[pavel_lishin]

> The truth is that people are not inherently bad.

I don't know about that. I'd argue that most people don't think of themselves as bad, but it doesn't make them not-bad. And humanity definitely has base instincts - if we didn't, we wouldn't need governments and police.

[delish]

> but it doesn't make them not-bad.

I disagree. I've never found a coherent absolute ethical framework. Not even "Don't kill people."

When anyone is arguing that something is bad, that person has to appeal an authority or belief. Often the reasoning leads to utilitarianism: "If we want society to continue, we should ban murder." But that's still an if/then statement. Beneath the if/then is an appeal that society is good or desired.

> And humanity definitely has base instincts - if we didn't, we wouldn't need governments and police.

This viewpoint becomes popular with Hobbes in the 1600s. I disagree with the term "base instincts," which negatively connotes those things. I'll change it to "randomness"; i.e. in a society of nondeterministic people, some will try to kill the others. Government and police try to reduce that kind of randomness. But from that same randomness we get music, science, justice. I'm speaking loosely of course.

I think of my American government as social contract, not as protective parent.

[johncolanduoni]

> I'll change it to "randomness"; i.e. in a society of nondeterministic people, some will try to kill the others.

I think "randomness" is even worse, because it makes it sound like these actions could be expected from anyone at anytime. Statistically, a small portion of the population is responsible for most of the violence, through repeat offenses. Also, in many situations there are clear warning signs (e.g. mentally ill with clear homicidal ideation, member of a gang). Are you really arguing that a dice roll is a good fundamental model for human behavior?

Nondeterminism (assuming humans are truly nondeterministic) doesn't really matter here, except for the fact that we don't have a way of precisely predicting people's behavior (and may never have one). If it turns out that humans are just complicated, deterministic machines that we can not feasibly predict, the reasons for which we have developed societal structures do not disappear.

> But from that same randomness we get music, science, justice.

I think it's pretty easy to distinguish between the first two and violence. I agree that the third is a bit trickier. If what you mean is that the exercise of both these and the dispositions-formerly-known-as-base-instincts are a result of allowing for a significant measure of personal freedom, I'll agree with you. But writing human behavior off as having no more structure than a random number generator ignores a lot of predictive and explanative power that we do actually have.

[derefr]

> it makes it sound like these actions could be expected from anyone at anytime

They can. A neurotypical person's brain could spontaneously generate a violent psychotic episode due to a stroke or adrenergic tumor or somesuch. Just like any area of the sky could spontaneously throw a lightning strike at you at any time. It's low probability, certainly, but murder is a low-probability event to begin with.

The important point is that a model with "non-deterministic" people in it has more predictive power, epidemiologically, than a model where it's impossible to become a murderer without "warning signs." It's not at all "writing human behavior off"; the fact that the model includes randomness can actually help you prevent murders more effectively, by leading you toward strategies to cope with unpredictable murders—e.g. building education toward methods of "de-escalation" for psychotic episodes, crimes of passion, etc. into your society—rather than simply trying to reinforce policing and social work.

[johncolanduoni]

> They can. A neurotypical person's brain could spontaneously generate a violent psychotic episode due to a stroke or adrenergic tumor or somesuch. Just like any area of the sky could spontaneously throw a lightning strike at you at any time. It's low probability, certainly, but murder is a low-probability event to begin with.

I think if we eliminated all murders except these, we would be in excellent shape. My point is these are not the ones worth focusing on, because we don't have good tools to deal with "random, history free, psychotic break."

> The important point is that a model with "non-deterministic" people in it has more predictive power, epidemiologically, than a model where it's impossible to become a murderer without "warning signs."

Well, if your probabilistic model has no "warning signs", then how does it provide any information at all? If you don't have a method of using information to differentiate the probabilities when given a person/group of people/location etc. then you have no predictive power at all, except for the average murder per capita.

> building education toward methods of "de-escalation" for psychotic episodes, crimes of passion, etc.

De-escalation of psychotic episodes is an impossibly hard thing to teach without protracted work with a mental health professional. In addition, I seriously doubt that there would be any effectiveness when taught to people who have not experienced psychosis. Teaching this to everybody would be inhibited not only by cost, but by the fact that there is not likely enough people in a society that would be good enough therapists to do this on a large scale.

[Retric]

Depending on what you mean by premeditation a large percentage of US murders are more or less random.

#Pollution #Cars

[Syrup-tan]

GP's point was that human's thoughts and intents are a lot different from randomness. It isn't likely that most people intend on running into pedestrians whenever they get in their car.

[Retric]

When someone drives a car into a farmers market there not exactly choosing there victims. In extreme cases you have things like people flying airplanes into someone's home.

Sure, they did not intend to crash, but choosing to risk others lives is considered a reasonable thing to do. Assuming your not overly blatant about it.

[pauloday]

Well if you want to get really pedantic, nothing is inherently anything because all meaning is constructed in our minds. Evil is a word humans use to categorize things, not a description of objective reality.

I would agree that most people don't think of themselves as bad, but since there's no objective 'bad', wether or not they're 'actually bad' is up to the observer. When a person is labeled as 'evil' it's not a description of them as a person but a description of what the describer thinks of them. Hitler wasn't evil because he killed millions of people, he was evil because the general consensus is that doing the stuff he did makes you an evil person.

If one loses sight of this and starts think of evil as objective reality, they're taking their biases and opinions as objective reality, and down that path lies ruin.

[bad_user]

I would argue that, while "evil" cannot be defined in precise terms, you can definitely say that evil acts are unnatural acts that only humans are capable of. Why? Well for one because a natural foodchain is balanced and biased towards long term survival of all the species it involves and towards further creation of life. It's a little ironic that human beings are the only ones in the entire animal kingdom that can choose how to live, we are the only ones able to choose what are, our intellect transcending our DNA coding, yet we are also the only ones destroying our habitat and each other. Isn't that funny?

But back to Hitler, if you're trying to make the case that his evilness is subjective, I mean no offense but that's a really dumb argument. Hitler was in no small part evil because his actions were, on one hand irrational, fueling and amplifying his people's potential for hatred and destruction and on the other hand detrimental to the survival of our species and of Earth itself. And again, genocide is not natural. You see, in nature animals kill to eat, but that's to satisfy a basic necessity and not out of some wicked sense of justice and animals can definitely not kill on an industrial scale like we do. Whatever definition for "evil" you find, genocide on an industrial scale is pure evil by definition.

And if that doesn't sound objective enough, consider that culture is a part of who we are. We aren't DNA-coded to eat certain foods, or to live in a certain place, or in a certain way. Compared with rats, we can rely on the wisdom of our elders in order to survive. And we've survived this way for a long time. As an example, our rich culture, which includes preconceptions and taboos, is what prevents us to eat each other, or to have sex with our siblings, or to bring human sacrifices to our gods. Actually some preconceptions are more subtle and newer than others - for example the notion that children are fragile beings that need to be loved and protected, instead of someone's property, is pretty new, being popularized by Christianity.

So you know, if popular conception is that doing this or that is evil or toxic or taboo, there's a high probability that such judgments are correct, helping us to survive and thrive. Even with all the false positives (which tends to be the lack of tolerance towards people that are different from us), dismissing our heritage would not be wise. Plus usually the guidelines are simple, like being a murdering maniac counts as evil, though somebody should tell those jihadists.

[pauloday]

You make a lot of excellent points but I think you might have misinterpreted my comment, because it doesn't seem like we disagree. You mention that evil cannot be defined in precise terms, and that's exactly what I'm talking about. It's not a property of things in reality that can be measured, it's a judgement about things made by people. The judgment may be very rational, but it can't be based wholly on objective reality. For that to be the case, it'd have to be based on a physical law or property rather than a moral principle, and I just don't see how that's possible. Your argument for why Hitler was evil is really solid, not because it's based in objective reality but because it's based the principle that the continued existence of the human race is a good thing. I'd say that's a solid enough principle that it may as well be objective reality. But technically speaking, it's still a subjective judgement that we're making about how things should be, rather than an objective observation of how they are.

This is a really pedantic, subtle and (I think) important distinction. If one sees good and evil as objective truth, they're reliant on the source of that truth for their moral judgement. This explains the jihadists you mention. It's not that they enjoy being murdering maniacs (although I'm sure some do), it's that their source of moral truth tells them that the infidels are evil and must be destroyed (or whatever), so they see what they're doing as a good thing.