Defining Good And Evil
First:
Good = Right
Evil = Wrong
Then:
Right as what is right in the long term
Wrong as what is right in the short term
Long term > short term, so long term is the most important; we should strive to make the ‘right’ / ‘good’ decisions.
Examples of good/right (right in the long term): Exercise, helping people
Examples of evil/wrong (right in the short term): Sweets, harming other people
Any alternative definitions?
Good = Right
Evil = Wrong
Then:
Right as what is right in the long term
Wrong as what is right in the short term
Long term > short term, so long term is the most important; we should strive to make the ‘right’ / ‘good’ decisions.
Examples of good/right (right in the long term): Exercise, helping people
Examples of evil/wrong (right in the short term): Sweets, harming other people
Any alternative definitions?
Comments (171)
All that counts is pleasure Vs pain:
- If you do something right, you get long term pleasure, short term pain
- If you do something wrong, you get short term pleasure, long term pain
All we need to judge between the shades of grey is the pleasure minus pain calculation; as long as there is more net pleasure than pain, we are doing the right/good thing.
How do you feel about eugenics?
"Wrong as what is right in the short term". Many actions are right in the short term and the long term. Many actions are plainly wrong in the short term as well. Furthermore, if you are ranking "right in the short term" as what creates the maximum short term pleasure, I think that is plainly incorrect. Killing someone for short term pleasure (as revenge or whatever is used to justify murder as a short term pleasure) is still wrong.
1. Every person has natural rights.
2. One natural right is the right to your own life.
3. If everyone has the right to their own life then they necessarily don't have a right over anyone else's life.
4. Murder is taking the right over someone else's life.
5. Murder is wrong.
I am sure you would agree with this claim that "murder is wrong" but I am showing that something wrong in the long term is not right in the short term, even if it creates temporary pleasure.
There are a few, I call them right-squared. For things that are both wrong in the short and long term, they are wrong-squared.
Murder is wrong or wrong-squared depending on if you are a sadist or not.
Got a bad wrap in WW2 to say the least. Because of modern society and social support structures like the welfare state, evolution / survival of the fittest is not taking place to the same degree as it does in nature. So human progress and happiness could be accelerated with Eugenics. So Eugenics would be a good thing if done right
Also "fittest" does not alway mean the strongest, fastest or smartest. It means they survived long enough to have offspring. In many cases this would mean they had sex appeal.
But the definition of survival of the fittest has chained in the information age; it's smarts that lead to success Our breeding strategy should relict this. Sorry of that sounds a little cold.
Since we are members of the same species and also members of a shared culture, we can often share our goals, but there are times when our goals come into conflict. When someone inhibits our goals, that action is seen as bad, or wrong. When our goals are promoted, then we see that action as good, or right.
This is why we have moral dilemmas for which there are no solutions. It comes down to whose goals get to be promoted at the expense of others' goals being inhibited.
I didn't say you sounded cold I say you were " showing an incredible ignorance of evolution." Learn how to read, then go read the Origin of Species.
Darwin talks about selective breeding right out of the gate, not on humans on animals, but it is the same principle. Actual Darwinian evolution is what is cold, and that this why people misinterpret it, like you, and tend towards a more Lamarckian spin on evolution (the idea of some type of progression).
Survival of the Fittest (aka natural selection) is the natural law which governs the selection process in the variation of species, in the case of eugenics that law would be removed. Eugenics would end natural selection in the human population. Natural selection is a selection process, so applying selective breeding removes that natural process.
Furthermore, whether or not humans are currently outside natural selection depend on if humans have escaped the Malthusian trap, which there are people on both sides of the fence on that one. Evolution is an incredibly slow process, and only time will tell if we have truly escaped Malthus' trap.
So to recap, it is not that I think you are being cold; I think that you don't know what you are talking about.
But natural selection is mis-functional in the information world; it does not select for a big brain.
You are a rude and ignorant person. Please do not breed.
But I am clearly smarter than you, and I thought you wanted the smart people to breed.
Evil = the (inter)personal behavior you disapprove of as strongly as you can disapprove of anything. Mere "bad" is weaker--simply the (inter)personal behavior you disapprove of. "Evil" is on an extreme end of the scale.
If society is functioning properly, you can define good and evil in terms of what's good/evil for society and the individual.
An individual is part of society so interests usefully align; whats good for the individual is good for society. 'Conflicts of interest' between individuals and society are down to unreasonable behaviour or expectations of individuals.
If you're trying to define x, you can't include x in the definition.
At any rate, society itself doesn't think. What's "good for society" is something that each individual makes a judgment about.
But you can define good/evil for the individual and then the sum of that for society. If people are making the right decisions then this should be right for society too.
If you take any example of a conflicts of interest between individual and a well functioning society; it is always the individual at fault; thats what we have prison for.
Okay, but as I said, good/evil for the individual is simply:
Good = the (inter)personal behavior you approve of, the (inter)personal behavior you feel is recommendable, etc.
Evil = the (inter)personal behavior you disapprove of as strongly as you can disapprove of anything. Mere "bad" is weaker--simply the (inter)personal behavior you disapprove of. "Evil" is on an extreme end of the scale.
Quoting Devans99
The "right decisions" are simply the decisions, to an individual, that are in line with the (inter)personal behavior they approve of.
That doesn't imply that other people will agree. Different people will have different opinions.
Good is what's demonstrably good for the individual (and therefore the group):
- Helping others
- Sharing ideas
- Exercise
- Consensual sex
Evil is what is bad for the individual and group:
- Murder
- Excessive eating
- Lying
Quoting Terrapin Station
I think you will find its a purely mathematical relationship; an individual is part of a group. What's right for the individual is right for the group.
Person A is wrong; Robbing/raping is detrimental to the group.
Person B is wrong; murder is an extreme form of punishment; much better to keep them alive so they can contribute to the group once corrected.
But if a person is so pathetic that they really cannot be taught the difference between right and wrong then maybe a compassionate death is in that individual's interests (and the group's).
Eating human flesh (without killing) (if there is nothing else to eat) is right.
Good and Evil are not just the results of how one values one thing over another. It is not a list of items ordered in rank of descending value. You can go out and meet both right now. You can look for either and find it. A cautionary note is in order, however. You could die during the course of the investigation.
Let me know how it all turned out.
So compassionate killing is right.
And incompassionate killing is wrong.
I think you will find that all intelligent creatures value the same things.
I think you would refrain from killing anyone because they might come up with some ideas / be of some use / on general principles - once the morality of the group is compromised; the group itself is compromised.
The weaker will die first; IE those with the lower quality of living. The remaining people can share the remains.
This is a somewhat gruesome discussion.
It's wrong to murder for food.
Im a vegetarian.
Hell for meat eaters is being eaten by the animals they consumed in their lifetime.
The reason people started talking about good and evil is not about sharing a list of what most people desire.
It started because evil people do really awful things that demonstrate, what shall I call, a different source of motivation, from other people who recognize they need to find a different reason to do things than those truly crazed people.
I am proposing a negative to a negative, not a table of shared positives. Creatures adapting to a specific environment, if that floats your boat.
Evil people are evil because of their upbringing. They are evil, therefore they are wrong, therefore they are suboptimal and therefore they need their neural networks retraining to do right. Then they would be motivated to act for their own good and thus the good of the group.
At this point I must take some sleep...
But your answer regarding a solution assumes that we are in a place to just fix the problem because everything needed to determine that has been determined.
How did you get from a list of what is favorable to retraining people for thinking badly?
Meat is murder. Animal fat is solid at body temperature so it clogs up your arteries whereas vegetable fat is liquid at body temperature.
It takes 5 times as much land to produce meat calories as it does vegetable calories,
Meat is wrong.
Right and wrong is a sense - like the aesthetic sense, or sense of humour. Seeking to define what is right and wrong is difficult for that reason. It's like trying to define art, or define funny - it's a matter of judgement, and of perspective. The world is complex - and the "moral sense" for want of a better term - applies to any and everything - and across time, insofar as one factors that into the equation. There's no inherent reason one must think long term. That's also a value judgement. Sometimes, it's not helpful to think long term - like in a fight.
Where it gets interesting, is Moses coming down the mountain with his stone tablets - or, to be more realistic, when hunter gatherers forged an agreement about right and wrong, pinned it on God for the sake of objective authority, and joined together to form society - in which everyone lived by the rules.
Clearly, there's a difference between a reflexive sense of right and wrong, and a set of rules carved in stone. The moral sense will always update itself in relation to circumstances, whereas - a set of rules carved in stone is liable to become ever more anachronistic over time. We see this in the values set out in religious texts - which were perfectly appropriate in the primitive context in which they were written - but that now, inspire terrorists to seek to impose their dogmatic beliefs and values through violence, upon a world to which those values are no longer relevant or useful!
No it's a mathematical relationship:
Right is pleasure > pain
Wrong is pain > pleasure
Long term > short term so its what right/wrong in the long term that matters.
Can you summarize this thread? I want to join, but it already has 2 page, and it will be hard to read them all
^ I agree
With respect to my definition, just to help you understand it, what would be demonstrably good about helping others, sharing ideas, etc. (and assuming that in your view we are indeed talking about ethics there, my definition was re ethics), if we're talking about a person or persons who do not approve of or feel that helping others, sharing ideas, etc. are recommendable?
Such a person is wrong, so should be corrected. Trying to help them understand the difference between right and wrong would be the correct approach. Once they understand that, they can join normal, well-adjusted society and they will respond positively to good/right actions.
They're wrong per what?
Offering unhelpful 'help' is wrong.
Rejecting help is "suboptimal" per what?
If S doesn't approve of taking a shorter time to complete a task, S doesn't believe that it's recommendable, then in what sense is it better or more favorable to complete a task in a shorter rather than a longer period of time?
Completing a task in 1 hour versus 3 hours is different. (Obviously.) Now, you're saying that there's a preference to complete it in 1 hour rather than 3. Where is that preference coming from?
But I was referring to the situation where offering help is appropriate; IE S does not enjoy the task and some help from another would make it much easier. Often people can be helped just by dropping a word of advice. Time is money. Free time is valuable. Excepting help is right.
But then it's not offering help that's good, because in the first case, the person doesn't want help, and you're saying that it's wrong to offer help in that case.
Hence why I said that good and bad (in an ethical context) are about the interpersonal behavior that people approve of, that they believe is recommendable, etc. It's about people's preferences, their desires, etc. It's not about particular actions regardless of anyone's preferences or desires.
If a person needs help its right to offer help. If a person does not need help, its wrong to offer help.
Quoting Terrapin Station
No its about maths. NET PLEASURE = PLEASURE - PAIN. It's about maximising net pleasure for the individual and the group.
What if someone doesn't approve of maximizing pleasure for the group, though?
You'd say that they're wrong. Well, again, they're wrong per what?
"Evil" would be the product of intent. Bad not necessarily. For instance, someone trying to kill you is evil. Cancer trying to kill you is just "bad". Now, if God existed and created the cancer to kill you, then that would be the act of an evil God.
I already gave the answer as to what is evil/bad right/good on the first page of this forum. It was ignored, so it is no surprise that this thread has continued on without a conclusion.
Again, my impression is that we were being asked about ethics/morality in this thread, not good/bad more generally than that. I don't recall why I had that impression now, but my answer was written in the context of ethics/morality.
Wouldn't the pertinent info be whether they feel it's negative or positive (or neutral) to be unpopular in the group?
Well, but that only matters with respect to how the person feels about those things, though.
In other words, S says he has goal x. Y inhibits goal x. S winds up not feeling negatively about that, at least not overall, and maybe S even winds up feeling positive about it. What matters there for "good/bad" etc. are how S feels.
If the group is a right acting group, someone would be quite wrong to reject popularity within the group. If the group is wrong acting, then seeking popularity is still correct as it will be needed whilst fixing the group's negative aspects (IE if you are popular, they should listen when you tell them what is wrong).
This person actively seeks to ethnically cleanse people, drops nukes, and knows that children will be tortured and slaughtered in thousands by the day.
Given the outcome is a nice society is creating such pain and suffering, such slaughter, “good” simply because the ourcome is deemed “good.”
One person’s utopia is often hell for many others.
Also, in the OP you’ve left out the possibility of short-term good causing long-term good. Do you think that is possible? If not why not mention it?
Given that we don’t really know the future then how are we to judge our actions today by what happens tomorrow, in a year, after we’re dead? By what means do we come to some decision? Or is the idea for us to simply resign ourselves to our own, or another’s, personal will?
Oy vey. I don't think we're getting anywhere. If the group is right or wrong acting to whom?
If the group sticks to what is right (pleasure>pain) for individuals, the group will be right as a whole.
Human beings have small differences but on the important stuff, right thinking people all agree (and wrong thinking people need to change).
Maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain are only positive when someone feels that that's the best course of action.
When someone doesn't feel that that's the best course of action, then there's nothing positive about it.
Likewise, x is optimal compared to y is purely a matter of an individual's preferences.
Spoken just like someone who responds too quickly to posts without thinking things through and who wants to argue for the sake of arguing.
You've moved the goal posts here and it still doesn't make your argument work. Now you're talking about over time how the victim sees the past event. Good and bad things will happen post event. Anyone can point to those good events and say that they wouldn't come about if that special event, that I thought was bad, didn't happen.
Let's take your argument and run a variable through it. If someone kills you in your sleep, you no longer have any feelings about it afterwards. So, does that make killing you in your sleep a non-moral act, like mowing your lawn?
War is wrong. There are better ways to change a government than war.
Quoting I like sushi
Can you give an example?
Quoting I like sushi
Yes, I call that right squared.
I think "wrong" is such a thorny concept that even this (above) can be wrong. Think about it for a few moments and you will be able to develop a particular scenario in which murder is not wrong....
These are the bodies signals of right and wrong. Someone would have to be seriously maladjusted if they did not seek to maximise pleasure and minimise pain. Such a person needs help.
I've been doing this stuff for more than 40 years.
Quoting Harry Hindu
What were the goal posts?
Quoting Harry Hindu
You just chastised me about responding too quickly, and yet you seem to have no understanding of what my view is.
Good and bad are ways that people feel about things. You correlated it to goals/goal achievement, etc. I pointed out that it's only correlated to goals/goal achievement per how an individual feels about it, where not achieving a goal, or being inhibited in achieveing it, can result in feeling any way towards it--positive, negative, anything in between.
So in the example you're presenting, good/bad hinge purely on how individuals think about it. Different individuals think differently. Hence, good and bad are relative to individuals.
To answer "Is x a moral or non-moral (or immoral, etc.) act," we have to ask someone who can think about it and give an answer. Obviously, a person can not do this after they're dead. To a dead person, nothing is or isn't moral, non-moral, etc. We have to ask the living people, while they're alive. While I'm alive, I'd unsurprisingly not morally agree with being murdered. The person who is murdering me might have a different opinion.
An obvious example would be either fascism or communism. If you want something more specifc then any ideology taken to an extreme (by which I mean personal views and opinions asserted as universal truths.) Another example would be someone who thinks the world should adhere to some strict religious doctrine and that homosexuals should be slaughtered.
Why do you call it “right squared”? Saying that good can lead to bad or good, and that bad can led to good or bad is not really worth mentioning as far as I can tell. What am I missing?
Basically you're saying that there's something inherently wrong with being highly unusual. I don't at all agree with that.
War is not the optimal solution to any problem, so it is always wrong.
Quoting I like sushi
These are both extreme viewpoints; extremism is generally wrong.
Quoting I like sushi
Most things that are right are painful in the short term. Being pleasurable in both short and long term is unusual so I call it right squared.
Most things that are wrong are pleasurable in the short term. Being painful in both short and long term is unusual so I call it wrong squared.
Is it an “extreme” view to say “war is always wrong.”? It is certainly an absolute claim and I’d call anyone asserting an absolute as holding to (or leaning toward) an extremist viewpoint where reality is taken as being binary (black and white.) Appealing, and even useful for simplifying an argument in order to examine it more closely, but often deeply misguiding if used as an unwavering “correctness.”
So this means that when you say “war is always wrong” that it is then not one of those kind of extremist views you deem as “generally wrong.”
Most things that are right are painful short term? Is that anecdotal or do you have some evidence to back it up? I would roughly agree with that though. Things worth knowing and doing come at a price. What is “right” in my book is to strive on regardless of apparent “unfair” failings and to be thankful when pleasure comes my way.
You could’ve simply said “life is hard.” I don’t think anyone really needs much empirical data to agee with that sentiment. It is not without tests and tribulations. I don’t readily engage with paain and suffering though merely becasue I deem it “good.” I understand that I must risk being wrong in order to improve. I also understand that I will always fail somewhere no matter what I do, yet I continue and will comtinue to continue.
Sometimes you are forced into doing the wrong thing. But it's still the wrong thing. Anything that is not optimal is technically wrong. War is about as far from optimal as is imaginable.
Quoting I like sushi
Life is hard because people make the wrong decisions; they optimise for the short term rather than the long term. Much of life is about short term sacrifice for long term gain. A clear definition of right and wrong would help people live better lives.
You've been responding too quickly to posts without thinking things through for more than 40 years. Yes, I can see how that could be the case.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I explained that in my previous post. Take the time to read before posting a reply.
Quoting Terrapin Station
This is total BS. Having your goals inhibited makes you feel wronged, or else you didn't have your goals inhibited. When would anyone feel good about their goals being inhibited? If they feel good about it, it's because they realized that it wasn't necessarily a goal of theirs. How do you feel about your stuff being stolen? Wouldn't you feel wronged because you have the goal of keeping your stuff in your possession?
All you're really saying here is that if someone doesn't feel wronged by having a "goal" inhibited, you're not going to agree to calling it a goal, because it turns out that definitionally, you require that it's something that one would feel wronged re it being inhibited for you to call it a goal.
That simply tells us something about how you use language.
That attempt failed obviously and only told us something about your personal vocabulary.
If you want me to clarify something about my view to you, though, simply ask (in a manner where you're asking me to clarify something)
That's not a "clarify your view for me so I can understand it better" question. It's a rhetorical question--you immediately afterward give your answer. In other words you're presenting it as an argument, not as a question about my view.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Aside from that not being specific enough--I'm going to feel different ways in different scenarios, and you've already announced that you're going to parse any response as an opportunity to show how you personally use particular vocabulary, my philosophical comments above re possible scenarios weren't a report of how I'm personally going to feel in some situation.
What if you had a button which would kill off half the population of China, would you press the button?
What if you had a button which guarantees the aversion of a Malthusian catastrophe, would you press the button?
What if those events were exclusive to one another?
Basically, if an action that could cause betterment to the majority of people in the future though it causes the detriment of many people in the present, is that action good?
P.S. I keep on defining good and evil as moral terms. Is that what this discussion is about?
Maybe I can help here a little?
How about someone having a goal that was, unbeknownst to them likely to end in painful death. Let us say they wish swim in lava annd imagine it to be a pleasant warm experience. You stop them. You “inhibit” them. They then see someone else dive smiling into the lava and then watch them scream in tormented pain briefly before dying.
Do you think the person feels “wronged”? Obviously not.
What you appear to be saying though is that at the moment they are prevented from carrying out the act they most certainly do feel wronged. No argument there! (Regardless of their ignorance of lava or possibly deluded psychological state.)
If someone kills me I don’t feel anything about it. If someone was to chop off my arm I wouldn’t be happy about it even if the reason was essentially for my own good. Not being happy about something is not necessarily the same as being wronged (gangrene would be one condition that made this necessary.)
Your post on the first page seems to be a gist exposition of “social contract” theory. Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau and many others have toyed with that.
The judgement of what is and is not an “evil” goal is something you don’t appear to have looked/explained closely enough.
I don't think that's universally the case, though. Claiming that it's universally the case doesn't seem to acknowledge the huge variety of ways that persons' consciousnesses, thought processes, etc. can work--as inscrutable to us as they may be at times.
We could stipulate that we're not going to call something a "goal" just in case the person wouldn't feel wronged at the moment we prevent them from otherwise carrying out the goal, but that doesn't at all amount to the person in question necessarily not thinking of it as a goal in a very similar way to how we personally think about goals (whatever term we want to bestow on the phenomenon).
Singlemindedness and focus on a particular goal may or may not block out any chance of any other thought process rising to the fore.
As a general rule if someone (an arbitrary “someone,” not a close associate/friend/family member) sctively halts my progress toward a goal I have set my mind too I don’t assume they have my interests to heart because I understand that I am pursuing my goals for my reasons (which benefit me and those I know) and not necessarily for the person seemingly blocking my progress.
You can of course continue to split hairs if it suits you to. It might prove fruitful.
The problem is simply that we're going to go off track if we try to suggest that anything is going to count as good/bad for everyone, in general.
No idea what track we’re trying to stay on. I don’t agree with most of what the OP says simply because it is unclear what is being said.
I know I can do evil and do good. What I mean by that is likely akin to the kind of things you mean when you talk of evil and good. Where Harry looks towards the blocking of a path toward some goal as a way to express “wrong” and “right”, and/or “good” and “evil” I don’t. My view is from the negative aspects of human existence. For me “suffering” thing we try to minimize yet equally a certain means of coping with suffering does seem to produce good. I see both passivity and activity as being two extreme poles that cause equally high levels of net suffering. The key, as I see it, is to take on challenge to cope with suffering rather than hide passively from it.
I could easily write seferal books on different ways to use the term “evil” and “good” from barious perspectives. My gist, as noted above, would still be the same more or less.
The difficulty I always find is in the judgement of long term effects of our actions. Hypotheticals are the best way I know of exploring moral problems and framing a personal idea of evil and good, or right and wrong. Many sadly confuse true with right and false with wrong.
Well, so for example I don't agree with that.
You could, of course, define suffering so that it includes the word "bad" in it, but plenty of conventional definitions do not have the word "bad" in it, and I don't at all agree that what people variously have in mind by "suffering" (and people have all sorts of things in mind with that term) are necessarily bad.
If the was really no other option but the button then technically it would be a good action as it benefits more people. But in a real situation, there would be better options and you would choose the optimal (most right) option.
Quoting NuncAmissa
I've defined right and wrong in mathematical terms. I think right=good and wrong=evil.
Do you “enjoy” to “suffer”? Come on now, really?
Of course you can argue that “suffering” now can lead to less future suffering but that defeats the point for the sake of pedantry wordplay. The psychology of loss aversion would point to people generally being over sensitive toward negatives outcomes (it is better to not lose than to gain.)
Other than your pedantic protest over my purposefully parenthesised “bad” (which you apparently took to mean some ... I don’t know?) the rest of what you wrote was complete twaddle.
Just because people feel pain for different reasons and suffer for different reasons and to different degrees doesn’t mean the term “suffering” can be used to express some joyous delight. Why is it I have to point this out? Exactly how did you assume stupidity on my part here? Utterly bizarre!
What definition of suffering are we using? Different people have in mind a huge variety of things with that term. See, for example, my post here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/225001
No. It was a question you should be asking yourself. You take a position and then, if you truly are objective and want the truth, you would question your position yourself and check to see if it is consistent with the rest of what you believe. I don't make distinctions between a rhetorical question and any other question. You should always be questioning what you know.
Quoting I like sushi
You and don't seem to understand how we make decisions.
Decisions are made with the information we have at any given moment. We can't make decisions with knowledge that we don't have. Our goals are the intent of any decisions we make. Goals are ideas about the future in the present. We then make decisions to reach our goal. There is no reason to make decisions without having some goal in mind.
You and Terrapin keep referring to some future knowledge that the person in our examples have after the fact, that they didn't have at the moment of decision. If the information changed, then as you both have pointed out, their goals change. That isn't to say that they made the wrong decision with the information that they DID have at that moment.
What if the person that wants to jump into the lava lake told you and I, "God told me to jump into the lava lake for a greater good." when we tried to stop them?
I think it's always true to say that war is a failure, in some sense, usually of diplomacy. War should be avoided because it's so often the case that all involved parties lose. There are no winners. But is it always wrong? When diplomacy has failed, and one side feels the need to enforce their position using soldiers and weapons, then the other side must consider what is most wrong: not warring, because it's "always wrong" (?), or resisting the invading army, because not doing so would be more wrong (from the perspective of the defender)?
If you know tell me please :)
:up: :smile:
Just how stupid/inexperienced/unfamiliar with philosophy are you figuring I am?
Which question, "When would anyone feel good about their goals being inhibited"?
The reason I'm not bothering with that is that you'd just say, for any example, "Then they didn't really have such and such as a goal," wouldn't you?
Go back and read what I wrote to I like sushi.
"Sure" as answer to the question I just asked should indicate that you'd just say, "Then they didn't really have such and such as a goal."
I told you how my claim could be falsified. The ball is in your court now.
Who kowns! Deos the dcuk eat bnnaaas or the gboibn sniwg in teres? Hvae you raed atninyhg or do yuo jsut pfreer to saht wdors out at rdonam?
New hree. Jsut tniryg to frugie out who the mpuptes are and who has stinhmoeg of vluae to say.
As I said, I knew that would be your response, hence why I didn't bother. It tells us merely something about how you use language.
Why would you read my comment as if it was supposed to be a falsification of something?
And what did I seem to be saying I was falsifying?
Try again.
Come to think of it, you've used language yet you haven't said anything.
So I didn't seem to be saying that I was falsifying anything. I agree.
lol re thinking that people only say useful things to you when they falsify things you said.
Lol re you seem to think that "you" means "everyone".
So why is it only in this thread and from me that there's nothing useful for you if I'm not falsifying something you said, but in other contexts and/or from other people, they can be useful if they're not falsifying something you said?
Shouldn't good and evil be identified or discovered rather than labelled?
Otherwise you can arbitrarily label anything good or evil.
The problem is that if you're doing anything with this different than effectively making a laundry list for yourself, you quickly run into people who disagree with your take on what's good and what's evil, and then you wind up having to talk about that whether you want to or not.
Good is pleasure > pain for individual and groups.
Evil is pleasure < pain for individual and groups.
I see nothing arbitrary about the above definitions?
I don't see what other metric apart from pleasure/pain that could be used?
It's arbitrary in the sense of it being you talking about how you feel about it. You're not reporting a fact. (Well, not beyond reporting the fact of how you feel about it.)
I am talking about the process of identifying good and evil. I don't think pleasure and pain identify what evil and good are.
I would not consider a painful injury evil and I would certainly not call all pleasure good such as the pleasures Nazi's or slave owners experienced.
I think identifying what is an evil act is complicated when you analyse a scenario. For example is it evil for us to buy goods manufactured in China which is a brutal regime with no human rights committing many abuses of its populace regions and minorities?.
I don't think it is meaningful just to identify pleasure and a pain. But what I am saying is before you need to define evil you should already have a consciousness it. For example if you see someone kicking a dog to death it seems ludicrous to need to go beyond the immediate manifestation to work out if it is evil.
I think complex forms of evil like exploitation where you have to follow a chain of causality and blame do not succumb easily to a pain-pleasure analysis. Therefore it needs a more sophisticated intuition or investigation including intention.
The way the individual or group views pain/pleasure while perhaps not quite arbitrary will be different between individuals and groups (and with individuals within a group) and in the sense that the differences in how pain/pleasure is viewed
Are based on the experiences of the individual or group I think “arbitrary” is close enough to refute what you are claiming.
Don't you think that what people are doing in defining it is attempting an abstraction/general/overarching conception of their intuitions?
You would certainly not call a painful injury good so by process of elimination it must be evil?
Nazi's were punished for what they did so it was net pain, hence evil for them.
Slave owners became fat and decadent. They where hated. Some where punished for what they did. So it was net pain, hence evil for them also.
There are some difficult to call situations. China I think sanctions would cause more pain than pleasure so it would be evil. It would cripple the world economy I mean.
Humans are quite similar in most respects and the pain/pleasure experienced by the individual can be summed to give the corresponding pain/pleasure for the group. I'll give two examples:
Exercise is good for the individual. Its painful in the short term but gives pleasure in the long term so there is net pleasure for the individual so it is good/right. It makes the group stronger having a heathy individual so the group also benefits in the long term (net pleasure good/right).
Murder is bad for the individual. In the short term it maybe 'convenient' and possibly a sadist would derive some pleasure from it. In the long term, the individual will be shunned from the group and maybe punished. So it is net pain for the individual. It is also net pain for the group having lost an individual and his ideas and capabilities.
So most fundamental decisions can be analysed as above. I don't see anything arbitrary about this type of analysis?
False dichotomy.
Re your nets, aside from the fact that you said nothing about it being a net matter earlier, just how are you doing a calculus on this?
In both examples, it is your own views on pleasure and pain you are using. The person exercising could lament not lazing about playing video games and see excersise as not worth the trade-off. The murderer might very well not care at all about being shunned or punished.
We can go back and forth like this forever, you can make sweeping statements about the way people think and I can come up with exceptions, all that does is prove my point.
When you get an individual who says, "I disagree, I feel that exercise is bad" what do you do--tell them they don't actually think that? Say, "Well, you're a very unusual outlier, so that makes you wrong" or what?
The same goes for an individual who says, "No, I don't feel that pleasure is good and pain is bad."
Pleasure and pain by definition pertain to good and bad. It doesnt make sense to say “I dont think pleasure is good”.
The problem arises when you are trying to tell people what gives them pleasure or pain, such as with the excersise example.
First off, definitions aren't facts beyond being reports of how some people are choosing to use terms.
Aside from that, pleasure and pain don't by conventional definition pertain to moral good and bad.
Ok, sure. Things can still be held to the definition we assign to them.
Your second sentence I agree with also, but Devons99 is trying to make a case otherwise.
Moral good/bad is about whether we inflict emotional or physical pain on ourselves and each other. So morality is fundamentally about pleasure/pain.
I define morality in more of a meta fashion than that.
net pleasure = pleasure - pain
Or wrong/bad if net pleasure is negative (same calculation obviously).
A moral act is net pleasurable for the individual. If its net pleasurable for the individual its net pleasurable for the group.
An immoral act is net painful for the individual. If its net painful for the individual its net painful for the group.
Group dynamics reenforce the above. If you do something popular in the group, you feel pleasure. If you do something unpopular in the group you feel pain. So the presence of the group encourages individuals to act in the right way for the entire group.
I think it is more labeling as opposed to abstracting.
Think of how many times groups of people have been vilified by negative language, women, Jews, gays, blacks and so on.
Another things that happens is when natural occurrences are labelled evil then described as punishments or karma. It is a too black and white world view. If people think pain is evil or disaster and misfortune are then they wonder what did Ii or we do to deserve this evil.
It can be argued that the process of moralizing causes its own sets of serious harms.
The irony about physical pain is it prevents serious Injury. People with congenital pain conditions or who lose pain sensation later die younger of serious injuries.
Personally I do not judge illness and pains I experience as evil in themselves I tend to attribute evil to things with motives.
I think that you cannot justify the step of going from pain to evil and pleasure to good. Pain and pleasure refer to feelings/sensations whereas good and evil are more conceptual and evaluative.
Another example is that people including Michael J Fox claim that a serious illness turned them into a better person. Hedonism can be seen as selfish and debauched or shallow.
I'm including emotional pain and pleasure in my definition of good and evil.
How do we judge if an action is good or evil? It has to be its impact on people/animals that we use to judge it. The only way to judge that impact is emotional/physical pain/pleasure. These sensations/emotions are the only way people/animals react to an action.
What about an evil act against the environment? That would cause emotional and physical pain for people/animals so it still fits with my definition.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
A serious illness turning someone into a better person fits with the pattern of good/right. Short term pain followed by long term pleasure. The period of adversity has benefited them in the long term.
There are two types of hedonism. If you are not harming anyone else whilst enjoying yourself, its a good/right action. If you are harming others its a evil/wrong action and you will regret it in the long term.
Jesus said much the same. It's such a simple rule but if everyone in society followed it, the world would be a much happier place.
I must strongly disagree, respectfully. Overcoming that barrier of basing opinions off of personal feelings is likely a huge step in personal progression. More specifically, emotional reaction and/or physical reaction, absolutely are not the only base for decision making for all people and animals.
This was known as the "Golden Rule" where I was in kindergarten. They were pretty serious about instilling it lol.
But what are the motivations of humans/animals? They seek physical/emotional pleasure and shun physical/emotional pain. There are no other motives.
Quoting NotesOfAMan
We have a mental reaction to events as well, but it simply is a mental calculation we do to maximise physical/emotional pleasure and minimise pain.
Because one must have a goal to find something useful. My goal was to see whether or not my idea holds up by exposing it to criticism. You have yet to provide reasonable criticism or reasonable approval. Therefore, you have yet to say anything useful regarding my goal.
So new, and already a Mod. :chin:
I can't speak on behalf of Good, though...
We're talking about someone defining something though, right? What do you think they're labeling when they're forwarding a definition?
Or are you saying that you were using "defining" more loosely?
Perhaps you could describe what makes you so evil so I can see if it fits in with my idea?
I have the motive of gaining knowledge and finding the truth.
OK, those things give you pleasure then. So pleasure is a super category of these types of motivations
- Then it was changed to your right hand and left hand.
- Remember that right is what is right in the long-term and wrong is is what is right in the short-term.
- Then in politics, we have left and right parties.
- But the left-wing are longer term than the right-wing (more infrastructure investment, higher taxes).
- So actually left and right-wing are the wrong way around.
- And they are also misnamed: It politics it should not be left-wing and right-wing; it should be right-wing and wrong-wing.
Which makes it a lot clearer who should vote for! (the right party not the wrong party).