| | MSK wrote: I fully agree that an idea needs to be adopted - meaning wedded to an intent for action - before evil (or any other moral evaluation, for that matter) can apply. We need to be clear here. A belief that murder is justified is an evil idea, not simply because the person who holds it actually intends to murder someone, but because, if the motive and opportunity to commit murder were to arise, he would have no objection to acting on it. The idea in itself has no moral import - merely correspondence to reality or not - as my examples show. (Kelley calls moral evaluation a species of cognition, not an integral full-time component of cognition like Peikoff does.) You need a person who wants to put an idea into literal practice before evil enters the picture. You did just say that yourself with other words, correct? Not exactly. What I said is that an idea is evil if it is "held by people who take it seriously and would promote and/or practice it." What I meant is "would promote and/or practice it if the motive and opportunity were to arise." A radical Islamist who does not presently intend to murder any infidels holds an evil idea, because he would murder them under the right circumstances. I don't think David Kelley or Barbara Branden would agree with this. As I understand their positions, they would say that evil only applies to chosen actions and that as long as the Islamist doesn't act on his idea -- doesn't put it into practice -- evil doesn't enter the picture.
I think there's a tension in Objectivism on the issue of evil, which is why the disagreement between Kelley and Peikoff arose in the first place. On the one hand, it has been the Objectivist position since the days of NBI that there is a cleavage between errors of morality and errors of knowledge. An error of morality cannot be due simply an error of knowledge; the moral agent must have made a choice that he or she recognized as morally wrong. On the other hand, we have Rand's statement that "all that which furthers the life of a rational being is the good; all that which threatens it is the evil." Her statement implies that an idea which threatens human life is evil, even if its adoption is based on an error of knowledge -- even if the person holding it cannot be blamed or held morally responsible for accepting it -- because his acceptance is not the result of evasion or of intellectual dishonesty or irresponsibility. So, for example, an Islamic boy who has been taught since birth that Westerners are corrupt monsters, that the United States is the Great Satan, and that these enemies of Islam need to be destroyed in the name of Allah and of all that is good and holy may be quite willing to murder them. Clearly, his belief is evil, but it is no stretch to say that it is based on "an error of knowledge," not "an error of morality." (btw - I don't agree with Rand's evaluation of Kant. Especially as the vast majority of mankind's history existed before Kant, so I wonder: Who was the most evil man in history to her before Kant was born? Or how about in Oriental cultures - representing a huge slice of "mankind" and "history" - that never heard of Kant until recently? This is a whole other discussion and it is a small tangent.) She would say that before Kant, someone else would have filled that role, but that once Kant developed his philosophy, he took center stage. I don't see a problem with this, unless you disagree with her that someone else was even worse than Kant. Lest you think that Kant was just another misguided philosopher, I encourage you to read Peikoff's essay "Kant and Self-Sacrifice" (in the September 1971 issue of The Objectivist), excerpted from Peikoff's book, The Ominous Parallels (Chapter 4, "The Ethics of Evil," pp. 71-83). But even once you have a person who believes in a potentially destructive idea, there is still a lot more information that is needed before you can call this idea "evil" as regards that person. Like what? If the idea is destructive of human life, then it is evil. And if the person accepts it -- truly accepts it rather than some sanitized version of it -- then he or she is evil as well. What more information do you need in order to make that judgment?
- Bill
(Edited by William Dwyer
on 8/12, 9:07am)
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