[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.