Thursday, August 16, 2012

Good and Evil exist

Of course, if something exists then it must be possible to formally and rigorously define it. And it turns out that it is possible to define good in such a manner. Examining the definition you then discover a number of theorems.

1. good and evil are relative to people with universal values, only values that can be made universal can ever be good for the obvious reason that if good contradicts itself then there is a problem with that notion of good.

Social power and status cannot ever be intrinsically good because it's not possible for literally everyone to simultaneously hold either of them.

Note that for something to be a moral value, it has to be path independent as well as universal. For 'good' only universality is required. It has to be good in all situations, always, without exception. For morality much more is required as the meaning of 'logically consistent' is stricter, for obvious but technical reasons.

2. society as a whole has a concept of good (empathy) and evil (psychopathy) due to the fact that any society that values psychopathy immediately self-destructs and so doesn't contribute its values to the sum over all possible societies.

3. the subset of society called cattle also have a concept of good (harmony, moral flexibility) and evil (principles, conflict). The violent contradiction of that concept of good against every other concept of good is why the value of cattle's concept of good is equal to only a single non-cattle's concept of good. And I'm being generous.

4. when you cancel out all conflicting universal values, there is still something left. No matter what your values or what your principles, psychopathy is always in violent contradiction to them. Which is why psychopaths are always evil.

As if by coincidence, psychopaths are one of the few people who are incapable of conceiving of good or evil. And in fact, I can't think of any other kind of people who are so incapable. Therefore, the only people for whom psychopaths aren't intrinsically evil are other psychopaths and probably ONLY other psychopaths.

Anyone and everyone who can't conceive of good and evil is intrinsically evil, to everyone except other people who can't conceive of good and evil. Only universally evil people fail to acknowledge the existence of evil. For everyone else, people who do acknowledge the existence of good and evil, you have to specify what they're evil in relation to.

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