Some Acts Are Always Evil

I’ve come around to perceiving that there is a very wide range of what societies can accept as good and evil. Going by first principles, any human society (even at a hunter gatherer band level) is a taking from nature, we’re at least taking fruits and animals and habitats that would otherwise be available to other creatures. Moving above that, any net population increase above zero will inevitably bring the population into conflict with other populations with different interests and interpretations of good and evil.

And that gets to the heart of it, what’s good and evil, taboo and sacred, is in fact greatly varying. To say war is always evil is a modern liberal idea (that modern liberals are typically terrible at actually following) as most pre-modern cultures venerate warmaking. And if your warmaking abilities are compromised, your culture goes extinct and won’t have a voice in the next round. Concepts like rape too, depends on definition of rape – would marrying an unwilling 15 year old girl be rape? Would deceiving a sexual partner about your health, wealth, or intent to marry be rape? Would having sex with anyone who isn’t fully sober, mentally sound, financially independent, and currently having a good time be rape? These are extremes in a gradient and it’s true that most modern societies bunch up in a portion of that spectrum, but the certainty that your conceptions of good and evil is the true one is a harmful delusion that’s been weaponized by the US led order many times in the last 75 years. It’s definitionally totalitarian, in claiming that your definition of good and evil is the one true definition and anyone that deviates from it is at best allowed “evil but partially excused…”.

So as I see it, short of self selected extinction (that I and more and more of my generation and younger are choosing), absolute good and evil is foolish, and it comes down to harm reduction, minimizing dislocation, and coming to liveable arrangements for as many of the existing communities as possible. Some of these communities will still need to go away completely, such as the neocon/neoliberal industrial complex, imperialist rentiers, and Israeli settlers, because they’re self contradictory and extremely damaging and totalizing to other communities.

I’ve known a few manipulators who routinely employ social constructivism and moral relativism to persuade others to do evil for their own (the manipulators) benefit. That way the manipulators get away scot free (after some plausible deniability and a toolbox of other tricks) with many evildoers believing themselves innocent.

I cant think of a quick and easy terminology for that kind of behavior. Sure, when one is being manipulated into being a weapon against people who aren’t actually their enemies, they’re called “tools”. But the manipulators themselves?

I prefer to critique only within the confines of *my culture* of 2023 American PMC and not worry about other cultures. I trust that being closer to their own circumstances, they’re more likely to come up with workable solutions for themselves. Certainly the track record of Western liberals with *all the right ideas* is beyond awful for the last 200 years.

And as I am currently not in a position to openly challenge the assumptions of American liberal PMC without completely alienating basically anyone in my life, I’ve minimized my engagement within my own “culture” and focused on learning about orcharding and economic Marxism. I have actually become much more hopeful about the future, now that I have broken out of the totalitarian liberal TINA model.

Hmm I’d probably be better off staying out of this thread, but “what is evil?” First, if you really want to escape cultural limitations and definitions of it, you have to have a robust definition.

To me, evil *has* to be defined by consequences. That’s not an “ends justifies the means” argument at all, if you limit it to something like the “direct, very likely, tangible harm or pain an act will cause someone to suffer”. That way, it’s harder to create a-house-that-jack-built story to justify it. But even there, you have to include some longer-term consequences, else some medical procedures are hurtful and ‘harmful’ in the short term would be “evil”.

If we don’t do that, we can’t really know what evil is. Remember, carbonizing people alive during the 16th century wasn’t “evil”, it was a positive good and moreover you were actually doing the ‘witch’ a favor. You cannot ignore that the people of any given time or culture think they know with absolute certainty what is “good” and “evil”, and I’m actually in favor of ‘drawing a goddamn line’, but what I see is that the ‘goddamn lines’ are often just another cultural invention. We let some hurtful things pass as ‘ok’ and persecute things that aren’t hurtful.

Hard disagree.

Whether you like it or not all of your examples are social constructs. Slavery, literal, full on slavery, not just voluntary debt slavery, was not considered evil for much of history. Lots of things that people wouldn’t want to happen to them personally still weren’t considered some sort of metaphysical evil.

In particular, killing is not synonymous with murder. ‘Murder’ has always had specific definitions that are entirely culturally dependent.

You’re not doing a great job of convincing me Daoism isn’t obscurantist gibberish. At this point I’ve lost all patience with ‘wisdom’ that requires lots of exegesis to (supposedly) reveal itself. If something can’t clearly get to the damn point, maybe it never had a point to begin with.

Is the assassination of an evil ruler itself evil? In my values idea it is most certainly evil as one is enjoined not to kill another human or in some systems not to kill at all. Is not leaving the evil ruler in place to perpetrate more evil not equally evil if not worse? What is one to do? Do we simply throw up our hands and hope the dilemma resolves on its own or pray for the Giant Asteroid to take care of it for us?

Declaring a thing or person or group or what have you to be evil without an effective means to deal with it leads directly to the existential dilemma of our own times where rightist mobs are gearing up to commit genocide on those they see as evil and thus in their minds take care of the problem for all time. Don’t fool yourself into believing they’re not. They are. And some of us are the targets. They don’t see their own acts as evil. They can’t. They’ve been conditioned to believe their role is purely good.

The question of evil is a core topic in the subject of moral philosophy. And as a rule questions like this don’t have definitive answers. They are exist to encourage clear thinking.

People who mistakenly believe that they have absolute answers to question that great minds have wrestled with for centuries are simply revealing their own unfettered arrogance and the hallmark of an ideologue who is unable to realize there own limitations.

The world is full of fanatics who claim that the world is broken and that they can “fix it.” But perhaps they simply lack the basic intellectual humility to accept that maybe the world is exactly how it should be.

Ian, this post is extremely disappointing. But I’m sure it’s very appealing the utopian millennials. Utopia, hooray….

I think one point is that if certain behaviors were always considered intrinsically evil, this would force a change in cultural mindset. Evildoers would then be forced by the mob majority to present some pretty damned good reasons for committing some evil, with all consequences considered. At least far better (in both logic and veracity) than they’re allowed to now.

Time for another story.

I once debated with a certain religious conservative over climate change. He quoted from a book written by a computer science major turned philosopher, who denied climate change by recounting all the economic benefits. That was the core of the reasoning. Second was that leftists are jealous of the lucrative success of the fossil fuels industry. That was pretty much it. Climate change is not happening and/or nothing to be worried about because the consequences are good and the worried are inconsequential. That guy had once been smart enough to earn a PhD.

Could it be that not being able to draw goddamn lines when it comes to good vs. evil, causes insanity?

There may be times when you have little choice to perform an evil act for the sake of greater good, or more likely avoiding greater harm. And there’s all those fiddly philosophical problems with tram cars running people down on tracks and whatnot. But if you do one of those, your hands are not clean. Just because it was the least bad thing to do doesn’t mean it wasn’t bad. Someone who commits an atrocity to save (some big thing) is still a person guilty of committing an atrocity. And if they really believe it’s so damn important, they should be prepared to take the consequences for such actions.

Mind you, for practical purposes such things are a LOT less common than fiction or the self-congratulations of those who claim to be doing them would have us believe. In every case of torture I’ve ever heard of, for instance, the people doing it might want to claim it was for the greater good . . . but it never actually was, it was a bunch of vicious shitheads working for the profit of some oligarchy. And in general, those who believe strongly in the “ends justify the means” being something that is routine and normal, almost always have crappy ends anyway. And even if they didn’t originally, their typical means tend to end up corroding their ends.

On the topic of slavery having been common in history and regarded as not evil . . . well, sure. But they were wrong.

Yes, it’s pretty much that simple. Working slaves to death in mines or on plantations was just as horrible a thing to do in classical times as it was in the dark ages as it was in the 18th century as it is now. People who thought it was OK were mistaken, and typically inconsistent, in that they were likely to perform moral reasoning in other cases which, if conducted solidly for the cases where they were wrong, would have led them inescapably to the conclusion that it was not OK. This kind of inconsistency is common right up to modern times. So if you take the Famous Five, that group of feminist women in Canada who campaigned tirelessly for the vote and such . . . they were pretty racist. They had no interest in votes for First Nations or such. They could have worked their way through the moral reasoning that led them to believe women should be treated equally, in the case of people of other races, but they did not. And few people (whose ox wasn’t being gored) did, but that failure of imagination did not make them right. Not like the slaves or the women or the Jews or the (racial group here) generally thought mistreating them was OK. You see women and peasants speaking out occasionally throughout medieval times.

For any given ethical conclusion typical of modernity, it was possible in any given culture to start from general principles that were already often agreed with (e.g. “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you”) and work one’s way through to it. It was just culturally very difficult.

Now that cultural difficulty can be considered a reasonable excuse for individuals. You can’t say an ancient Greek who kept slaves was individually evil because of that act. Sure, he could perhaps have gone through a process of moral reasoning and reached the conclusion that slavery was bad. But for any given case we can be almost certain that he had not done so, was not even aware of anyone who had, and so did not really understand that keeping slaves was evil.

Although there’s also issues of degree there. I mean, say some guy had a couple of house slaves that he treated about as well as an average more modern employed servant and their slavery period was eight years after which they’d be free and clear. That’s a rather different moral story from a big landowner who shoved people into mines with an average life expectancy of 2 years. I suspect a lot of people even at the time looked at that kind of crap a bit askance.

In theory, given that I was once an actual practicing anthropologist, I should be receptive to arguments that even absolute evil is culturally defined, but I find myself a – few decades removed from the academy devoted to trying to mitigate the impact of many lesser evils – with remarkably little patience for that perspective. You can fail to realize, wearing cultural blinkers, that some behaviours are evil – but that doesn’t make them any less evil.

When in changing times when such realizations are taking root one needs to be particularly aware. Our current situation with assisted suicide, where we tolerate the fact some are choosing it mainly due to the intersection of poor health and poverty (rather than health conditions alone) is a timely example. That toleration and the apparent role of some government functionaries in presenting it as an option is evil.

Btw … Great post Ian.
Though, I can’t help but feel like there’s a finger wag in there for my recent turn to the cynical.
If so, well done on that front too.

Ian, just wanted to thank you for your clarity and commitment over these long years. You’ve held the line since the Bush years and held to a true north of ethics the whole time.

I know it’s discouraging when you do one of these posts and the neolibs show up to immediately justify the most evil stuff imaginable.

Normally I lurk, and suspect most people do, but this warranted a message of solidarity that your morale compass is always appreciated and on the mark.

Without getting into concepts of relative and absolute evil, I will mention in passing that dominant economic theories, agriculture practices and treatment of animals are unquestionably evil. Examples abound.

It’s not just about human rape and murder. (Cue the Rolling Stone’s “Shelter”.)

As much as I hate being outdone when it comes to ramblings, I’ll say that it makes a lot more sense to just follow the money than it does any conspiracy theory.

different clue—it’s the system, dude (or dudette!).

your little choices are only available to you because you are fortunate. you earn enough to make such choices and live in an environment that allows making them easier for you.

the Ideology Class has long emphasized the PERSONAL footprint. why? it obviates examination of the system that the Owners control needing to change, and focuses people on their little great chain of being (organic eating is largely financially determined, much less Fair Trade purchasing), earning green credits in heaven, “i am doing good when and where i personally can because that’s all i can do activities”. it turns the “saving the world” thing into another brand to sell shit by.

in other words, it keeps you busy, most busy and from overthrowing the damn system. and it keeps you feeling like you are helping or trying to help or whatever, and thus makes you sleep better at night.

note—i too make these choices when and where i can, but i don’t fool myself that i’m “saving the world, one person at a time” or anything. i just try to limit harm when i am able. the system still needs overthrown.

medical needs would be the one area where i would legitimately say “just burn shit” to keep it running. but working there, you have to admit how much waste is probably built into that system. literally EVERYTHING except plant and equip (including the workers, at times) appears to be disposable, one-time-use (and yeah, there are reasons called GERMS for that). unless you can enlighten me otherwise.

Here is a story from WW2. It pushes a lot of boundaries. The Dutch youth F. Ploeg decided that communism was the path the humanity should follow in to the future when he was 13 years old, That was in 1923.
The local communist party leader told him not to tell anyone about his thoughts or his meeting with local communists. In 1929 Mr. Ploeg entered the University. After graduating he then did a stint in the military serving in Asia. Upon his return home the local communists asked him to join quasi facist groups to be able to report upon thier activities to them. At this time he was working as an insurance agent. He got a job with Dutch Customs in 1936.
Once the Nazis invaded the Netherlands Mr. Ploeg became a Nazi collaborator and began to work with the German Gestapo as a translator. He was trusted by the Nazis due to his long history of right wing political activism. Eventually he became a trusted investigator for the Gestapo, though not technically a member of the organization but of some Dutch affiliate organization. He became infamous over quite a large area for torturing suspected Dutch Resistance fighters to gain information about the Dutch Resistance.
But F. Ploeg’s views really had not changed since he was a 13 year old boy. The Nazis were completely fooled by Ploeg’s overt behavior. Ploeg was torturing prisoners not to gain information but to subtley direct the answers that the prisoners would give. When prisoners are under torture they will say what ever it is that they think the person torturing them wants to hear.
Ploeg was using his crucial position to prevent the communist resistence leadership from being exposed and to direct suspicion on to non communist resistence members.
He took no pleasure at all in torturing people. But if he did not do it a real Nazi would be doing it in his place. There was no way if you ended up in the building that he worked in that you were going to escape torture. So, he did not have any trouble sleeping at night. As a result of the risks that he took F. Ploeg saved the communist party leadership and intellengence gathering capabilty in central Netherlands.
But by September of 1944 the Communist Party leadership in his area realized that they had a problem. There was no way in hell that the Soviets would be the ones to liberate the Netherlands. The knew that the western allies would arrest F Ploeg as soon as the arrived in the area. They knew that he knew if he fell in to their hands he would likely be killed. His only barganing chip would be his knowledge of the local Communist Party. That was a loose end that they would have to somehow deal with.
In late September 44, Ploeg was told that a plan was being worked on to get him and his family to the USSR. The gist of the plan is that he would travel to Lübeck where he and his family would get picked up by a Soviet Submarine and be brought to Lenningrad. But it would take some time to work out the details.
On the 6th of January 45. He was told that he and his family should be prepared to leave on the night of the 9th of January. But as he was on his way home that night he was assissinated by two members of the communist resistence. There had always been two members of the communist resistence that had followed him home to cover his back so to speak to protect thier asset.
The two who carried out the attack were not at all happy about thier assignment. But they realized that it had to be done. In reality there was no way that they could manage to get Ploeg and his family back to the USSR with out a huge risk of being caught and thereby destroying all that he had done up to that point. Whether or not Ploeg realized that we will never know.
His family waited in vain for him that night. His son at that time did not know who is father was actually working for. He would eventually find out. His son would join the Communist Party himself.
If F. Ploeg had known how it would all end for him would he have chosen not to make the choices that he did? If those that ordered his killing had known where the world would end up by the end of the 20th century, let alone by 2023, do you think that they should have not killed him and surrendered themselves to what ever hand fate would have dealt them if Ploeg had told the Amis and the Brits everything that he knew?
Back in the first half of the 20th Century people actually believed that Capitalism or Communism could deliver a good and just society that would go on and on my friend. Now pretty much everyone knows that there are theoretical reasons that neither work. Not only that there are some people who realize that there are theoretical reasons why nothing will work for very long. But despite this these people know that if we are honest and acting in good faith we have to take actions which will at least treat the symptoms of human problems which will cause us to stumble from one lesser evil to another until no one is left to stumble. Or until there are no honest people acting in good faith left.