[alexvr]

Just a friendly reminder that morality is just a little human social construct associated with the pain-pleasure mechanism that evolved to guide intelligent machines toward evolutionarily advantageous ends. It's not a fundamental "problem" or anything if someone dies or suffers unthinkable agony. It's just that collections of molecules that avoid these things tend to survive. Outside of silly little human opinions, you're not a "bad person" if you stab people with scissors for fun, and you're not a "good person" if you cure cancer. These are both just "happenings" of nature, nothing more than what they are. Please don't waste your time pondering ethical dilemmas because it's as silly as arguing about the location of the garden of Eden or whether the population of leprechauns is greater than the population of unicorns.

[jondubois]

Yeah but if none of us had this construct of 'good' or 'evil', we wouldn't be able to co-operate. We would all be killing each other to get resources - Physical strength and brutality would become the most important evolutionary traits.

I almost certainly would not be able to exist in such a world - So my existence (and that of millions of people like me) relies on the fact that people believe in 'good' and 'evil'. So I support the notion.

That said, the notion of 'good' and 'evil' doesn't have to be homogeneous throughout society. In our current economic environment, it pays to be slightly evil because it lets you take advantage of people who are less evil than you. If you can do 'evil' things but manage to deceive people into believing that what you're doing is actually 'good' - Then you have a huge evolutionary advantage.

I think hypocrisy is a huge evolutionary advantage as well.

[icebraining]

Everything is just happenings of nature, so by itself that tells us nothing on how we should use our time. If you consider that particular action a waste, you're implicitly making a judgment using that silly social construct.