Toughest Philosophical Questions

@Cyracuz,

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There are no bad people, and there are no good people. These are labels we put on people's actions. No one is all good or all bad.

You hit the nail on the head Cyracuz...

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@cicerone imposter,

I know it might take a lot more effort to prove than I am willing to provide, but the fact seems to be that moral codes arise when actual morals are in decline... Well raised children, that is, children raised with love are naturally moral, and they learn to be so before they can think rationally or critically upon the subject of morals... Immorality is learned behavior, and reason supports it, and for that reason all injustice is justified... When people behave morally, they do not act rationally, exactly... Reason may be found for what they do, but no reason offers a good argument for their doing it... The argument is always in a search of a context.... It is good, for example for an adult to risk their life to save the life of a child, and moral... Good as a moral form depends upon a person being alive to conceive of it, and if the risk of life is real, so that death is possible, even certain, then the act cannot be reasonable since being alive is a predicate for the seeing of reason, With life lost we have lost the context of reason, but moral behavior because of our emotional bonding pre-reason, can still be emotionally satisfying while unreasonable...

Again, it is with the break down of morally that morals must be asserted and defended socially, formally, and legally... If I say morality is community, it is because it is natural to expand the natal feeling for mother to all people of ones nation.. We stand with our natural friends against our natural enemies, but civilizations with their blending of peoples by contact or conquest blur the lines between native and natural behavior... When we cannot so easily choose sides, or cannot even define the enemy, or recognize him then we have lost our own distinct identity... If you take the hebrews for example, and see how many times they cleansed their ranks, or rubbed out foreign people to a man you might consider them the most immoral of people chosen for their immorality... We judge them according to our own standards, and what was moral then, to hold to ones own, and destroy strangers, is done today with equal ferver by Israel, and it is still moral... To see your own people destroyed is not moral, but immoral... Group responsibility is moral...

It is civilizations that hold to peace while injustice walks abroad that need moral codes... Naturally, to an extent, the desire for peace is worthy... The problem with moral codes and laws is that such behavior, springing from the emotions cannot be forced, and all the examples of immorality cannot be prevented... When the jews multiplied their laws the multiplied their lawyers, and their loopholes... In the time of Jesus, he pointed to sons neglecting the care of their parents in defense of which they were saving for an offering in the temple... What is moral is the care of ones own parents and children, but the priest could barely defend what was moral at their own loss of income...

A moral feeling and condition cannot be mandated by law, but the very fact of the law meant that one group had mastered another, and was writing the laws to suit itself, to maintain a formal situation as it was...In the example of the Jews, their laws, and the inequalities established by law sucked the vitality out of their society... There is no law written that people have to love each other... Jesus among others, said it, but he was trying to revive his society through revolution... Families, communities, and nations should love each other and mutually defend themselves, and in a primitive and moral state, they do... When one group, to have peace and to avoid destruction submits to the laws of another, they have surrenderd morality for survival, and survival without morality is slow destruction...

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@Procrustes,

Procrustes wrote:

Quote:
There are no bad people, and there are no good people. These are labels we put on people's actions. No one is all good or all bad.

You hit the nail on the head Cyracuz...

He hit his head on a nail... I would like to have the argument laid out before me that hitler was not all bad because he saved lobsters from being thrown into boiling water, but would not save death campers from freezing water in hypothermia experiments meant to save the lives of airmen lost to artic seas... Some people have no ability to relate... Sympathy or empathy are beyond them, and for all practical and moral purposes they are useless, except as bad examples, or example of bad...

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@Fido,

Fido, Spot on! Some people either don't remember history, or they are without conscience. For them, there are no good or bad people; they're neutral on the question. Even after Nazi Germany exterminated some six million Jews in the holocaust.

I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau last month, and have a travel blog on my visit at travelpod.com. Look for me as c.i.222.

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@Fido,

Do you not see that this is relative to the values we hold?

You and me view Jews and gypsies as human beings equal in worth to ourselves, and in contrast to those values, what Hitler did was gruesome. But Hitler had different values, and according to his values, eradicating Jews was something that would benefit all of humanity. He acted out of a desire to do good.

Our values are such that we do not consider cows to be living creatures worthy of the rights we extend to human beings, which justifies how we mass slaughter cows to supply humans with food. They are more valuable to us as food than as living creatures. Slaughtering ten cows to feed a village of hungry people is a good act. The life of a human is worth more than the life of a cow.

If those values change in the future, people a hundred years from now might be looking back at this time, seeing bad people doing horrible things to further what they saw as the good of all.

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@Cyracuz,

In your attempts to rationalize brutality of Jews by the Nazis, you have lost your sense of humanity.

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@cicerone imposter,

cicerone imposter wrote:

Fido, Spot on! Some people either don't remember history, or they are without conscience. For them, there are no good or bad people; they're neutral on the question. Even after Nazi Germany exterminated some six million Jews in the holocaust.

I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau last month, and have a travel blog on my visit at travelpod.com. Look for me as c.i.222.

Actually; they killed something like ten million unarmed and helpless people of all sorts... My son is Jewish... I have broke bread with them, and slept with them... With all due respect; they do themselves a discredit when they say six million people died in the holocaust... It was a holocaust for many others as well, but only they died for being Jews... Other people with less or equally little guilt died for who they were too, and to minimize their deaths is as much a holocaust denial as that of the most rabid neo nazi... I miss them all, and as a human being regret their suffering...

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@Cyracuz,

Cyracuz wrote:

Do you not see that this is relative to the values we hold?

You and me view Jews and gypsies as human beings equal in worth to ourselves, and in contrast to those values, what Hitler did was gruesome. But Hitler had different values, and according to his values, eradicating Jews was something that would benefit all of humanity. He acted out of a desire to do good.

Our values are such that we do not consider cows to be living creatures worthy of the rights we extend to human beings, which justifies how we mass slaughter cows to supply humans with food. They are more valuable to us as food than as living creatures. Slaughtering ten cows to feed a village of hungry people is a good act. The life of a human is worth more than the life of a cow.

If those values change in the future, people a hundred years from now might be looking back at this time, seeing bad people doing horrible things to further what they saw as the good of all.

Where knowledge for the wise is so uncertain, certainty is a virtue only to the ignorant and a vice to the educated...Certainty does not make a bad act good...And it is in the eye of the beholder... No victim means no crime, and no witness... The Spanish had their Auto de Fe's, and made people into candles... Could I justify it only because faith stood firmly behind it, then evil would walk every street in the world with gun and knife in hand because death is certain!!!...

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@cicerone imposter,

cicerone imposter wrote:

In your attempts to rationalize brutality of Jews by the Nazis, you have lost your sense of humanity.

I think he is being more of a devils advocate here... It is the subjective view of morality made hypothetical... The thing is; there is no hypothetical morality... Evil is as evil does... Bad intentions result in bad consequences since good people take care to see that good is the result of their goodness...Goodness is not blind, and evil always is...

Why does ignorance hurt so many??? It is because certainty takes the place of the limited vision we have -that to work at all we must work to focus.. As the Greeks believed Promethius created us, so they believed that we too could see the future, and that we lose that ability when we hope against hope...Certainty depends upon hope and faith while knowledge is left idle as too much effort for the active man... Some times I feel I am too much like hitler for reading on many subjects, but too little in depth... What little he read gave hitler certainty at the price of sight... I figure I am born blind and know no more, or better than I feel...

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@Fido,

Quote:

In your attempts to rationalize brutality of Jews by the Nazis, you have lost your sense of humanity.

Quote:

I think he is being more of a devils advocate here... It is the subjective view of morality made hypothetical... The thing is; there is no hypothetical morality... Evil is as evil does... Bad intentions result in bad consequences since good people take care to see that good is the result of their goodness...Goodness is not blind, and evil always is...

Why does ignorance hurt so many??? It is because certainty takes the place of the limited vision we have -that to work at all we must work to focus.. As the Greeks believed Promethius created us, so they believed that we too could see the future, and that we lose that ability when we hope against hope...Certainty depends upon hope and faith while knowledge is left idle as too much effort for the active man... Some times I feel I am too much like hitler for reading on many subjects, but too little in depth... What little he read gave hitler certainty at the price of sight... I figure I am born blind and know no more, or better than I feel...

Fido

its kind of tough to have the depth of all things

we just don't live long enough

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@Fido,

That's true; the Nazis also killed Poles by the tens of thousands, and others including Gypsies, Russians and others they thought inferior. That record is also at Auschwitz-Birkenow camps.

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@cicerone imposter,

Quote:

In your attempts to rationalize brutality of Jews by the Nazis, you have lost your sense of humanity.

Let me get this straight...
You actually think Hitler was rubbing his hands gleefully, thinking up ways to be an asshole? Do you think he perceived himself as a bad person?
Do you think the entire German people were evil, that they wanted to kill millions of Jews?
That Hitler was insane, a mass murderer, yes he was. But did he think of himself as a bad person who had to be as good as possible at being bad?

Rigid absolutism like what you display with your reaction is precisely the kind of belief that can be manipulated into justifying just about anything.

Even today, the entire western world lives on exploiting the rest of the world, and we have enough ways to justify that to sleep well at night. And this is the same set of values by which you decide that someone has lost their sense of humanity. As long as you let the emotions that inspire that kind of judgement rule you, how long is it until "lost your sense of humanity" becomes "not human"? I am sure you know that the entire German people were manipulated with fear and taught to hate. They were not bad people.

The terrible truth is that good people can do terrible things as long as they believe the gain is greater than the sacrifice, and I think I am closer to my humanity than one who doesn't understand that.

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For all intensive purposes, Socrates did mention something about people not knowing the evils they do (something along the lines of that). I would agree to a point, that certain individuals get 'hijacked' by malevelonce blindly and unbeknownst to them. This happens with nations today, claiming they are 'the good guys' while there are 'evil doers' in this world. Such polarisation of moral values are relative cos what one nation sees as the 'evil doers' will be saying the same rhetoric: "We are the good guys and we will destroy evil."

And this in no way negates the destruction caused. It is because of such relative moral values do we see opposition between any force, or within individuals. And it is always after the fact that something horrific has happened do we point the finger.

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@north,

north wrote:

Quote:
In your attempts to rationalize brutality of Jews by the Nazis, you have lost your sense of humanity.

Quote:
I think he is being more of a devils advocate here... It is the subjective view of morality made hypothetical... The thing is; there is no hypothetical morality... Evil is as evil does... Bad intentions result in bad consequences since good people take care to see that good is the result of their goodness...Goodness is not blind, and evil always is...

Why does ignorance hurt so many??? It is because certainty takes the place of the limited vision we have -that to work at all we must work to focus.. As the Greeks believed Promethius created us, so they believed that we too could see the future, and that we lose that ability when we hope against hope...Certainty depends upon hope and faith while knowledge is left idle as too much effort for the active man... Some times I feel I am too much like hitler for reading on many subjects, but too little in depth... What little he read gave hitler certainty at the price of sight... I figure I am born blind and know no more, or better than I feel...

Fido

its kind of tough to have the depth of all things

we just don't live long enough

True enough, but starting young you can get a fairly good grasp of what is going on... Culture is knowledge, but some cultures have more current knowledge than others... I have an older brother, like myself, raise in the culture of Socialism who ws never much for reading, and though he may still call himself a socialist, as I would not, he swims in the culture of Fox News with all that passes there for intelligence... It reminds me of an aphorism that is at this moment beyond my reach, to the effect that people take their opinions from others as people buy their mil;, on the theory that it is less trouble than owning a cow -without considering that both milk and opinions may be watered... Hitler only read enough to confirm the opinions he already held... In his library their were many classics, but he made room for Westerns written by a German who had never even visited America...Compare that to some one like MacArther who knew a lot about Japan, and read two books a week, or Stillwell, who knew Chinese, and China well, and you get a sense of the stupidity involved in making a war based upon second hand opinion...

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@cicerone imposter,

cicerone imposter wrote:

That's true; the Nazis also killed Poles by the tens of thousands, and others including Gypsies, Russians and others they thought inferior. That record is also at Auschwitz-Birkenow camps.

I do not understand how the Jews can make so much of their part of the Holocause when it is already the greatest part...I know the wish to capitalize on it was there, but I think history will some day see that they were nearly the only group that emerged stronger from the death camps than they went in... By that I mean that they had a ton of moral capital that they are not through blowing yet... Their infirm, their old, their young, and most of their women and old fashioned traditions died in the camp, and for a while, they were like a warrior society ready to fight for Israel... A Jehovah witness once told me more of them left the camps than entered... While this is not true for the Jews, those six million dead Jews spoke for Zion without even a voice to do so...

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@Procrustes,

What can be said, as said by Socrates is: Knowledge is Virtue... Clearly, people do evil out of ignorance... Even Hitler claimed the moral high ground, saying in one instance that the Nazis were fighting for German Freedom... People justify immorality on moral grounds, and it is for the weapons of war, technology to decide who will be the victor... We are locked in a contest with Islam for which we are paying a huge economic cost... A billion and a half people who produce little of what we need could be a huge market for our goods, which they often do need; but for the public and religious opinions that they hold they will not be... We talked about Saddam, and attacked a whole country of innocents, and this is not a new method...We punish whole people already punished by tyranny and wonder why they do not care for us... We do not realize their strength... We think to impose Western Law on them when they have a law that already works for them to a degree...I would admit, that we can change their society, and force it into a future they are unprepared for, but we will never demoralize it short of its total destruction...

Morality, which is honor is what individually binds each man to his community, and religion...To say that our law is better than their law based upon their religion is the same as them neglecting their oaths and bowing before a new God... It may appear to happen and will not... We need peace with , or distance from those people...

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@Cyracuz,

It doesn't matter if an individual believes he's a saint, but kills millions of innocent people. The "solution for the Jewish question in Europe" was evil no matter how anybody with any humanity, ethics, and right vs wrong sees it.

There is no way I can justify such massacre of humanity by anybody, even though people like you try to rationalize them and their actions.

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@cicerone imposter,

I do not try to rationalize them. I try to understand them. Big difference. I agree that whatever Hitler believed himself to be doesn't change the quality of his actions, but that doesn't change the fact that he acted believing he did something good. There is no way around that it is fucked up, but it is not evil. "Evil" is a naive judgment made by self-righteous people who cling to the "black/white" simplicity that enables such things to happen in the first place.

You know, what happened to the Jews in ww2 was part of the justification for the forming of the state of Israel, and we all know how smoothly that went, with no violations of humanity or ethics at all...

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@Cyracuz,

Yes you have; even went so far as to blame me for not understanding what you're trying to portray as "knowledge." Bull ****!

There have been experiments done at Stanford and Yale Universities that proved even students with above average intelligence can be manipulated to torture others under certain conditions. They had to stop those experiments, because it "went too far."

That doesn't justify what they did can be "rationalized as normal."

Most cultures have laws against crime which are punishable with jail and or prison time - some without the possibility of parole. There's a reason for laws; without them, most cultures would live in chaos. Most judgments are executed through court systems where decisions of guilt or innocence is made by their peers. If they rationalized that mass killing is "normal" like you would have us believe, the court system would be useless.

Most people know the difference between right and wrong.

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@cicerone imposter,

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There have been experiments done at Stanford and Yale Universities that proved even students with above average intelligence can be manipulated to torture others under certain conditions.

Yes.

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That doesn't justify what they did can be "rationalized as normal."

That is exactly what it does. And that is why it is so dangerous to adhere to "normal" as if it's some kind of absolute from which you can measure the quality of any action.

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Most people know the difference between right and wrong.

The German people who informed on Jews so they got captured and transported to the camps thought they were doing right. They knew the difference between right and wrong.
Suicide bombers who blow up buildings and kill themselves and a whole lot of other people know the difference between right and wrong.
Wealthy banks that take people's homes so they have to live on the streets know the difference between right and wrong.
All the people of the western world, who enjoy welfare and luxury at the expense of poor people in third world countries, know the difference between right and wrong.

What does that tell us about "right and wrong"?

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