tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-447603865959500290.post7775134291056694136..comments2024-03-28T02:54:46.537-04:00Comments on The TOF Spot: Evil as a defect in the goodTheOFloinnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14756711106266484327noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-447603865959500290.post-36072304297784680672015-08-08T04:15:52.219-04:002015-08-08T04:15:52.219-04:00I'm still trying to figure out what other than...I'm still trying to figure out what <i>other</i> than "depriving a whole class of people of a good, namely their lives" is bad about genocide. It's not as if genocide creates anything new, some black and twisted shape that it defiles the sun to shine upon (although genocide may involve the creation of some nasty machinery, like gas chambers—which are only bad because they're being used to deprive people of their lives). Mountains of corpses are very bad things, but their badness is due to being the by-product of mass murder—if you 3-D printed a bunch of cloned tissue into the shape of corpses, and stacked the results up, it would be really, really weird, and soon quite unsanitary, but it would be more or less morally neutral.Sophia's Favoritehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02871625814389904112noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-447603865959500290.post-71917559673204181482015-08-07T15:13:50.408-04:002015-08-07T15:13:50.408-04:00"How dare you say that something as horrid as..."How <i>dare</i> you say that something as horrid as genocide is 'only' a deprivation of a good!"<br /><br />I think the problem here is that 'only'; taken at face value, this formulation seems to suggest that human depravity can be assessed as "bad" solely by what level of suffering it actually causes, and that it is the scope of the suffering rather than the means or intent of its inflictor which is the moral concern. It feels wrong on a certain gut level to say, for example, that a murderer who kills seven people before being caught is "no more evil" than a storm which collapses a building and kills seven people inside, if it could somehow be verified that the suffering of each group was generally equivalent. (Partly this is due, I think, to the fact that most people no longer distinguish between what is called "physical" evils and moral evils; the general tendency I see is to assume that "evil" <i>means</i> "moral evil" by definition.)<br /><br />Perhaps we could say, then, that "defect in a good" is a necessary but not sufficient condition for something to be truly named "evil"; that while all evils encompass a deprivation of a good, not all deprivations of a good are "evil" unless they are caused by the conscious act of a morally-aware being.<br /><br />If your original interlocutor wants to blame God for permitting suffering to exist, of course, that is far from incomprehensible, but it is just another way of restating the Problem of Pain and thus not original.Stephen J.https://www.blogger.com/profile/17731801189076630997noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-447603865959500290.post-33838857906303562602015-08-05T23:41:20.559-04:002015-08-05T23:41:20.559-04:00Here's where having studied Zen comes in handy...Here's where having studied Zen comes in handy. You say to him, "If you have 'no ice cream', I will take it. If I have 'no ice cream', I will give it to you."<br /><br />And if that doesn't make the concept "hypostasized privation" penetrate, you hit him with a fly-whisk while shouting "Katsu!"Sophia's Favoritehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02871625814389904112noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-447603865959500290.post-31042549476812528942015-08-05T22:04:23.385-04:002015-08-05T22:04:23.385-04:00This comment has been removed by the author.Dominic Saltarellihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00725597759209031625noreply@blogger.com