Asymmetrical Information

when europe settled the new world,did they know they did evil..
when the US settled the continent,did they know they did evil..
when the brits settled oz and NZ did they know..etc
when the maoria settled NZ did they...etc..

who determines evil??... the winners history books..!!!

Why would you care? Isn't it enough to know your enemy?

This is impossible to answer unless you call the objectivitely of morality into question. If you think there is an absolute truth, and are essentially utilitarian in your view (that it is results that matter), then it is evil. Stalin might have thought it okay to kill a few 10 million if the overall plan was sound and good, but we'd still call that evil. The Nazis convinced themselves (a la Bohr, Heisenberg, Heidigger and Nietsche et al) that evil only meant something within their personal context, so anything that didnt fit within that context, like killing 6 million jews, was "beyond morality" because it was outside of the context of their culture, which they defined as only being of pure german blood.

A circular argument that leads down an ugly path.

I think there is an objective truth. I dont think any one does or can know it fully. I think humans and given faculties to try and discover some of it. I believe that "the full monty" so to speak is the purview of God. I think that to a certain extent that a "natural law" helps us identify what is right and wrong (gee, everytime I kill someone in cold blood, the community wants to fry me, perhaps this is not right??).

I also realize that this is a product of my lutheran/calvinist upbringing. ASnyone with a different idea probably has a different upbringing.

So you CANT answer this objectively, it is the ultimate catch 22...the objective truth of yes/no is entirely a product of whether or not you believe in objective truth in the first place.

Of course under my system, people who indescriminately kill people get stopped. I dare any one to claim that isn't good.

"...did Hitler and Osama bin Laden know that what they were doing was wrong?"

I've met thousands of people who have done what just about any reasonable person would consider evil. Rapists, pedophiles, kidnappers, murderers, you name it. And not one of them thought they were doing anything wrong.

Oh, they all realized that they were committing a crime, but they figured that what they were doing was justified in some way. Even if their rationale was that they were the only human being on the planet and everyone else was just dogshit to do with as they please.

Can't speak for ol' Adolph or Osama. Never met either one. But I'm willing to put money down that it's more of the same.

James

I would suggest that (in a framework of objective good), that a person who knows what they are doing is wrong might be considered bad, but a person who does wrong thinking it is right is evil.

I will answer your question: Yes, they're evil even if they don't know it.

Glad to be a help.

Follow-up: How about a person who does good, thinking it to be evil?

Discuss amongst yourselves.

I'd run raf's distinction between 'bad' and 'evil' in the other direction:

If you do wrong thinking it's right, you are dumb, or insane, or ignorant, or mistaken, or ...

If you do wrong knowing that it's wrong, that's EVIL.

And for Tom, if you do good, thinking it's evil, you are bad, and also bad at being bad.

Follow-up: How about a person who does good, thinking it to be evil?

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Nah, bad idea. My protagonist would have to use the word "nigger," because that's what everyone in that time and place said, and no one would read my book then.

This is so dumb. Yes they were evil and anyone with a lick of sense knows that.

Evil is unloving acts, and some people don't care about love, in fact they have other goals in mind like the rush of ecstasy that killing someone gives serial killers, and they see nothing wrong with it. They don't feel guilt, yet it is unloving.

Maybe God created reality so that people were so free that they could choose not to love, and not to feel guilty about it, to give them the opportunity to make the choice to love. For those of us who choose to live our lives by love, crushing someone under your boot for the pleasure of the power rush it gives you is evil. We have as much right to our opinion as the serial killers of this world do ( and that includes islamofascists), so we are right to stop them even if that means killing them to do so.

What matters is the intention, why the action is done, not the action itself.

Paul Snively,

I would recommend to you a short story by the same author, "Heaven or Hell?"

Here's a link to the Heaven or Hell story:

http://www.classicreader.com/read.php/sid.6/bookid.263/

"What matters is the intention, why the action is done, not the action itself." Napablogger, for a Christian, you are naive in the extreme.

Refer to your great apologist, C.S. Lewis, and his Chronicles of Narnia for a moment, would you? In the last book of the series, a young man apologized to the allegorical Christ figure, the Narnian lion Aslan, for being dedicated to Aslan's demonic adversary his entire life. Aslan in effect tells the young fellow that the adversary, being evil, would reject any good actions done in his name, while Aslan, being good, rejects the evil done in his name.

In other words, it is NOT the thought, but the action--the result--the outcome--that counts in the determination of whether an act is good or evil. That is practical. It is realistic. It has muscle. It makes sense. Even an atheist can agree with it. Your treacly "love" drool doesn't have any appeal at all to anyone who cares about reality.

Perhaps this discussion implicates the legal distinction between those who commit crimes because they are "insane" and those who do so because they are inherently or circumstantially "bad". Someone who kills a man thinking he is an alien monster because of a hallucination is considered insane. Another who commits exactly the same act to benefit financially from the man's death is considered a greedy criminal. But just ask yourself, which is more dangerous? Which is more easily deterred? Don't "sane" criminals commit acts because they think they can get away with them and don't care if they're good or not?

Speedwell, I am not a Christian by any means. My point stated simply is that the same actions can be good or bad depending on the circumstances. A surgeon cutting someone with a knife is not the same as a sadist cutting someone they have kidnapped for torture.

At bottom what makes the difference between whether an action is good or evil is love, treacly though that may sound to you. Love, defined in the broadest sense. The surgeon is being loving because he is trying to help the person by knifing them.

Actions cannot be defined as to their moral character independently of their intentions.

I wrote a longer post but I don't see it coming up so it must have gotten lost somewhere, sorry if this is a repeat.

At the end of "The Last Battle", the final book in "The Chronicles of Narnia", Aslan says, "if any man do a cruelty in my name, then though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves." Athough easily misunderstood in a non-apologetic work, C.S. Lewis was a deontologist -- a believer in intent -- rather than a utilitarian -- a believer in earthly results.

In his apologetic "Mere Christianity" 1952 ed, pg. 85-87, Lewis wrote:
[begin quote]
The bad psychological material is not a sin but a disease. It does not need to be repented of, but to be cured. And by the way, that is very important. Human begins judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices. When a neurotic who has a pathological horror of cats forces himself to pick up a cat for some good reason, it is quite possible that in God's eyes he has shown more courage than a healthy man may have shown in winning the V.C. [the Victoria Cross, the highest Britsh award for gallantry] When a man who has been prevented from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing, does some tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God's eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend. Is as well to put this the other way round. Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and a good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say of Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it. Most of the man's psychological make-up is probably due to his body: when his body dies all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or the worst out of this material, will stand naked. All sorts of nice things which we thought our own, but which were really due to a good digestion, will fall off some of us: all sorts of nasty things which were due to complexes or bad health will fall off others. We shall then, for the first time, see every one as he really was. There will be surprises.

And that leads on to my second point. People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, "If you keep a lot of rules I'll reward you, and if you don't I'll do the other thing." I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.

That explains what always used to puzzle me about Christian writers; they seem to be so very strict at one moment and so very free and easy at another. They talk about mere sins of though as if they were immensely important: and then they talk about the most frightful murders and treacheries as if you had only got to repent and all would be forgiven. But I have come to see that they are right. What they are always thinking of is the mark which the action leaves on that tiny central self which no one sees in this life but which each of us will have to endure -- or enjoy -- for ever. One man may be so placed that his anger sheds the blood of thousands, and another so placed that however angry he gets he will only be laughed at. But the little mark on the soul may be much the same in both. Each has done something to himself which, unless he repents, will make it harder for him to keep out of the rage next time he is tempted, and will make the rage worse when he does fall into it. Each of them, if he seriously turns to God, can have that twist in the central man straightened out again: each is, in the long run, doomed if he will not. The bigness or smallness of the thing, seen from the outside, is not what really matters.

One last point. Remember that, as I said, the right direction leads not only to peace but to knowledge. When a man is getting better, he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right. This is common sense, really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly: while you are making them you cannot see them. You can understand the nature of drunkenness when you are sober, not when you are drunk. Good people know about both good and evil; bad people do not know about either.
[end quote]

good post Strowbridge, thanks

The biggest mass-killer of all times, Mao, is often defended for the deaths in the Great Leap Forward (from 10 to 30 million unnatural deaths in just a few years, for no particular reason), because he wasn't trying to starve all those people to death. He knew that they were dying, and he could easily and instantly have stopped it, yet many defend him because he wasn't trying to hurt those people - it just happened to suit his purposes to do things that would bring about their deaths. He didn't care either way - he had his own goals and objectives, and millions of deaths didn't matter.

Mao also described the atomic bomb as a "paper tiger" and said that, if someone killed tens of millions of Chinese, they could easily be replaced since China was always making more.

Is that evil? I think so. He probably didn't think he was doing wrong, since the lives of others didn't particularly matter. He had his own objectives...

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