[alex_young]

If you can get to the understanding that all of the outcomes in human thought and behavior are based on inputs of some level, be they genetic, or nurture, or through interaction with others or impacts from the natural environment, then it seem truly odd to believe in a concept like evil.

[tovej]

Following this argument, nobody is culpable for any crime they may commit, because their behavior is fully determined by their biology and environment. Try that in a court.

Evil is a perfectly straightforward concept. It may have many definitions but it's easy to conceive of one, e.g.: willingly making others suffer unjustly.

The concept of evil is quite different from what is being argued in the source material. There, we are questioning whether the environment created by a proposed god systematically leads to situations that indicates that the creator is not benign.

[david422]

> Following this argument, nobody is culpable for any crime they may commit, because their behavior is fully determined by their biology and environment. Try that in a court.

It's pretty simple. If you have no choice but to commit murder because your fate is predetermined, the court is also predestined to put you in jail.

[enugu]

This is indeed a standard response. But one issue is that courts do make exceptions for provably insane persons from being convicted of crimes. Nor do they punish accidental deaths as severely as intentional crimes.

When all actions are an outcome of environment(inherited or cultural), the non-trivial issue is to make a clear demarcation in different kinds of influence on a person who commits a crime.

A natural process which flows through conscious reasoning and motivation is different from a uncontrollable malfunction in the mind.

[alex_young]

> Following this argument, nobody is culpable for any crime they may commit, because their behavior is fully determined by their biology and environment. Try that in a court.

I’m not sure I understand the contradiction there. Are you saying that a court doesn’t care enough about any mental disorder which may have led one to commit a crime to completely absolve them? That’s does indeed seem to be the case in many areas, and for good reason: one important function of our legal system is to prevent future harm.

[tovej]

I'm saying that determinism doesn't remove issues of ethics.

[pmoriarty]

"If you can get to the understanding that all of the outcomes in human thought and behavior are based on inputs of some level, be they genetic, or nurture, or through interaction with others or impacts from the natural environment, then it seem truly odd to believe in a concept like evil."

Again, this doesn't explain at all why there is suffering caused by natural forces like hurricanes, earthquakes, and diseases.. and such sources of suffering are (along with human-caused ones) central to the Problem of Evil.[1]

But even were we to only focus on human beings, and even were we to grant for the sake of argument that we have no free will, then there's still the question of why we are the way we are.. if the answer is evolution and the physical laws of the universe and the history of the universe, then why is it all the way it is?

To theists the answer is "god". But why did god (a perfectly good, all-powerful, and all-knowing god) choose to make it that way... a way that entailed a lot of (or even any) suffering?

That's The Problem of Evil.

It's really a theological and philosophical question having to do with why the world is imperfect and yet supposedly the product of a perfectly god.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27801917

[alex_young]

I think I understand the argument well, but I don’t see that there is much room for an ‘evil’ upon we could all agree given the observational reality we find ourselves in.

Leaving aside the religious matter of a higher power, I think it’s safe to say that evil in the general context means something more than merely undesirable; perhaps intrinsically wrong from all possible rational observers or something like that.

Finding that biological systems have desirable or undesirable situations and that they having higher order communication systems can agree on a set of shared undesirable outcomes still doesn’t quite get to that concept of evil does it? If not, then I think we can agree that hurricanes are bad for us in general, but not exactly evil unless there is some unobservable force acting upon us which sounds a bit like magic to me.

[pmoriarty]

While the technical term in philosophy is "The Problem of Evil", it's really more about suffering and imperfection than it is about the loaded term "evil" as such.

It can be reduced to the general question "if god is perfect, why is the world imperfect?"

Or, to narrow the question a bit while still avoiding the use of the word "evil", we can ask "if god is omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent, why does suffering exist?"

We can agree that hurricanes, earthquakes, other natural disasters and diseases cause suffering, without getting in to the question of whether they're "evil" per se.

Such non-human causes of suffering don't seem to be necessary in a world created by an all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly benevolent god.. yet they still exist. Why?

Couldn't such a perfect god have created a world without all this suffering?

[emerged]

That line of thinking is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, although I think at its root it is purely semantic.

If you understand the physics of a ball rolling down a hill, the concept of motion doesn’t become truly odd to believe. The concept is still there and still matters, you just understand it in more detail.

Evil is another such emergent abstraction. The meaning is there regardless of the details of what lower level details it emerges from.

[exo-pla-net]

A closer analogy is continuing to believe that motion is caused by invisible angels pushing on objects, after you understand physics.

You could argue that the laws of physics are the tools that the angels use to do their pushing, but you'd then be entering the realm of absurdity. Angels are unnecessary to understand motion.

Same goes for evil. After you understand the basics of human psychology, and you accept the largely deterministic nature of everything, insisting that evil is the driver for certain acts is as absurd as a belief in physics angels.

Evil is not an emergent abstraction. It's a fiction and a religiously-tied social tool used to demonize opposing tribes, justifying destroying them, as well as to control a group's behavior/identity (it's evil to worship false idols, etc.).

[enugu]

You can imagine a robot actively planning to cause damage to others. The fact that this it is programmed doesnt change that it is an evil act. We can see evil as a property of action rather than an agent - this means we dont need to involve free will. But it does mean we have to account for intention.

[andrei_says_]

This is a beautiful way to put it. Contemporary Advaita provides many pointers, one of which is to observe your choices and try to find a force independent of observable causality chains.

Unpacking what we call “free will” in this way is a really sobering experience, leading to automatic compassion for everyone.

[pmoriarty]

"Contemporary Advaita provides many pointers, one of which is to observe your choices and try to find a force independent of observable causality chains."

How can we observe causality?

We can observe a sequence of events, but that one event causes another is not something we can observe.

See Hume's critique of causality for more on this.

[andrei_says_]

If this was a non-rhetorical question - the way I use this pointer is to focus on an action I feel tension about, usually detectable as guilt.

“I shouldn’t have rushed my nephew in the store.”

The inquiry goes something like this: what emotions did I have at the moment? Did I choose those or were they caused by something? What thoughts did I have? Did I choose them or did they spontaneously appear or were they caused by something like conditioning, habits, traumatic patterns? Were we on our way to a concert? Is my nature patient or not so patient and chill and when did I get a say in my preference in how my neuropathways will get organized? Was my nephew fascinated by those books? Did I choose him to be? Did he choose to have interest in some things and not others? Did he choose to have a bit of difficulty when transitioning away from interesting activities? Did I choose how I was treated when I was a child in his situation?

Given all of these, including feeling overwhelmed and out of options, and having only the tools I had at the moment, my existing genetic makeup, thoughts, beliefs and environment, can I find a force independent of all of these that made me raise my voice at the child?

No, I cannot. It happened and I kind of witnessed it but that’s it. What I call a choice or a free will, when unpacked, is a combination of infinite causality chains which happen to express themselves through me in this moment.

[mgh2]

This and the implication that free will is an illusion - supported by ample evidence.

https://m-g-h.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale-4fecf80...

Note: Evil exists and has a purpose though

[nine_k]

This sort of removes any agency from humans. It's then easier to believe in a clockwork world where everything is predefined.

[mgh2]

We should only look at where the data tell us, not what we want to believe. Humans are great deceivers, even to themselves

[ikrenji]

how do we know its not? if not a super deterministic clockwork, at least a probalistic one