations and moral evils.
Anscombe points out, "One man– a philosopher– may say that since justice is a virtue, and injustice a vice, and virtues and vices are built up by the performances of the action in which they are instanced, an act of injustice will tend to make a man bad; and essentially the flourishing of a man qua man consists in his being good (e.g. in virtues); but for any X to which such terms apply, X needs what makes it flourish, so a man needs, or ought to perform, only virtuous actions; and even if, as it must be admitted may happen, he flourishes less, or not at all, in inessentials, by avoiding injustice, his life is spoiled in essentials by not avoiding injustice – so he still needs to perform only just actions. That is roughly how Plato and Aristotle talk, but it can be seen that philosophically there is a huge gap, at present unfillable as far as we are concerned, which needs to be filled by an account of human nature, human action, the type of characteristic a virtue is, and above all of human "flourishing.""
"In present-day philosophy an explanation is required how an unjust man is a bad man, or an unjust action a bad one; to give such an explanation belongs to ethics; but it cannot even be begun until we are equipped with a sound philosophy of psychology. For the proof that an unjust man is a bad man would require a positive account of justice as a “virtue.” This part of the subject-matter of ethics, is however, completely closed to us until we have an account of what type of characteristic a virtue is – a problem, not of ethics, but of conceptual analysis – and how it relates to the actions in which it is instanced: a matter which I think Aristotle did not succeed in really making clear."