Quote:
Originally Posted by
Quertus
Can you give examples of what you consider Evil that are not fundamentally grounded in causing harm?
...
So what makes an action Evil that is not, at its heart, motivated by hurting others?
These two statements both seem to indicate what you think Evil is, but they indicate different things. The first suggests that Evil is based around your actions harming people, while the second is based around harming people
for the sake of harming people.
If you believe Evil is consequence-based, ie that it's based on whether your actions hurt more than they help or vise versa, then I agree with you (or close enough that there's no point arguing). But if you believe Evil is intent-based, ie that it's only evil if you hurt people
to hurt people, then I'd argue that your definition is far too narrow to incorporate much real-world evil.
Take the case of
Josef Fritzl, which I'd argue is about as close to textbook Evul as you're going to find in the real world. I won't discuss the details here, but I don't think Josef did what he did because he wanted to hurt his daughter and other children/grandchildren; he did it because he
didn't care about hurting them.
This is an important distinction, though it might sound trivial. Equating not caring about people we hurt to
wanting to hurt them is not only ridiculous, it makes us
all evil; we all have negative effects on people who we never meet and hence have no reason to care about.
So what if
apathy and
malice are distinct? Well, even most standard Evil Villains are driven by apathy as much as malice. No corrupt corporate executive this side of a Captain Planet villain wants to hurt the world just to hurt the world; they just don't care how much they hurt the world if it lets them keep their job and line their pockets. Does this make them not evil? A cultist who drains the resources and health of his flock to keep the church running isn't
trying to hurt them, just prioritizing the church over the good of its congregation. Heck, even Hitler was doing his thing more to protect the security and racial purity of the German people than because he wanted to hurt the Jews; at the point where someone can even
make an argument that Hitler isn't evil under a given epistemology,
you need to re-evaluate your epistemology.
TL;DR: I can't give examples of evil that aren't grounded in harm, but that's not the same as examples that aren't
motivated by doing harm.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Quertus
Sure, dumping toxic waste in the river to increase your profit margins because you can, when you know it will harm others, is Evil. And it doesn't require getting off on harming others. Fair enough. It just requires "harming others" to not have a sufficiently large negative value... unless you count "greed" as having a root cause of "harming others". So, it depends on how deep you go as to whether it's one motive or several.
Greed is a bad thing because it harms others, but it is
not motivated by a desire to harm others. Your arguments seem to consistently (though, I assume, unintentionally) conflate results with motivation, ie, assume that
everything that happens as a result of someone's actions was considered desirable to them.
But, well, nobody works like that. You would need to be omnipotent (and probably omniscient) to always only get what you wanted out of your actions, with no unwanted side effects. Anyone below that power evel has to accept that sometimes their actions will have consequences they didn't want. Evil is in what consequences you accept, and for what reason.
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I guess this depends on whether you view his greed as, deep down, being motivated by desiring to harm others. (If everyone has a palace, and he needs a bigger palace, then, yes, I call that desire to be better than others as having the same roots).
How is a desire to be better than others equivalent to a desire to
harm others? One involves making yourself better, the other involves making others worse. Life isn't a zero-sum game, the two aren't even close to related.
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I like your motivations. I'm not certain that they're Evil, though. Imagine a Celestian Beaver building that same dam, completely ignorant of the existence of the the town upstream. Same effect, different reasoning. And a Good creature performing a Neutral act.
1. Just because you define your hypothetical example to be done by a
celestial being doesn't let you change the morality of an action. I'm not sure why that matters.
2. Ignorance is a critical component that you're just kind of handwaving.
Intentionally destroying land is, of course, worse than
accidentally doing so. (This is, incidentally, one of the points where I disagree with a strictly consequential moral epistemology.)
In short, this example is completely unlike Tajerio's, and hence needs a
much stronger argument to connect it to his.