re: #612 Iron Fist

But how do you determine what is “good” and what is “evil”? Why should your definition of them be any more “truth” than mine? Without something above the mere human, it is merely your opinion.

There’s no reason for me to make it mine.

If it makes you happy to be happy, then by all means, be happy. The irony is that the atheists are usually the ones who ask that question, as justification for their behavior that doesn’t completely jive with the societal definitions.

I do not conceive of good and evil as cosmic categories, but as human ones. There is no good or evil in the vast unpopulated cosmos. There is no good or evil in the natural world. Hurricanes and earthquakes are not good or evil; they simply ARE. Likewise, predators, such as wolves and lions, are not being evil towards their prey.

But we, unlike rocks or rattlesnakes, are self-consciously aware, and that allows us to reflectively make individual choices, rather than just blindly responding to externally obtaining circumstance due to the combination of the conditioning of our histories and our genetically instinctual predispositions. We can self-consciously choose to do good or ill to others. But in what circumstasnces does such the attribution of such good and evil to our actions inhere?

When people ignore the humanity of others, and treat them not as other people with rights to be respected, but as things to be used without regard to how they feel about it for one’s own purposes, that is evil. This definition covers murder, rape, enslavement, theft, fraud, and lying, among many other human wrongs.

We must share this world with self-aware others who are similar to but not identical to us, in a manner that allows for the greatest amount of liberty, prosperity, and safety to manifest. This requires that we follow Immanual Kant’s two ethical principles: universalizability and reversibility. Would it be a good thing for others to do this action to me if the situation were reversed? Would it be a good thing if everybody did this thing? Morality is the logical consequence of knowing how we want to be treated, and then transferring this understanding into the imagined moccasins of every individual we meet, and into all of them together.