Is there an objective difference between good and evil?

Post Reply New Topic

*The more I'm on these boards, the more eccentric my speech becomes. Mostly because no one here will care, and folks in real life get annoyed when I abruptly swap "thees" and "thous" into speech. And they really hate when I switch my syntax around.*

I'm going to go out on a limb here, especially considering the tree in which I live:

YES and NO.

A thing is what it is, it is neither evil nor good. VX gas was originally pesticide, if it is evil, when did it become so? It was made for a purpose, but it cannot be good or evil, it has no will of its own.

An act, however, cannot be objective. Since any act is committed by someone against another, it is inherently subjective. An act cannot be viewed objectively either, since anyone who views it does so in light of their own experiences.

Good and Evil are subjective, and cannot be otherwise. Even Christianity views the same act differently depending on who commits it to whom, since it is the why that matters. Good and Evil are matters of why, not what.

A lot of what is considered "morals" are subjective. But one objective evil is killing. Humans are innately repulsed from killing another human.

Good and evil are classifications/categories of value. We map them onto the world, mostly according to early social conditioning of our "disgust" reaction.

They are labels, whose use/attribution varies from place to place and group to group. As far as I know there is nothing which has not been considered acceptable at some time or other by one or more groups of people.

The only objective/concrete component is the reaction of disgust, which we feel about things we have learned to categorise as evil.

.

Godwin's Law invoked! 20-something posts in and the Nazis show up. Teehee. With the word "Evil" in the title, we should have placed bets. Anyways, here I goes:

Does it take something on the level of the Holocaust in order for an act to be objectively evil? Certainly killing large numbers of people isn't evil, we slaughtered millions of Nazi soldiers during that war in order to end it. It's all motive.

I kill you because of your ethnicity = Evil

I kill you because to stop you from molesting my sister = Good.

And motive is subjective.

Godwin's Law is in this case a joke. Since neither side of the argument called the other side Nazi-ish, Godwin's Law can't be used in it's proper context. I just figured I'd throw it out as a joke, when I read the title, I just started wondering how long it would take.

Yes, generally the Nazis serve as a great example of Evil and madness combined, but since there are many other cases, we ought to reference the Nazis only when we need to reference something they only did.

It's easy to reference them when talking about ethnic cleansing, but it's more of a challenge to weave Darfur or the tribal wars in central Africa into a thread. And when talking about crackdowns on dissenting opinions, it's tougher to bring up the ChiComs or Soviet Russia. Yet these are also applicable.

Honestly they are both conceptual and entirely dependant on the human, so far as we know no other being has created either 'Good' or 'Evil', but who are humanity to judge?

If an ant were to say that humans are evil, would anything hear it? Well, humans wouldn't, thats for sure, so I think that 'Good' and 'Evil' are both pointless to talk of, because that is assuming that humans know the direct meaning, and as neither are universal laws, I doubt they are important, I do not kill because I do not wish the same upon myself, not because it is inheritly evil