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Evil As A Concept

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RationalBiker

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Try asking the question about a person: Can you think of any person who only accomplishes evil regardless of context?

So you see no difference in an object that is incapable of doing anything on its own, versus a person who is capable of taking action to affect reality? I say they are different entities, different contexts and should be judged according to different standards.

If that were the proper standard for judging a person,
That's certainly nothing I have ever implied. I was talking about objects. Objects are incapable of consciousness, volition or the inherent ability to affect reality on its own.

Obviously when judging a person we need to keep the context.

No argument there.

VES

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One could say that a tornado is evil, due to its destruction of human life and property. You could say the same about the plague, or any life-threatening disease. I call the genes that cause my particular malady "the evil genes." I think it is understood that none of these things are in the same category as human evil because none of them involve the concept of volitional wickedness, but they are evils when they pertain to human life.

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One could say that a tornado is evil,

This is from the web site Stephen referred me to earlier in the thread:

http://www.aynrand.org/objectivism/f-v.html

Metaphysically given facts, Miss Rand points out, cannot as such be evaluated. Sunlight, tidal waves, the law of gravity, et al. are not good or bad; they simply are; such facts constitute reality and are thus the basis of all value-judgments.  This does not, however, alter the principle that every “is” implies an “ought.” The reason is that every fact of reality which we discover has, directly or indirectly, an implication for man’s self-preservation and thus for his proper course of action. In relation to the goal of staying alive, the fact demands specific kinds of actions and prohibits others; i.e., it entails a definite set of evaluations

....(skipping a bit)....

All these evaluations are demanded by the cognitions involved — if one pursues knowledge in order to guide one’s actions. Similarly, tidal waves are bad, even though natural; they are bad for us if we get caught in one, and we ought to do whatever we can to avoid such a fate.

The bold highlights were mine.

I suggest that since a tornado is a metaphysically given fact, it cannot be evaluated in terms of good or evil (bad) according to Rand. What is integrated into our knowledge from this metaphysically given fact is that if we put ourselves in situations which we are prone to be harmed by tornadoes, our ACTIONS could be (contextually speaking) evaluated as evil, but not the tornado itself.

The latter part of the article seems to contradict this. Mr. Peikoff says that tidal waves are bad, IF we get caught in one, which is again largely a consequence of our actions. What I think he means by this can be most accurately described by generally saying, "Tidal waves can be harmful to us." That is far more accurate than saying "Tidal waves are evil."

VES

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I have also just understood that when Peikoff refers to man-made facts, he is actually referring to actions, not the physical by-products of actions (such as destructive weapons).

Again from http://www.aynrand.org/objectivism/f-v.html

Now let us consider what is involved in judging a man’s actions morally. Two crucial, related aspects must be borne in mind: existence and consciousness, or effect and cause. Existentially, an action of man (as of sunlight) is good or bad according to its effects: its effects, positive or negative, on man’s life. Thus creating a skyscraper is good, murdering the architect is bad — both by the standard of life. But human action is not merely physical motion; it is a product of a man’s ideas and value-judgments, true or false, which themselves derive from a certain kind of mental cause; ultimately, from thought or from evasion. Human action is an expression of a volitional consciousness. This is why human action (as against sunlight) is morally evaluated. The skyscraper’s creator, one infers in pattern, functioned on the basis of proper value-judgments and true ideas, including a complex specialized knowledge; so he must have expended mental effort, focus, work; so one praises him morally and admires him. But the murderer (assuming there are no extenuating circumstances) acted on ideas and value-judgments that defy reality; so he must have evaded and practiced whim-worship; so one condemns him morally and despises him.

  Both these aspects, I repeat, are essential to moral judgment. An action without effects on man’s life (there are none such) would be outside the realm of evaluation — there would be no standard of value by which to assess it. An action not deriving from ideas, i.e., from the cognitive/evaluative products of a volitional mental process, would be the reflex of a deterministic puppet or of an animal; it could not be subject to moral judgment.

In the last paragraph I would assert that the following is true. While there are none such actions that remain without effects on man's life, objects can be created which could have no effect on man's life. This would preclude it from moral evaluation. For the sake of argument (I remembered your suggestion Stephen regarding the Devil's Advocate :) ), once a gun is manufactured, the gun itself (an object) could be placed in a drawer never to be used again, and have no affect on man's life.

VES

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I also find good metaphors sprinkled about technical journal articles, though certainly less frequently than one will find in good, but less scientific, nonfiction writing.

Maybe this is one of those knowledge-context things, i.e. ymmv. If you can point to an example or two of a good use of non-literal language in a technical scientific journal, that could persuade me to relent. What I find is either people saying what they mean, quite literally, or else people trying to pull the wool over the readers' eyes via nonliteral statements that attempt to bypass reason in arguing for a conclusion. The main point is that correctly interpreting non-literal statements is difficult, and I would say based on my observations that if you see a given non-literal statement being used twice, you have evidence that a concept is being corrupted. Since many people engage in word-based fallacies in reasoning, use of a word outside of its strict literal definition is potentially risky behavior, especially in a context where the purpose is to say precisely what "is". My main concern is that I have to live on a planet populated with people who aren't totally clever.

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If you can point to an example or two of a good use of non-literal language in a technical scientific journal, that could persuade me to relent.

I grabbed (metaphorically, not literally, since the paper is electronic :)) the paper that I am currently reading in Classical and Quantum Gravity. It is not important, for our purpose, that you understand the detailed technical meaning of what follows, but the essence is that the author is using an analogy to better illuminate a rather complex idea. The analogy being used is between an esoteric and complicated quantum gravity group, SU(2)_g, and the more commonly understood black hole in a de Sitter space.

"Choosing a value of k is like choosing the dimension of the Hilbert space and the size of the cosmological horizon, and so will be very large. An elementary particle will be a representation with j small. A black hole will be a 'medium-size' unitary representation, with j smaller than but close to [formula deleted]. The energy, i.e. the size, of black holes grows like j, until it abruptly stops growing when the maximum energy/size has been reached. The 'large' representations with j larger than j_top will form a 'hidden sector', because as we saw from the tensor product decompositions ..."

The analogy continues on, and, in fact, in the next main section, there is a further analogy used for this quantum gravity group, SU(2)_g, and black hole thermodynamics. The point is, though I followed the mathematics, it was difficult for me to grasp the physical essence of the quantum gravity group, and the various analogies related to black holes in de Sitter space helped to make the connection. Had the author not used analogy, and metaphor too, I would still be struggling to understand the meaning.

What I find is either people saying what they mean, quite literally, or else people trying to pull the wool over the readers' eyes via nonliteral statements that attempt to bypass reason in arguing for a conclusion. The main point is that correctly interpreting non-literal statements is difficult, and I would say based on my observations that if you see a given non-literal statement being used twice, you have evidence that a concept is being corrupted.

I do not doubt that there are cases of what you say. I certainly have seen them myself, but I think of them as improper use of techniques, not a condemnation of the technique itself. But, perhaps your field is more prone to that sort of behavior, and you are (rightfully) incensed by what you read. In general, the further away you get from the 'hard' physical sciences, the more opportunity for detachment from reality.

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RationalCop:

Sometime in the night I realized my mistake in asserting that tornadoes and such are evil because of their detriment to human life. Such statements are a holdover from our mystical past, where such disasters (against the stars :P ) are caused, not by natural phenomena, but by gods and devils, or the alignment of the heavens, or some such nonsense. How humans are affected are tragedies, but cannot be ascribed to human intention or action. You are right to draw my attention to this fact. I was being sloppy.

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It's actual usage determines it purpose in any given context, and as such it's "evilness", not it's potential usage.  I think that's a huge difference.

I'll just repeat what I said before, and leave it at that.

"All I am simply saying is that a man-made object, like a man-made idea, can be evil based upon the purpose and consequences for which it was devised."

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