Hi Craig Weinberg It doesn't matter whether you have good or bad intentions. The law and God judge us by what we do. You do the crime, you do the time. You sin, you go to Hell. Personally, I believe that the "eternal torture" of Hell is not to be able to feel God's love and forgiveness. That would be Hell to a Jesus. He refers to being tossed out and undergoing a "weeping and gnashing of teeth".
Hindus and Buddhists believe in reincarnation, which from what we observe, is not always a pleasant life. [Roger Clough], [[email protected]] 1/3/2013 "Forever is a long time, especially near the end." - Woody Allen ----- Receiving the following content ----- From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2013-01-02, 20:24:14 Subject: Re: The evolution of good and evil On Wednesday, January 2, 2013 6:21:27 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 1/2/2013 2:24 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: That really has nothing to do with Evil though, except in sloppy reasoning. True Evil is about intentionally initiating social harm. Getting smallpox is not evil, it is just unfortunate. Giving someone blankets known to be infected with smallp On the contrary it is sloppy ethics to confine 'evil' to intentional social harm. First, it implies that socially bad is bad simpliciter, but values are ultimately personal values. Speaking of sloppy. I'm not sure what that was intended to say. Without some explanation of why you say that evil is other than intentional social harm, it sounds like you are just saying that you disagree. Second, it implies that as soon as we find a physical cause (he was drunk, he had YY chromosmes, his father beat him) for a behavior it's not longer evil. It implies that only to those who think that personal intention is not a physical cause in its own right. Just because someone was drunk when they commit an evil act doesn't mean that it wasn't an evil act. But all behavior has a physical cause. All physics is an experiential effect. So I'm ok with just dropping the term 'evil' and just referring to good/bad for individuals and good/bad for society as derivative. But I think it's a hangover from theodicy to refer to human actions as evil but not natural events - it's part of the idea that humans are apart from nature. I agree that dropping the term 'evil' as a formal term is the more enlightened way to go. I don't have a problem with it as an informal hyperbole that is reserved for intentionally cruel behavior though. I think that we can separate intentional human cruelty as a class of attitudes and effects unlike any other, though I would not apply any supernatural significance. I would say that there is a hidden hypocrisy in allowing no expectation of self control on the part of individuals while taking it for granted that exactly that kind of moral control is to be expected from a law enforcing society composed of those same individuals. If it's not evil for an axe murderer to execute people at random, how can it be evil for a society to call that person evil and seek to execute them? If we want to be humane toward outlaws that's fine, but I don't think that we should do it out of the assumption that human behaviors are under no more human control than storms and earthquakes. Craig Brent Ethics is, at bottom, the art of recommending to others the self-sacrifice necessary to cooperate with ourselves. --- 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/-/-RFrHbTbweoJ. 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. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. 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.
