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by jonmrodriguez 4119 days ago
I guess it's hard to prove, but I think certain objects are inherently correlated with good/evil. E.g. a torture device is inherently evil IMHO, and a vaccine is inherently good.
2 comments

I guess you could kill with vaccine if you really wanted to, and you can have sex using torture device if you're into that kind of stuff.
Maybe for some object, but I can't think of any, and I don't think that vaccines or torture devices fit the bill. One could sell a spoiled, ineffective, tainted, or defective vaccine. That would be evil. Or, one could torture Hitler to learn how to disarm the doomsday machine.
The original vaccine is still good, and it's evil to torture anyone, even Hitler. I think you're stretching too far.
"Good" is inherently normative. Nothing can be "good" exterior to a normative claim. This is in contrast with "positive" statements, which are true regardless of anything happening to perceive them that way or not. The original vaccine, if it exists in a vacuum, is neither good nor bad, because there is nothing else to attach the normative claim to it.

Further - and while this is an entirely normative claim - if you would happen to agree that if you could save 1,000,000,000 lives by torturing one person for 5 seconds, that you should do so, then I would argue that torture is not inherently evil within your own normative value system.

>in a vacuum

It wouldn't be a 'vaccine' if it was in a vacuum, it would just be a vial of fluids. Once you have enough context to define vaccine, you can demonstrate that it is good.

>1,000,000,000 lives by torturing one person for 5 seconds

This argument is just obnoxious. Give me a moment.

...

You can play with all the numbers you want, they don't change the underlying act. Except to the extent that you make the time period so short it no longer qualifies as torture and you're not even asking a question any more.