On Wednesday, January 2, 2013 3:58:45 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: > > On 1/2/2013 12:46 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: > > > > On Wednesday, January 2, 2013 3:05:10 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: >> >> On 1/2/2013 11:13 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: >> >> >> >> On Wednesday, January 2, 2013 12:57:34 PM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: >>> >>> >>> On 02 Jan 2013, at 02:01, Craig Weinberg wrote: >>> >>> Chemotherapy Good or Evil? >>> >>> >>> Better than nothing for most people having some disease. >>> Worst than THC injection, plausibly for the same group of people. >>> >>> Here the Evil is only in the fact that minorities hides information >>> from the majority, and this for the minority's interests. >>> This leads to harmful consequences for the majority. >>> >>> Bruno >>> >> >> I was thinking more of how chemotherapy is ambiguous as far as it being >> something which can enhance life by inevitably diminishing it, but sure, >> the politics of it is an issue also. >> >> If I had to get into a definition of good and evil I would go more toward >> a political direction - senseless inequality of power tends to lead to >> corruption and crime. Crime and corruption tends to lead to scapegoating or >> a misuse of sense. The combination of corrupt actions and distortion of >> truth to cover them up is probably as close to evil as I can think of. >> >> >> Anything that causes great net suffering of people can be considered >> evil: cancer, small pox, AIDS, tsunamis,... I see no reason to limit it to >> social/political causes. >> > > Do you think that viruses and tsunamis are well served by the label 'Evil'? > > > ?? I'm not interested in serving them. >
Obviously. I meant 'Do you think that it serves us to label natural phenomena outside of our control as Evil'? > Values are human values and each person has his own - although there is > a lot of consistency. I think society and individuals are well served by > labeling some viruses and tsunamis as 'evil' because that means we should > cooperate to mitigate them. And in fact we have: We eliminated small pox. > We created a tsunami warning system. Actions I count as good. > The action of mitigating damage is good, just as the intentional neglect of such actions are evil, but the non-human cause of the damage is neither good nor evil. If you get an electric shock, it does not mean that voltage is evil. Craig > Brent > Unfortunately it is the prerogative of evil that to seem so is to > be so. > --- Bertrand Russell > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/SzjN6yHj9NsJ. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
