RoR: Forum

Post 80

Sunday, March 12, 2006 - 12:46pm

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Michael!
George is right. You are soooo evil! ;-^

Post 81

Sunday, March 12, 2006 - 1:06pm

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*Deleted*

Because it was too good for the masses, I deleted this post.

(Edited by George W. Cordero on 3/12, 1:58pm)

Post 82

Sunday, March 12, 2006 - 1:11pm

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Just goes to show the evil of power lust, you lose.

Post 83

Sunday, March 12, 2006 - 4:04pm

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Joe M. wonders how far off topic from my article this conversation has strayed. I think quite a bit.

First of all, my article didn't care at all whether Mother Teresa preached to others, poisoned minds, or whatever. The point was to describe how evil could be viewed from the point of view of others (Hitler is evil for killing people), or how it can be viewed from a personal egoistic point of view (a person is evil for destroying their own lives). This Atilla vs. Witchdoctor, and all the other discussions of Mother Teresa being evil for preaching self-sacrifice, are all interpreting evil from the conventional "otherism" point of view, pointing out the harm she did to others.

That's exactly the premise I'm trying to check here. I don't care to try to figure out which kind of harm to others is worse between violence and spiritual poison. Let the altruists have that debate. We have our own issues. We need to answer why our most powerful moral term is still used entirely within an altruistic framework.

Jon Tager disagreed with my statement that Hitler killing people was secondary when viewed from the perspective of his own self-interest. This distinction is important, so let me try to clarify. There's no doubt that sacrificing others to yourself has negative consequences to your own life. The issue is which is considered the most important effect. Is it the fact that those others are hurt? Or is it the fact that your own life may be diminished because of it? Which is the standard of value? If the standard of value is other people, the fact that the lives were lost is the cost. If it's your own life, that isn't the cost. The cost is how how others will respond to you now, how the psychological affects of killing people will impact your life, how destroying the harmony of interests will negatively impact your life, etc. In other words, are the costs measured by their impact on other people, or on his own life.

This is why it's legitimate to compare the personal costs he incurred, and compare them to the costs of someone else who sacrificed their happiness and life consistently (thus, Mother Teresa). The example doesn't matter much except that the personal sacrifices must be pretty big to show the point. The point you have to see is that the costs on your own life of continuous sacrifice can be greater than the costs on your life from being a murderer. This allows us to distinguish the altruistic conclusions (murder is the worst thing you can do) with the egoistic conclusions (there are many ways to destroy your life, and they don't have to impact anyone).

And of course, all of this is just to set the groundwork for showing that the term 'evil' is conventionally used to discuss harming others. I think George Cordero's post 58 captured the spirit of that conventional use. It also highlights the problem with trying to use the term in a more Objectivist oriented way. While it is a moral term that in theory should shift meaning depending on the underlying moral standard, that's not something that will be understood by most people. It's a quick recipe to cause confusion and stop people from taking you seriously.

And on the other hand, if we continue to use it as is, we'll continue to use an altruistic-laden word that makes the harshest moral judgment all about how it affects other people, as if that were the standard.

Robert B. suggested that using 'selfishness', like Rand did, is appropriate when you have the time to argue it out and explain. But it's just asking for trouble to try to use it in everyday conversations. And I agree that this applies to an Objectivist view of 'evil'. But let me ask something else? How many people still use 'selfish' in ordinary conversation to describe someone who's short-sighted and stomps all over other people? Personally, I avoid it since I don't buy into the package-deal there. Similarly, I avoid throwing around the term 'evil' since I don't agree with the conventional meaning of it.

Once this package-deal is understood, there are some interesting avenues to pursue. One possibility is that there's a difference in kind, and not just degree, between evil and immoral. One could imagine someone pursuing legitimate, life-affirming values, but it in a short-sighted way. Like trying to get a promotion and blaming problems on your competition. Bad means to a good end (corrupted by the means of course) could be described as immoral. But what if the ends which someone is pursuing really is not life-affirming? What if they pursue self-destruction? What if someone seeks to hurt those around him? Or hate the good for being the good? This could be a way of distinguishing evil from simply immoral. I haven't followed this line of reasoning far enough to have confidence in it, but the point is that some avenues of exploration open up.

Post 84

Sunday, March 12, 2006 - 4:13pm

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NEWMAN: When do you classify someone as immoral?

RAND: Only when he has done...done, in fact, some immoral action... When someone in action [Rand's emphasis] does something which you know, can prove, is an immoral, vicious action -- a sin, not a value; or a vice (whichever you want to call it) -- then you have to judge him as he has proved.

In other words - evil is as evil does.

Post 85

Sunday, March 12, 2006 - 4:15pm

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deleted
(Edited by George W. Cordero on 3/12, 7:20pm)

Post 86

Sunday, March 12, 2006 - 4:26pm

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I find the whole approach of factoring reason out of the concept of evil in Objectivism and calling the traditional anti-reason standard an "altruistic framework" absolutely breathtaking.

Cost-benefit is being proposed as a moral substitute for reason.

I disagree.

Edit - Apropos. The moral basis of Rand's new concept of selfishness was epistemological: reason.

Michael

(Edited by Michael Stuart Kelly on 3/12, 4:32pm)

Post 87

Sunday, March 12, 2006 - 4:43pm

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Subject: the illogic of purely verbal disputes

Many of the posts on this thread make the same mistake: debating who is more "evil", A or B (Mother Teresa, Hitler, Kant, Kennedy, Machiavelli, the author of a manual for hit men,...and on and on) without first specifying which of the several definitions of evil they are using. This is a form of the fallacy Lionel Ruby discussed in the very first page of his introductory "Logic" text, the book long recommended to (but seldom read by) Objectivists. The examples he gives are the college bull session debate on "are all men created equal" or "is country X a democracy". Quoting Ruby: " a verbal dispute...is not a genuine dispute in the terms in which the dispute is formulated...the parties use a key word in two different senses...They must use this key word in the same sense before they can determine whether they are in agreement or disagreement....In a verbal dispute the parties believe that their statements cannot both be correct [me: A is more evil than B vs. B is more evil than A], whereas actually they may be." (p. 9). [One form or name for this fallacy is equivocation.]

A cure for this problem is: "[ask yourself] do the parties use a key term in different senses?... state the different senses [of] the ambiguous term... restate...replacing the term with the variant definitions..." (p. 19). If I were to do this I would restate as follows (using Mother Teresa and Kant, but you could also use the other people who have been mentioned in this thread such as Hitler, the author of the hit man book, etc.):

Position 1: "Kant is more evil than Mother Teresa, because evil means causing the most massive destruction and harm in the world."

Position 2: "Mother Teresa is more evil than Kant, because evil means causing the most destruction to one's own personal life.

Note that these two positions could -both- be true (depending on one's assumptions of the motivations and self-knowledge of the two people) because they rest on using *two different senses* of the word evil. Both of which are valid and in the dictionary. (I listed the four meanings of the word in my post #12 justs to avoid this kind of nonsense.)

Many of the really long threads on this board involve several posters at heated swords point who are in engaged in either purely (or largely) verbal disputes because they are in a tug of war over whose use of the term will prevail, when both usages have some support in the dictionary (or in Objectivist parlance). Or when they need to simply describe how they are using it in a phrase or sentence or definition and then restate using this definition or sense or connotation (as I did above) to see if they are in actual disagreement.

In -this- largely pointless debate, I am sure both sides would agree that all or most of the people they are furiously contending about...self-immolating individuals, philosophers whose intent is to destroy reason or happiness, or mass killers... are quite immoral. Arguing endlessly about Who Is -More- Evil is a ludicrous waste of time on the order of debating how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.

People in Objectivist debates can come across like such time-wasting, nitpicking, esoteric medieval scholastics sometimes.

(Edited by Philip Coates
on 3/12, 5:06pm)

Post 88

Sunday, March 12, 2006 - 5:12pm

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> The point you have to see is that the costs on your own life of continuous sacrifice can be greater than the costs on your life from being a murderer. [Joe]

No, rock bottom is rock bottom: They are both disastrous and completely soul and self-destroying. So there is no point, no logic in trying to say one is worse. If total self-destruction is the standard and both are totally destructive, how could anything be worse than zero? Which is worse, death by fire or death by hanging?

> One possibility is that there's a difference in kind, and not just degree, between evil and immoral. One could imagine someone pursuing legitimate, life-affirming values, but it in a short-sighted way. Like trying to get a promotion and blaming problems on your competition.

That's a good point. But short-sighted doesn't necessarily indicate immoral. You'd need to add other categories such as simply being honestly mistaken, having a psychological mental block, compartmentalization, not being able to see connections or integrate at a certain point in time, etc.

Post 89

Sunday, March 12, 2006 - 6:28pm

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Newberry hit it on the head with post 68 (real evil is an evil that survives to fight another day).

The truly evil folks aren't in prison (most prisoners are honestly-brutal, infantile narcissists). The truly evil find scapegoat after scapegoat after scapegoat. The truly evil are able to cast their suffering onto others with a hard-earned skill. They work their whole lives on how to pass blame to others -- without ever being tainted in the dynamics. They are 'master' evaders.

With this in mind, Mother Teresa seems more evil than Hitler (ala the Toohey Phenomenon).

Ed

Post 90

Sunday, March 12, 2006 - 7:04pm

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From "The Objectivist Ethics" by Ayn Rand from The Virtue of Selfishness:

The standard of value of the Objectivist ethics�the standard by which one judges what is good or evil�is man's life, or: that which is required for man's survival qua man.
Since reason is man's basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil.
Since everything man needs has to be discovered by his own mind and produced by his own effort, the two essentials of the method of survival proper to a rational being are- thinking and productive work.

Where is the "otherism" in this? I don't see it.

From Joe Rowlands's post above "We need to answer why our most powerful moral term is still used entirely within an altruistic framework."

Once again, where in Rand's words does her definition of evil suddenly become based on an "altruistic framework"? And by what stretch of "otherism" can Mother Teresa be considered as more evil than Hitler on Objectivist terms?

If this discussion is not about Objectivism, then OK...

Michael

Post 91

Sunday, March 12, 2006 - 7:26pm

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Michael read the article again.
(Edited by Ethan Dawe on 3/12, 7:26pm)

Post 92

Sunday, March 12, 2006 - 8:00pm

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Ethan,

OK. I reread the article just to make sure. The word "reason" was used once (as an alternative to emotion) and the word "rational" was used once as an adjective for interests.

Nowhere was it mentioned that reason is the basis of Objectivist morality. But "pursuing" and "hurting" and "enhancing" your life was given. Phrases like "others oriented" were used as a substitute standard for reason.

I admit, reason was not negated. It was just deleted from the discussion.

I questioned where "otherism" was in Rand's words because of this statement from the post above: "We need to answer why our most powerful moral term is still used entirely within an altruistic framework."

My point is that Rand does not use this term within an altruistic framework. Objectivists who do use it that way learned it wrong. So if this term is "still used entirely within an altruistic framework," then who is still using it "entirely" like that? I certainly don't. Do you?

I hold that an Objectivist discussion of evil needs to include reason by definition.

Michael

Post 93

Sunday, March 12, 2006 - 8:06pm

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> read the article again

Ethan, Joe said evil is a flawed concept, corrupted by altruism and a package deal. Michael has pointed out Rand's definition: "that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil." I pointed out the dictionary definitions. Neither Rand not the dictionary is altruistic or a package deal (in some ways Rand's definition improves on the dictionary's by identifying an underlying thread that essentializes and unites the various definitions). Unless I missed it, Joe has not bothered to respond to this point. What part of this stunningly simple point is unclear or requires that one "reread the article"?

(Edited by Philip Coates
on 3/12, 8:19pm)

Post 94

Sunday, March 12, 2006 - 8:25pm

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Yah know what? I just reread the article, taking my own advice. Upon doing that and reading a few posts here I realized something. Phil, I just don't think you get what Joe was saying. Call that a floating abstraction, but I'm going to go to bed rather than bothering to explain it.

Michael, you're not even talking about Joe's article. I don't know what tangent your on. Maybe I'm crazy

I see my previous sabbatical from the forum wasn't long enough.

Ethan

Post 95

Sunday, March 12, 2006 - 9:24pm

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Phil, do you know what a package-deal is? For instance, do you think the conventional view of 'selfishness' is a package-deal?

I already addressed your dictionary definitions, and showed that you were switching contexts in order to make your claim.

As for Rand's definition, it's fine and non-contradictory. But that's where the package-deal comes in. The conventional view of evil has more than one component. It deals with others as a threat to our lives. It deals with them as being immoral based on their standard. It deals with an extreme magnitude of immorality. It also has powerful emotional connotations. Rand's definition ignores the threat factor, and reinterprets the morality based on a new standard. But as should be obvious from the rest of this discussion, severing that package-deal is harder than it looks. Especially when we have people like you swearing that there is no package-deal in the first place, and then trying to fix it by having two different definitions anyway. Why exactly do you need two radically different definitions (one internal destruction, one external destruction) if there was no package-deal to begin with?

MSK, as always, your understanding of Objectivism is a hodgepodge of out-of-context quotes mixed with your own contradictory opinions, all stated as if you had any idea what you were talking about. It's scary at how confused you are. I haven't responded to your earlier posts because I refuse to pretend your irrational and contradictory statements have some kind of deeper meaning, and because you didn't read my article.

Let me state for the record that if life is the standard of morality, then it is the effects on life that must be used to judge them. Rand's quotes agree with me, not you. Your attempts to make rationality the standard of morality are wrong. We're rational in order to live our lives well. We don't live our lives well in order to be rational. Evasion is bad because of the effects it has on our lives. We don't judge those effects based on how much evasion took place, but by how destructive they were to our lives. I can understand why you don't want to talk about evil in the context of altruism, since you promote it at every turn. You'd rather discuss it in terms of some ill-defined "rationality", where the whole discussion of altruism vs. self-interest gets blurred out, letting you pretend that Rand was an altruist and you're just carrying on her good work. But this article is all about that distinction.

Post 96

Sunday, March 12, 2006 - 9:46pm

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Joe, if your view is that the conventional view of evil, the *application* of the concept presumes an altruist moral code if you are an altruist, then we are in agreement (few people in our culture besides Oists are going to call a totally 'selfless' person 'evil'). But my point was that the *concept itself* as it has come down from a millenium of use is a valid one (people agree on the definition of evil as some kind of ultimate immorality and most would be aware that it can be self-destruction OR other-destruction such as genocide, etc.)

I would be willing to bet you and I could walk down a row of churches in Sunnyvale and ask the priests and their flock as they emerge next Sunday and they would all agree on the definition, once I'd stated it for them. They would all know what evil -means-. But they would heatedly disagree on the application. On who -is- evil in many cases.

( In a way, I'm sorry we have spent so much time on this issue - I have managed to bore the piss out of myself even with my own posts. It was not the main or at least not the only point of your thread, and other good things you said have gotten lost in this endless definitional hassle. I -do- believe, however, that exact and precise definitions are absolutely vital in philosophy. At any rate, I for one, have now lost patience with this side topic....since I have made my view completely clear...and if we disagree, so be it. )

(Edited by Philip Coates
on 3/12, 9:50pm)

Post 97

Sunday, March 12, 2006 - 10:32pm

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Joe,

Here we come to the crux of the matter. You claim: "We're rational in order to live our lives well. We don't live our lives well in order to be rational."

Nope. In addition to that being a false dichotomy, we are not rational because of the cost-benefit to us. Otherwise, if being irrational allowed us to live our lives better (more benefit with less cost), then irrational would be the good at times. Short term, that is a wholesale moral sanction of Hitler. He could live his life very well by being irrational. He did it.

Your concept of "living well" is disembodied from the faculty of reason. That is not Objectivism.

We are rational because that is our nature as human beings. We were born with that faculty. We can choose to exercise it or not and we have no other major means of survival. The results of using it are thinking and producing things. What destroys rational thinking and rationally producing things is the evil. That goes for the person and that goes for society (your "otherism").

That is so basic that it is almost embarrassing to have to write it.

I will not return your insults and your "errors" about my thinking, other than to say that they demean you. I prefer to stick to the ideas and the facts.

One fact for me is loud and clear, too. Your idea of Rand making a package deal out of the concept of evil is flawed at the premise. Maybe she even did oversimplify a bit, I'll have to think some on that, but your premise is still flawed. Your definition of evil is in terms of cost-benefit and not in terms of man's nature, which is basically his faculty of reason.

I especially object to your characterization of "Rand's package deal of evil" being the reason why it is not clear that Mother Teresa is more evil than Hitler. That's really out there by any stretch of the imagination. Only an idea that does not use reason as a premise can get to that point.

Michael

(Edited by Michael Stuart Kelly on 3/12, 10:43pm)

Post 98

Monday, March 13, 2006 - 12:30am

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In Post #40 Robert Bidinotto wrote:

Mother Teresa clearly preached a vile and toxic philosophy. However, she did not kill people; she did not enslave millions; she did not run gas ovens for ethnic cleansing.

In other words, repugnant as she was, she was not Adolph Hitler, or Saddam Hussein, or Ted Bundy.

That said, I would like to pose a question to those who would equate holding or preaching irrational ideas, with engaging in real-world acts of butchery and destruction:

By what means can we even determine that evasion or "irrational ideas" are evil, if not from their real-world destructive consequences?

In other words, are destructive acts evil because they are rooted in evasion and bad ideas?

Or are evasion and bad ideas evil because they cause destruction?

Put another way: Is evasion bad because it violates the virtue of rationality? Or is it bad because it undermines the value of life?

Then what actually and primarily defines "evil": that "evasion" which we do within the privacy of our skulls, or that destruction which we carry out in the world?

And as a corollary, who is the most evil: he who accepts bad ideas and who evades facts -- or he who acts on bad ideas or evasion, and directly, willfully causes harm and destruction?

Kant or Hitler? Mother Teresa or Ted Bundy?

Think about it.

This is an immensely plausible and reasonable argument. And it largely is a matter, as others have written earlier in the discussion, of how one defines "evil." But I still tend to disagree with it.

Berkeley, Hume, Kant, etc. made Hitler, Stalin, and Mao possible. Without the idea men, those three dictators and butchers would never have come into existence. False ideals were absolutely necessary for Hitler's genesis, and he did not have the ability to generate them on his own. Kant and company constitute the root of human evil. They are the foundation upon which the house of genocide is built, and without which it never gets built at all. Hence, Rand's view of Kant.

Ayn Rand once noted "Ideas matter." This is why it seems more accurate to me to describe idea people like Aristotle, Rand, Cicero, etc. as the real heroes of the earth, and not George Washington and the soldiers of Valley Forge. The fighters at Marathon and Salamis were truly brave and noble, in my view, but the deep rational thinkers of Athens were much braver and nobler.

Post 99

Monday, March 13, 2006 - 6:03am

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     P. Coates points up in post #87 how this thread has totally forgotten the point of J. Rowland's article which originated this thread: everybody's arguing over which noted historical character is more 'evil' than which other (not to mention if such is even meaningful), and, that few even attempt to define their meaning of the term (and, clearly, many are going by implicitly conflicting defs).

     Indeed, many make clear that they've forgotten that, if we're talking within an O'ist framework, there's an O'ist definition of it. But, MSK hadn't forgotten (ironically, given some of the diatribes he's received), as he showed in post #90 (Beat me to it, Mike!). --- However, Mike, methinks you misconstrued Joe's reference to the term's ('evil') use by world culture ("altruistic framework"), in which case it wouldn't be in terms of Rand's definition. The opposing frameworks are what his article was about, wasn't it? Or, did I misread it?

     Strictly speaking, whatever def or generalized-idea one goes by re 'evil', it can obviously be a prob in defining further criteria about measuring degrees of it, ergo, 'who' (and maybe even merely 'what') is more 'evil' than...'X'.

     Nevertheless, any and all who've crossed-the-line into 'evil' (and show no interest in redeeming themselves, of course) are, practically speaking, 'evil' enough to be considered equivalent in getting SOME negative treatment, if not the same exact treatment. --- So, in one sense, a burglar is nowhere near as bad as killer-for-hire, who may not be as bad as a serial-torturing-sadist, and, where teachers/advocates of "Ignore logic/your-'reason'" and/or "All who do not unquestionably accept 'X' must be killed" fall in there...well, J. Rowland's article had no point to pick on all this stuff. That's a whole other thread, isn't it? --- O-t-other-h, in another sense, really, all line-crossers ARE equivalent...in their worthwhileness as a human-being: they flunked. This means that they deserve no effort/energy from others in helping them with any 'needs' they have. (What this implies about handling captured criminals is still an other thread.)

     Finally, for those interested, before one speaks anymore of that dear self-sacrificing nun Mother Theresa again, please check out C. Hitchen's articles (if not his book) on this near-sadistic witch who considers those who suffer as 'closer to Christ', hence looks on sufferers as not those to 'cure', but to continue endurance until they die, at:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=12495017&method=full&siteid=50143

...and his later one at:

http://www.slate.com/id/2090083

LLAP
J:D

(Edited by John Dailey on 3/13, 6:07am)