Calling evil "good" and good "evil"

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Good, I'm saying it as a Jew.

Nah... I think it depends. From a biblical POV, the people who crucified him did God's will, so they were evil people who were used to do good. But if we bring the situation into RL with no mystic interpretation, I think his crucifixion would have been an example of both religious intolerance and political corruption.

Last edited by Bun on 12 Jan 2012, 9:21 am, edited 1 time in total.

Even Rick Perry might have pardoned him, or let him off with a flogging, had he been in Pontius Pilate's position, and not been drunk.

But, without the Crucifixion, Christians wouldn't have any means of having Yahweh forgive their sins, and they would have to go to the lake of fire and sulfur with the rest of us.

We might be following Mithraism rather than Christianity, if Jesus had been let off, had gone back to Nazareth to take up carpentry, raised a family, and died of old age.

kind of reminds me of the writing of george orwell saying "war is peace freedom is slavery ignorance is strength"
also refering to the ministry of truth the ministry of love the ministry plenty and the ministry of peace

Our Department of Defense used to be called the Department of War.

Frank Luntz is currently the Republican Party's spin doctor.

Do you know when the name was changed?

ruveyn

It looks pretty much obvious that is about telling people to reject any different doctrine, philosophy or ideas that contradicts the one being promoted and defended.

Funny thing, I would have thought Christ himelf may be one calling "good" "evil" and "evil" "good", according to that verse (or according to interpreters of the verse)

Good and evil are not real, tangible things. They are concepts, and fail at any level of being self evident or universally agreed upon. One man's idea of good is another's evil. The quote from the bible is rubbish, as are many quotes from that book.

But it is curious where this conversation has gone. I sometimes wonder about the consequences of societies that encourage or force socialist behaviors on its community. The "good" of the many seem to be served, but at what cost? Those that are most adept to function in the community, are generally expected to or heavily encouraged (forced) to care for and provide for the least capable and adept within the community. This can have numerous and widespread consequences. But I wouldn't call any of these things good or evil, I may have my own preferences, you might have yours...but how can it be good or evil? These labels really are beyond our ability to use.

One can examine even small scale individual acts.

If I shoot a man in the back of the head and end his life, is that evil?
Most people might be inclined to say yes.

If I shoot a man in the back of the head and end his life just in time to stop him from pressing the button that would cause a nuclear holocaust, is that evil?
Far less of you are probably inclined to say yes.

But what has changed? Certainly not my actions, and yet my action is what is being labeled as good or evil, no? But it is more likely that we base this opinion on the outcome and effects of my actions, and not the actions themselves.

What is curious the most to me however, is that the effects of even the most insignificant action are much further reaching than the immediate consequence, every action reverberates through time and changes the course of history indefinitely, so far reaching is every miniscule action that it is well beyond any human’s ability to foresee and therefore beyond their ability to judge. We simply cannot tell if something is good or evil, such things are well beyond our capability as human beings, and discussing what to call which is similarly inane.

I think it best to avoid labeling anything as good or evil, it’s obvious to me that any use of words of this nature is pure speculation, short sighted, and entirely based in opinion. My 2 cents.

You could go further and refuse to label anything as anything whatsoever, for example a table is just a pile of dead wood, but even that becomes questionable in the light of quantum mechanics. I don't see that other 'more concrete' concepts should have any special privelege over social ones that are consciously felt by a majority in a society. Indeed, one definition of mental inadequacy is the inability to tell right from wrong, and I feel it's easy for us auties to fall into the trap of labelling only physical objects as 'real and tangible'

Having said that, there's a lot of conflicting definitions of good and evil that all seem equally valid when looked at from their own perspective, hence my discussion of Nietzsche. Incidentally, the title of the book of his that I'm reading at the moment is 'Beyond Good and Evil'.

The nub of the matter seems to be what feels right. Take the example of Karl Marx - Despite ending up being responsible for the death and oppression billions of people, one can take the view that his work was good as he wrote 'inspirationally' about a 'perfect' society. However, from the little I know of his life, he sounds like the original sponger, refusing to provide for his family and blaming it all on 'society', bitterly and 'martyrishly' snapping at the hands that fed him. In other words, if his idea of good made him feel 'wrong' rather than 'right', maybe that's what it was. That doesn't make the whole issue less fiendishly complex, however.

P.s. The bible quote could be read by Christians as a criticism of jewish legalists who saw stoning adulterers to death, for example, as good rather than a a necessary evil, but jews could argue the opposite - that the passage criticises Jesus-types who recast 'evil' prostitutes as 'good', etc. etc..

No, but I could look it up easily enough, and I am sure that you know, and have a point to make.

So, you're saying that Nietzche was against what we conventionally think of good in terms of the actions of a 'caring' society because this only encourages a basic weakness, all of which holds back what to Nietzche is best in human beings.

It's an interesting example of this you give in reflecting on your own upbringing. Without reflecting too hard on this particular question, I tend to agree that it might have been better for me (and why not many others?) to have had develop, to a keener extent than it was, that instinct for survival and associated self-reliance.

I appreciate some of David Cameron's rhetoric relating to this. I think his message of 'go out and do it yourself' is a positive and empowering and self-perpetuating one ('teach a man to fish' and so on). The Conservative Party in the UK, of course, have traditionally favoured a smaller state in general.

However, I seem to recall that Nietzche is also pretty committed to perspectivism, and, as I think you said, this means that there are no actual grounds for his view, and there is an inevitability about the existence of opposing perspectives. I tend to agree with this. In fact, I go further and suggest that it is the existence of a particular perspective or concept that necessarily requires the existence of it's opposite (they kind of give birth to each other).

Good and evil is a simple example of this. There can't be one without the other. The way to get rid of evil is to get rid of good and vice versa. In this way, I think iamnotaparakeet is mistaking concepts and thinking about the world for the actual world.

However, in practice I'm not sure something like this is is possible as perspectivism is unavoidable: if we are not of one view, we are of another.

I tend to agree with your post. The other moral perspective to take, of course, in addition to actions and consequences, is that of agents ie, how to good people act, or virtue ethics. I tend to think this is alos problematic because there is no self-evident or emprically verifiable good or bad person.

Unfortunately, your, or my, own position is susceptible to the same attack that you make on those who use the language of good and evil ie, there is no actual 'best' that is the case when not thinking in such dualities. I'm not sure how to get out of this predicament other than by stopping discussing it, but then I still think there is a perhaps unavoidable tendency to think and thereby behave in this way.

I'll throw the religious aspects out of the equation and look at, well, a modified/advanced utilitarian sense of the terms 'good' and 'evil'. This way we get to keep the conversation on a more general ground.

The problem you have is that lots of people are very short-sighted, lots of people have self-centered agendas, and life can pit us against each other really making us quite mechanically pathetic (the terms sheep-like and sheeple come to mind) in terms of what we prioritize or which politician's $%^& we're on over our one particular self-centered issue.

The other part: lots of people love the 'shoot the messenger' mentality. For their entire lives they've made a steady practice of running from reality when they don't like what they see, they continue this all the way through adulthood, and they react strongly - even violently - toward anyone who's trying to pop their bubble. It seems like their strongest preference is enforcing their own needy fantasies on everyone else and trying to strongarm us into believing or at least hiding belief that any such problem exists; for their good, not ours. When such people have more power to assert fantasy over reality via bullying or sheer numbers you essentially have a societal bubble which could mean either a) burgeoning societal collapse or b) major remodification/correction of some other type is on its way. I tend to see human mentality like economic bubbles though - delusion/illusion can only last so long before the inflationary bubble pops; you just hope that this 'pop' is nothing too violent or grueling on the supposed innocent.

I've actually got time for your seemingly absurd suggestion that we should refrain from calling a table a table and such like. I see, logically, why this use of language is questionable for the same reasons that we are saying that moral language is questionable. But I'm not sure agreeing on calling a table a table is at all controversial or problem-generating in practice and so it is not really an issue. Moral language, on the other hand, does seem to lead to, or is at least associated with, disputes and what most of us would consider 'problematic' behaviour in the world.

Relating to this, I think you make a good point about a perhaps AS tendency to discount the reality of the non-empirical. I do not subscribe to view that there is nothing that is real isn't empirically, or theoretically, empirically verifiable. There are many subjective experiences, thoughts, feelings that I have that are certainly not currently empirically verifiable in that they could be shown to others to exist in the same way that I experienced them as existing for me. No, our subjective experience of the world is real for us, for any individual, and there does not seem to be any escaping this subjective experience of the world, so it might as well just be called real, tangible, existant, for all practical purposes.

I don't quite follow you on how Marx felt about what he was doing or his ideas, but I am interested to explore the idea of 'what feels right' as a kind of practical morality.

Going back to the quote in the OP. One might respond by saying: 'so let there be woe'. What is woe? The speaker was not saying that one would be wrong or evil to call good evil and evil good, only that there would somehow be woe. Perhaps the meaning could be that it is difficult to go against conventional concepts of good and evil.

I like your analogy of the human fantasy and the inflationary economic bubble. Do you have any examples of this bubble-like thinking?

I'm not sure self-centredness is a problem for I consider it or self-interest, at least, to be the natural state. This could suggest two things, among others. One, that there are no 'problems', only things we don't like because they don't suit our own interest. Two, 'problems' arise when self-interest is not made explicit but is covert and unknown either to its owner, its audience, or to both.

Now, I would like you to tie together the two themes of bubbles and self-interest and come up with a unified explanation of how you see things.

Well, the rise, decay, and fall of Rome is a great example. Seems like for most cultures the hardest thing of all for them to survive is prosperity. Often times people who grow up in prosperity and haven't really gotten a good look at what they've been sheltered from....hard to find any other way of saying it..... they're not all there.


I'd suggest the same, and self-interest when looked at on its face is a double-edged sword; its value of outcome really has more to do with how society manages it than it in and of itself. Channeled productively it can be a great thing, channeled into fantasy and a very macho assertion of running from reality - its quite destructive.


Lol, one could say further that this is really the only touchstone to reality we have.


That and, I'd add, when you have a side of society that tries to force people to deny the existence of that nature (some of them who need fantasy, some of which are just fuzzy thinkers - can't get cause and effect right), and when people try to hammerheadedly beat their faces into reality and beat their faces into the human condition - all the things you'd expect happen similar to if a person wanted to walk off a cliff and not fall in order to protest the age old suppressive human lie (from the 'man') that gravity will make you fall.


Sure. As an animal no one can force you into 'right think', or at least we don't like the society we have left as a result when we push the rules down in a 1984-type manner. We have the choice of things like, say, dictatorship where there's no crime but the criminals are the government and military or democracy where people are free to succeed epically, fail epically, and just like in the dictatorship you can be killed by the government in a democracy you can get stabbed to death or shot for your shoes if your in the wrong place. I mean I'm giving a very simplistic version of it and obviously not all democracies have the same crime rates - there's more going on - but the freedom to make bad decisions or to decide that "I didn't ask to be put here, I'm not getting what I want, so....I should be able to take anything I want form people I perceive as weak" - you can give people incentives not to go to the darkside, you can give them a good list of consequences, but the end economics of such decisions are up to them. Similarly the person who doesn't have the integrity to dissect reality, would rather let their emotions run their logic and everything else, who gets to a high place of public dialog and wants to spout demagoguery and utter garbage irresponsibly - that's another thing that can only be corrected external to them and you need to have enough people in a given society with their heads on straight to ignore these types of people. However, if you grow up given too much and have a very strange/incomplete sense of reality - you can be talked into believing many very strange things.