"James A. Donald" wrote:
At 11:43 AM 12/13/2000 +0100, Tom Vogt wrote:
example: killing 1 million. jews is evil, because - because of what? there's a lot of "becauses",
I notice you imply that the Nazi liquidation of the Jews has been wildly exaggerated.
stop telling me what I'm implying, will you? I'm quite confident that I know that better than you do.
Killing several million Jews is murderous because killing Jews merely for being Jewish is like killing me, therefore someone who liquidates the Jews is likely to kill me, someone who favors rendering society Jew free is likely to kill me if he had the power.
Similarly anyone who thinks that Stalin was too soft on the kulaks (read the various commie criticisms of Stalin) would certainly kill me if he had the power, for the same reasons as he would kill the kulaks.
but none of them works without a subjective set of ethics.
Bullshit.
only if you change the subject, as you did above. all along we've been talking about "evil". suddenly, in your two examples above, the word doesn't appear anymore. pointing out a potential danger is NOT the same as putting a moral label on something.
you won't find a "because" that has the structure of, say, a mathematical proof.
You cannot prove that iron is iron with the structure of a mathematical proof, because it is a fact about the world, and empirical fact, ultimately resting on the evidence of the senses. To deduce the necessary "because", one must start from the nature of man, and the nature of the world.
that's why the "say" is there. it's an example, one possibility, a counter-point to the ethical argument. it's not all-inclusive.
Tom Vogt:
you are changing the meaning of "we" without noticing it. in the 2nd paragraph, "we" means pretty much everyone. in the third, "we" is much smaller. for example, the nazis would certainly have agreed to calling iron "eisen" (the german word for "iron"). however, they didn't call the mass murdering of jews that.
Then they were wrong, just as they would have been wrong had they called iron copper.
but the point is that the one point can be settled, the other not. it's hard to maintain that iron is copper in face of all evidence. it seems to be very easy to continue believing that "only a dead indian/jew/arab/american/nip/whatever is a good one" even if the whole world is convinced otherwise.
And evidence that they were wrong is that a great many of them died of that error, for nazis killed more nazis than they did commies, just as the commies killed more commies than they did nazis, something that anyone could have foreseen had he recognized that killing Jews was murder, that killing capitalists for being capitalists was murder.
if dying for your belief proves you wrong, xianity has been wrong from the start. (not that I wouldn't agree on that point) but you're playing bait&switch again. you're moving from evil to wrong to murderous as it pleases your argument. try to stick to the one term we're discussing. we can talk about "wrong and right" afterwards, it's no less interesting, but it IS a different point.
Not "deemed to be murder".
Not "socially constructed as murder".
It really is murder, really is capricious and unreasonable killing, and hence it really is indicative of propensity to kill people capriciously, which is why we feel about murder as we do, feel that it is wrong.
so? I don't understand why you're arguing at length for something that's never been questioned. the point is that calling this "evil" is a subjective point and that there is no such thing as "objective evil". I don't care for right and wrong at this point. I don't care for murder or not, or for 1 mio., 10 mio. or 50 mio. dead. it's not that I'm indifferent to those questions, it's just that they simply aren't the topic.
Tom Vogt
that's because they are so readily abused by them. almost everyone is prone to not listening to what someone else really has to say, but to draw conclusions quickly. go into any anti-nazi newsgroup and argue a careful position, ask for evidence and draw conclusions only from facts. want to make a bet on how long it takes until you're called a nazi?
I observe the contrary -- that people who go into anti Nazi newsgroups and purport to argue a careful position that the Jews were not murdered, or at least no very many of them, and anyway they had it coming, are generally not called nazis by most people, even though they quite obviously are nazis. Same goes, even more strongly, for commies, even those who loudly announce that they reject Lenin and Stalin, and then proceed to argue that Lenin and Stalin were softies, that they failed to suppress capitalism with sufficient vigor.
interesting. I've been labeled nazi in german newsgroups pretty much immediatly for pointing out a few real factual errors in someone's argument. maybe the anti-nazi groups over here are much more touchy than yours.
they spoken not to their own people, but to the people of serbia, they could not have "crossed the gap [between is and ought" with such ease.
The people of Serbia were wrong to vote fascists into power, though US intervention saved them from themselves, so they did not discover for themselves the consequences.
please not start an argument about "the people of X are so stupid that we, the enlightened people of Y have to save them from themselves". I dare to say that permutations of that argument have killed more people in history than any other reason has. it's always those who believe they are the good ones who cause the most evil. feeling yourself divine just pulls out the stops.