"James A. Donald" wrote:
If morality is merely relative, then what is wrong with murdering a few million jews, kulaks, or people as irritating as James A. Donald? All a matter of perspective, isn't it?
or indians, right? "the only good indian is a dead indian". all of our countries have a bloody past. some are just more recent than others. all were over before I was born, so they're all alike to me. as to your question: you are close. there are, of course, a lot of things wrong with killing any large number of any people. however, try describing one completely without adding a personal belief or ethic background. example: killing 1 mio. jews is evil, because - because of what? there's a lot of "becauses", but none of them works without a subjective set of ethics. you won't find a "because" that has the structure of, say, a mathematical proof.
"evil" could, I believe, be *defined* as "the term pretty much everyone uses to describe his or her enemies".
People who use this definition have a disturbing tendency to define entire social groups, races, classes, as their enemies.
I agree.
The reason we define certain killings as murder is not because "the bible tells us so", but because we want to know if a killing indicates that the killer is apt to kill murderously.
In practice we notice that one piece of metal is like another, and other kinds of metal unlike, and we call one such group of pieces of metal "iron", "iron" being our word for that commonality that makes them alike. The naming does not make it iron, but the character of the metal itself.
Similarly we observe that one deed, and one man, is like another, and another unlike, and we call one such group of men and deeds "evil", "evil" being our word for that commonality that makes them alike.
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. maybe that's because they were evil, but now you have a snake that's eating it's own tail, because you allow only people who are not evil to define what evil means.
They crossed the "is ought gap" without the slightest difficulty, and so does everyone else except for monsters and philosophers. I find it striking that many of the philosophers who have such great difficulty with this alleged gap have some connection to monstrous regimes. Not all of them by any means, but most of them.
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? to the politicians: the point here is that they could expect (and were obviously right so) that the vast majority of readers has a very similiar definition of "evil" and other details of ethic background. had they spoken not to their own people, but to the people of serbia, they could not have "crossed the gap" with such ease. it's almost a shame that the cultural differences on the globe become smaller and smaller every year. today, if you want to find a really interesting example (people who think it's unacceptable to, say, eat in public) today, you have to refer to some almost-extinct tribe in the middle of somewhere nobody ever heard about.