Our common usage very much does cover "the least good thing", as you have pointed out yourself, we even call the least good smells evil. So how are you possibly be getting this nonsense about "society consisting almost entirely of evil" from our common usage of "least good" smells? You seem to have failed to make the very important distinction between what may be considered "least good" of one class of things NOT being an absolute relative to a completely different class of things. The subdivision of "smells" is an arbitrary one, useful when discussing that particular class of thing. Torture is the worst of pain, and death the worst to life. It is foolish and illogical to attempt to conflate the two.
First off - I said "If so maybe we need to just focus on the claim that "evil" must be perceived by these beings even if it is just chocolate ice cream or bad smells, which i (obviously)
disagree with". Secondly, cool, I was wondering how you could possibly argue against this. I appreciate your creativity here, but the fact remains that the worst experience of smell is not as bad as the worst experience of what you could possibly eat, is not as bad as the worst experience of having a finger removed, is not as bad as the worst torture. It can all be called an experience, so you have no support behind your artificial categorization of the worst of all experiences, into ever smaller sub-genres. You can also go the other way if you want to keep categorizing, so that the worst candy i have eaten is better than the worst candy i have eaten today, which is better than the worst candy i am eating right now, until all things can be categorized as "that which is". Why not decide what is "the worst thing i could be experiencing while i am typing at a keyboard in my home", as opposed to the worst of all possible experiences. If we are going to categorize, we can draw the lines anywhere, not just where you want to pretend they are solid. There is zero reason to ask me not to compare a car and a skateboard to decide the "worst" of means of transportation, or even which is the "worst" thing to transport myself into a drained swimming pool with.
Our world is "relatively described". So you cannot distinguish between these classes of things?
oh but i can if i wish to, fortunately i won't here. The worst of all possible experiences? Eating candy or being tortured? I think it would be safe to say the "worst" candy is not "evil". It is called english. Your categories are arbitrary, and as such, easily dismissed.
You are seeming to be intentionally obtuse or dishonest by insisting on using this ice cream example that I have, many times now, told you that your changed conditions are far beyond where it applied. If you do not desist then I will once again assume you are intentionally being dishonestly provocative and respond accordingly. Fair warning.
i am not addressing the ice cream example as something you have or have not said, nor am i implying what you meant by your example. I am simply using an expedient descriptive experience by which to provide contrast to what i consider an actual evil.
Now you are saying that any evil that may happen in the world of yours could not be recognized by its inhabitants. Can you provide an example to support this assertion?
No actually i couldn't say that or the world would actually contain an evil that would happen. In this (imaginary) world, evil does not occur. i have already explained many possible reasons for the possibility that the evil would not occur.
Is that not just how animals perceive our world?
talking about how animals think is a black hole of conjecture. I have done a little research on the subject but i am not qualified to answer as to how animals think.
Do you consider animals to have comparable free will to our own, or just at the mercy of instinct?
I don't know about animals, perhaps if i knew exactly what they were thinking i could answer that question. I am assuming we aren't talking about imagining what animals think but about what they actually think, in which case i reserve judgement until more knowledge on animal consciousness is gathered.
Yes, I think we all understand your penchant for bare assertion. Where is the logic?Just because you have naively conflated what is called evil between unrelated classes of things, as I explained above, does not mean you have any logical argument for dismissing the definition of "worst".
See above the logic that proves your categories arbitrary.
Uh, you did say "could", and still failed to clarify whether you meant "may" or "is capable of". And you still failed to support your assert, so I will phrase it in a question for you this time. What support do you have for your assertion that "ancestor worship increases with positive results"? If you cannot support this assertion then it is meaningless.
i was merely responding to your unsupported assertion that ancestor worship fades over time, by pointing out the opposite "could" be true, and is actually more likely in a world where behaviors are positively reinforced. We can toss both the idea that ancestor worship fades and also the idea that it increases - that is perfectly agreeable to me.
Holder of the burden
When debating any issue, there is an implicit burden of proof on the person asserting a positive claim. "If this responsibility or burden of proof is shifted to a critic, the fallacy of appealing to ignorance is committed". -wiki
ok so the person who claims "evil must exist" must prove it. Cool. Keep trying to do that. There is a logical proof necessary, not a simple, "evil must exist because it exists here now" will suffice.
An appeal to ignorance is asserting something is true simply because it has not been proven false, which is exactly what you are doing. You are trying to require me to prove your assertion false rather than proving it true yourself. And no, me saying that evil clearly does exist in our world is not the positive claim here.
no we aren't talking about whether evil exists in this world, that would be a very, very, VERY short discussion.
Me saying that evil must exist in our world is supported by the evidence that it clearly does. If our world developed to include evil, it is reasonable to assume that its inclusion was at least partially necessitated by the causality fundamental to our world. You have yet to provide any comparable evidence.
Don't tell me you didn't read "Candide" and laugh along with voltaire's criticism of Liebniz and his "best of all possible worlds is the one that exists" Pangloss ideas. Saying "evil must exist in our world because it exists", is the same argument as leibniz got panned for in the reverse wording. Saying "wherever you go, there you are" is cute, but not meaningful. Nobody denies that evil exists in our world. Saying "evil must exist in all possible worlds because it exists in ours" is no more useful than saying, "this is the only inhabited world in the universe, so forget the question". Here you are trying to change the conversation into being about something i have never argued, i.e. that evil physically must exist, or exist in this world, or whatever. I have a solution to this - let's BOTH be required to create a proof that goes one way or the other, because until there is one, there isn't one. And unlike your evidence for evil in this world, there still can be one even though there isn't one currently. The possibility is implied by the imagining (overly optimistic) that we (you) could act cordially.
Again, you have made the claim that ALL EVIL need not exist. If you are changing that assertion then you need to specify what evils are allowed, and by doing so refute your own argument.
only according to your arbitrarily categorized definition of evil. I suggest another definition that has some objectivity to it. Saying "highest sensible moral value to an average western citizen, or perhaps inhabitant of earth" would at least allow for a discussion to be had about what should be considered in accordance with that, but your infinitely sliding relative categories does not.
You really do not know the first thing about human behavior and development, do you? Self-interest is merely a matter of proximity. That which is most prominent, i.e. your own personal sensations and experience, draw the lion's share of your attention. Look up psychological egoism.
let's not even begin to pretend egoism is the accepted reality. It isn't accepted that all human behavior is selfish, but rather that is one (often argued against) idea. I understand that we see in others what we see in ourselves, but fortunately some of us have had examples of kindness and goodness. Actually it isn't relevant to the discussion as to whether these safeworlders do good things because it makes them happy, or that they experience goodness as inconvenient but essentially productive. You would still have to show that there is more satisfaction to be had in deviating from the norm and somehow becoming evil than in following the herd, and it seems to me that the herd would be quite content on safeworld.
It is only your bare assertion that your imaginings are logical. As you have pointed out, Einstein being able to imagine traveling at light speed does not make it logically so. Evidence trumps imagination, so if this is all the argument you have then this whole conversation has been a colossal waste, which I have suspected for quite some time.
since you want to have a discussion about the only possible world you can imagine, i guess we are wasting time, although you did provide me a chance to straighten out the idea that pure relativism is just as arbitrary, and less functional, than limiting the use of the word "evil" to some sensible idea.
1. That is an appeal to ignorance.
you claim "1. Personal self-interest, self-preferential optimal happiness" as the determining factor, insisting that the most happiness can be had by causing other people suffering. I claim that optimal happiness consists of the "most possible happiness", so if a thousand people are very happy, that is better than one person being a little bit happier and 999 people suffering for it. That is pretty obvious. Of course that doesn't even take into account the negatives that mentally healthy people feel when causing suffering. Maybe you should defend your point instead of typing unsupported objections.
2. Appeal to ignorance. What "much better way of doing things"?
already explained many ways in which things could be done better.
3. If people do not recognize good, then no value judgments exist and you can rightly claim that on one recognizes evil. None of this has any bearing on whether a necessary but unrecognized evil may exist. So this is a red herring (distracting from the actual issue). Also, if there are no value judgments then people have absolutely no basis for making free will choices, other than perhaps animal instinct. Again, do you consider instinct an expression of free will?
So, do you mean an animal acting in a way which is required by their nature, and they cannot do otherwise? We answered that question already when we agreed that freewill necessitates a choice.
The evidence is more than any imaginings you have provided. If a world could exist without evil, why not this one?
that doesn't tell us what is possible, only what exists now, which AGAIN is not a discussion but rather a given.
Are you assuming something intended our world to include evil?
first of all your word for evil is not applicable to my world, as in my world, smells are not evil except in some strange slang sense, which i have never heard , and only in slang where "bad" can be "good", and "dope" can be a positive. Secondly i have no problem attributing all responsibility to the appropriate entities. If God, for example created a being with freewill who chose to do wrong and through time become evil, then yes, god is ultimately responsible for not curtailing the behavior. If we want to talk about a necessary evil, we could have a metaphysical discussion, but that is not what is happening here for me, because i am focused on a false LOGIC that requires evil due to pure relativism, where any system would apply the, now meaningless, word "evil" arbitrarily wherever it can. Another false LOGIC is that we need evil to keep us motivated to go to work in the morning, or that what is here now is the ideal.
So now you are introducing brainwashing? I did not say the pedophile was not being actively stopped, since you asserted that all evil actions would be actively stopped. So make up your mind and stop equivocating. So if they cannot affect anyone else, pedophilia is only relatively evil? Remind me, who was bellyaching about relative evil? Video games? Where actions you would not take, even unhindered, are virtually taken? You have some serious issues if you can conflate pedophilia and video games, by any stretch of the imagination.
you were the one asserting evil is relative. I was saying that your line of reasoning leads to a lack of clarity in what can be considered evil. In your purely relative idea of evil, we can use the word "evil" to describe the "worst" in the video game category, and also use the same word "evil" in the sexual behavior category. That sentence alone should be enough to show you why you cannot insist on using these categories, because the worst video game and the worst sexual act will have the same word "evil" describing their ethics. In safeworld pedophilia doesn't exist because people value children. there is no reason for you to think pedophilia is a natural expression of behavior and therefore would occur. I believe a person who is not able to act within reasonable bounds is probably mentally ill (to a large degree in this case), and there is no reason to think mental illness would exist in a safeworld. Pedophilia is an unnatural behavior which i believe is universally condemned on our planet, so the fact that you insist it would naturally develop on any world against social norms is only, once again, saying "because it is that way here". Mental illness is cured, children are sacred, pedophilia does not exist - this situation is imaginable and therefore there is no reason to say evil must exist in that situation. I need a specific evil that must exist, but that is ridiculous until we drop the absolute relativism and make a definition.
We are done here, and I am reporting your post for gross and flagrant intellectual dishonesty.
I've already pointed out about the safeworlders "i certainly don't suppose they are just the humanity that we know now, transported to another safer place while retaining all their conditioning from our world". I don't care what these people are, we certainly have tried to attribute some human qualities to them, but again, if we are just talking about this world and it's people, we're not having a dicussion about the logic behind the idea of "there must be evil" but rather the physical reality of it, which was never even assumed to be a question. I would like to report myself to moderators for trying to create (in a thought experiment) an imaginary world, and I didn't have the whole thing defined up front. Is that a requirement for starting a thought experiment, to be finished with it? I was exploring an idea. I do appreciate your objections though, otherwise I would have had to explore the idea using an unexpressed concept that evil is not completely relative and bad smells can't be called evil, instead of proving it. Without your arbitrary categories argument i wouldn't have had such clarity. But i am glad you are done responding to me because you are clearly not an amiable person who wants to enjoy a nice discussion.
