close but not quite. i'm trying to see how other forum members see other people, and how their personal morals come into play, and how or if they can look at their own perspective from a different perspective.
What's a bad person?
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close but not quite. i'm trying to see how other forum members see other people, and how their personal morals come into play, and how or if they can look at their own perspective from a different perspective.
This is my perspective on it (feel free to disagree);
One is morally wrong while the other mathematically wrong. But you wouldn't call the man who gave the wrong mathematical answer 'bad' or 'evil'. So it appears to me that we have objective morals in this sense because most people would agree (from whatever culture they may come from) that first was not just wrong, but evil. The reason why I use 'sex' in this example is because its a means of preserving a spices. In the animal kingdom, if an animal forcefully mates with another we don't call it 'rape'. As far as both animals are concerned they are carrying out their instinctual duty, neither animal is aware of the wrong doing that we perceive. However in the case of humanity, here we have something completely different. Moral duty and obligation. Whether this is the product of evolution or not has little to do with this perceived fact (though I am what you would call a theistic evolutionist) but we humans have a set of moral laws encoded into us and I highly doubt they came to be from the minds of powerful dictatorships (considering that dictators have a tendency to be rebelled against).
I am sure there are some communities in the world where rape is not as condoned or seen as evil, but is seen as more natural or like how other animals use it.
Generally, people don't like it because it's not consensual and goes against the "golden rule" very strongly.
But anyways, you are taking the stance that a person who does things that are morally wrong, is "bad". Even "evil". You are taking the stance also that morals are objective (further than saying that there are just "patterns" in peoples chosen morals), therefore who is "good" or "bad" is also objectively true.
Like I said, my views on this are very nihilistic in nature. I can fully comprehend how people might typically label others as bad or good. It's just that I don't think people should be obligated to have certain morals, and be deprived of compassion or understanding from other human beings just because of this. Of course that means I believe people are entitled to believe and act however they want, including "what I don't think people should believe". It's just that I do not operate in this way, because I don't think its very magnanimous or truly showing the utmost of human understanding and compassion to be that way. People label those as wrong or broken people because they don't exhibit the moral attitudes of their society, because they hurt and inconvenience others. It makes sense and is convenient to do so, but people think these are broken, truly objectively bad and unworthy human being, rather than realizing that these views are subjective in the context of their own society and the values that people have been brought up to hold. It separates human beings into light and dark, rather than realizing that anyone, even you or I, could become a child molester if they experienced certain conditions or had the bad luck of having certain forms of mental and emotional development in their lives.
lenina
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correct me if i am wrong, but i believe here you may have revealed that you are not as nihilistic about morals as you may believe. i agree that i could become a child molester if i had experienced other things in my life, or if i had bad luck, but that 'bad' luck would be people or systems doing 'bad' things to me. 'bad' causes more 'bad' which means 'badness' is something real. you are saying X became this way because Y happened to him. i am saying X became this way because Y happened to him and now X and Y are one in the same. which brings to the importance of each individual being accountable for his/her actions and stop being the cause of bad things happening. for some that is harder than others, but for those that it is the easiest, those are the worst of the bad people (this is what i was saying in my above post).
GracieRuth
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I am just trying to clarify your position. If there are no good/bad people, then you consider Martin Luther King Jr and Adolph Hitler to be roughly the same?
Are you saying that the child being tortured, raped, and killed is merely being inconvenienced?
894tt3h9
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Objectively I don't like to label anyone as solely good or solely bad. There are just people who do things that I like, and then people who do things that I don't like. It's not up to me to determine whether the person in their entirety encompasses all good or all bad traits/behaviours.
Be careful about trying to draw such a strong distinction between Hitler and Martin Luther King. He was NOT a saint. He was a plagiarizer who happened to give good speeches. Here, this will tell you all about him: http://www.martinlutherking.org/thebeast.html
Sure, Hitler had a lot of people murdered. King, had a lot of people blind. One of them has been condemned as an evil tyrant and the other one has a national holiday. I could just as easily say that Hilter was a good man with good intentions, but, under whose power bad things happened.
Be careful about trying to draw such a strong distinction between Hitler and Martin Luther King. He was NOT a saint. He was a plagiarizer who happened to give good speeches. Here, this will tell you all about him: http://www.martinlutherking.org/thebeast.html
Sure, Hitler had a lot of people murdered. King, had a lot of people blind. One of them has been condemned as an evil tyrant and the other one has a national holiday. I could just as easily say that Hilter was a good man with good intentions, but, under whose power bad things happened.
I'm yet to see any human being that isn't aware of the difference between right and wrong. Even the insane are aware of their moral instincts.
Are there no absolutes?
GYX_Kid
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Well, they're what they are due to their cause/effect relationship with the average of every human's values added up.
If neither of them hadn't done what they did, the chain of events leading up to your birth would have been completely different.
Then the ideas of good and bad in your head would never even exist in the first place.
So Adolph Hitler is also responsible for the existence of everyone you know and love.
(Everything in this silly argument is all about definitions of things, mostly)
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Ones a pervert and ones an idiot.
One needs to be murdered and one needs to be educated.
One does wrong and one says wrong.
I disagree.
Hitler was a bad person. Gaddafi was a bad person. Stalin was a bad person. Pol Pot was a bad person. John Wayne Gacy was a bad person. Idi Amin was a bad person. Augusto Pinochet was a bad person. Kim Jong-Il is a bad person. Enver Hoxha was a bad person. Ted Bundy was a bad person. I've personally known two psychopaths who are bad people and I've had a couple of bosses in my distant past who are going to hell, no doubt. I could go on and on. Is this enough or do you need more proof?
Hmm okay. But then, why place all responsibility on the person to stop the badness, rather than it being the whole world's responsibility to eradicate the "badness" in the world if it dislikes badness so much, and if the badness happened to him because Y happened to him anyway from the rest of the world?
No, they are not the same in that they are very different people who had very different roles in history. But they are roughly the same in that, yes, they are both human beings who could just as easily have switched roles if circumstances caused them to do so.
They are being inconvenienced very very much. I just use the word "inconvenience" to encompass all things that could bring misfortune to others.
Anyways, you are getting caught up in the trees here.
You miss the point. My point was not that "good" and "bad" behaviours do not exist among humans, but that they exist within their societal construction of them. Why did you quote that particular line I made, "I am sure there are some communities in the world where rape is not as condoned or seen as evil, but is seen as more natural or like how other animals use it."? I made that to illustrate that there can be communities in the world whose values are not exactly the same as the ones we'd be used to. Take societies who practice cannibalism, or who do not support female liberation.
I imagine the insane are aware of what you call "moral instincts" outside of the obvious-to-determine "demanding equality in treatment" and "golden rule". because they have retained their conditioning from society.
Asking whether or not there are absolutes will depend on your philosophy. I personally believe that absolutes only exist as concepts.
Okay, but why? Did you read my post #43.
GYX_Kid
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This is a concept to think about
Any one of us could have been living in Germany during the second World War, and very likely been manipulated by the values around us.
Then by most standards we'd be evil sheep.
Killing all or at least most of these people would likely benefit society in a lot of ways, especially your psychopaths running around now.
But they at least provide examples for each flavor of what they are
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An irrational being is any being not capable of rational action: animals, plants, inanimate things, etc.
What is reasonable and unreasonable? - in terms of applied action, that is the subject of the entire field of ethics/morals. A bad person is not one who is incapable of living reasonably, such as those with dementia, but rather, one who knowingly (or negligently) refuses to live reasonably/ethically/morally.
In other words, a person is neither good, nor bad in terms of how they exist, but rather in terms of how they choose to act.
lenina
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@niffer , it is each person's responsibility to be good. each person in the whole world. some people are fulfilling that responsibility, many are not, but we all should. good and bad exist. the people that have the least holding them back from being charitable and kind should do the most to be that way. while for others it will just take all the effort they can conjure up not to kill someone (like the person who raped them, or someone in a concentration that they are in charge of). societies do make up what is good and bad, and what they make up is subjective, but as human beings, of free will, we need to be able to tell when what our society is telling is actually good or actually bad.
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why?
lenina
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why not?
GracieRuth
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In most cases I would totally agree with you. Most of us in this world are morally mediocre, and that is probably where I fall on the spectrum as well. But when a person is so much better than the norm, I just think of them as good. And when another is so much worse than the norm, I think of them as bad. Sometimes a bad person only really does one thing bad, but its so horrific that it overwhelms anything they might do taht is good. Like, I don't really care if a serial killer goes to church regularly and gives money to the poor -- he's just an evil man. But usually "bad" refers to someone who does selfish mean things habitually, knows its wrong, and decides to live that way anyhow.
Has anyone in here read the book "People of the Lie"? Same guy who wrote "Road Less Traveled." He's a psychiatrist, and "People of the Lie" is about a certain personality of person who is willing to damage other people in order to avoid feeling guilty about their own wrongs. He believes that it's not the people in the psych wards and jails that are evil, but they were driven to criminal activity and psychology extremes BY evil people -- he says the evil people themselves are usually the pillars of society sort. Very interesting read.
GracieRuth
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"why place all responsibility on the person to stop the badness, rather than it being the whole world's responsibility to eradicate the "badness" in the world if it dislikes badness so much, and if the badness happened to him because Y happened to him anyway from the rest of the world?"
why place the responsibility of each person's goodness solely on a person, rather than everyone's goodness/badness being shared by everyone?