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by tasty_freeze
363 days ago
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How is what I said different than "good for somebody". A Russian bridge gets blown up. It is good for Ukrainians; it is bad for Russians. There is no intrinsic goodness to the event in this case. Let's take another case that has people arguing on both sides in the US: universal health care. Some think not having it is an atrocity, and others see it is a threat to civilization. Who is to judge its objective goodness? You make the call, and then will you just say the people who disagree with you have bad and harmful desires and that is why they don't see the truth as you can? |
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A person with pika desires to eat things with no nutritional value, like glass or polystyrene. A drug addict desires drugs. A pedophile desires sexual relations with children. These are disordered desires that do not advance the good of the subject: eating glass is not good for you; taking drugs is not good for you; having sexual relations with children is not good for you (both the sexual act in itself, but also that harming children like that is gravely opposed to justice and our social nature).
In the case of an armed conflict, our social nature entails justice, and so we can determine the moral features of a war according to justice. We can objectively say that the Russian invasion, broadly, is gravely immoral and that the Ukrainian defense of their country, broadly, is moral (it is still possible for Ukrainians to engage in immoral acts as part of their defense, of course).
W.r.t. universal health care, this is not something that is intrinsically evil, and so whether it would be good to institute universal health care will depend on particular circumstances. That there is debate over such things does not imply that there is no objective fact of the matter. Indeed, if that were the case, then genuine debate would be impossible, as genuine debate presupposes an objective truth. It would be nothing more than a battle of arbitrary wills willing things for no reason.