Wednesday, June 16, 2021

Good vs. Evil vs. Preferences

Good and evil don't exist, but if you say those words to someone untrained they automatically translate it to [things I like] and [things I don't like]. These things do indeed exist, so it intuitively sounds wrong to them. 

Good and evil don't exist because there's no external way to validate or invalidate your preferences. As indeed should be the case. Stuff that exists exists. You like what you like. The rest of the world can say or do what anything at all and it doesn't change that you like the things you like.
It's merely that if you like getting high on heroin, but also like not dying of opioid overdose, then upholding the first preference over the second is imprudent. The conflict is internal. (Shocking news: consciousness is subjective, not objective.)

You know this next party already, but I'm going to say it anyway. The [morality is social control] crowd is far more correct than not. It's common to identify [stuff you like] with ingroup and [stuff you don't like] with outgroup. Naturally this is done by those who can control what counts as ingroup and outgroup, thus controlling your ""moral"" compass, thus controlling your actions. Harming the upper class, no matter how parasitic, is always defined as immoral. Self-sacrifice is a myth spread by the most selfish, who offer the clarion call to sacrifice your interests in favour of theirs.


P.S. Most humans have no personality. They have no internal texture aside from maybe [hunger is bad] & [sex is good]. Changing their fake and pretend preferences for other fake preferences is trivial and largely meaningless to the human in question. If saying up is down and black and white lets them secure their next meal, it's all the same to them.

P.P.S. They can't have good taste because they have no taste at all. It seems bad merely because entropy; there is far more bad art than good art.

2 comments:

Dave said...

Axiom: Anything that destroys itself cannot be good, because destroying good things is evil.

Axiom: All humans die, and can therefore destroy themselves merely by failing to reproduce.

Therefore that which fosters successful, ongoing reproduction is good, and that which thwarts it is evil. If the world isn't big enough for my people to peacefully co-exist with your people, then killing or sterilizing one people is good for the other, but only liberals try to conjure up universal definitions of good and evil, a conundrum they can only resolve by contracepting themselves out of existence.

Alrenous said...

That first axiom is not an axiom, it's much better than an axiom. Is it yours?

Humans are destroyed by age, not themselves. That's like saying humans die when they are bullet'd, and therefore destroy themselves by failing to avoid getting shot.

Even if we take it as an axiom, the consequences aren't what you want them to be.
If a human fails to reproduce, it destroyed itself and therefore was evil and failing to reproduce was just.

that which thwarts existing is evil
Err, but we've determined that certain things that exist are evil. Anything that can be thwarted must have been evil.

Universal morality isn't hard. Be prudent. Satisfy your values.
Complication: if your values are about directly thwarting someone else's values, it is rational for them to team up and destroy you. This is one of the many ways of saying cooperation is always rational. Thus defection is always irrational; that is, crime is inherently stupid.
Humans find it hard to define crime, but it's surprisingly easy: let die vs. kill. Could the bad thing (value contravention) still have happened if the accused didn't exist? Did you blow up their values or did you merely not help uphold them?

Liberals try to say letting die is a crime. In particular, the farmer failing to give food to the starving is murder, even if the farmer would themselves starve if they do. This is because liberals envy the farmer's productivity, therefore he is considered evil and considered to deserve to not-exist himself. This is because the liberal knows they are evil and/or mutants and the world would be better off if they didn't exist; they deal with this knowledge via denial and cope.

Whether they try to make it universal is locally irrelevant. "Universalism" is European expansionism. Expansionism => Empire => dead empire, including dead heartland. Universalism is self-destructive and therefore inherently evil.