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Oldtimer, I have to say that I believe the attitude expressed in your post is the overwhelming attitude in the UK and the US, and part of the problem.

saved a lot of people a lot of tax dollars defending his rights and then making sure he was comfortable in a jail cell for the rest of his days

There is short shrift given to the idea of rehabilitation in both countries, so we never really get to the root causes of violence. We punish, we exact revenge, we make no attempt to understand. And this fuels the problem, in my opinion. I believe that the act of premeditated killing is a symptom of illness of some abnormality in a person's psyche. I don't believe in evil. What I do believe is we have to learn more about this illness, this abnormality, to be able to treat it, to address it before it surfaces in other people. And we can't do that without hospitalising, studying and attempting to rehabilitate those who have already committed acts of violence.



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I like to think that whoever designed marine life was thinking of it as basically an entertainment medium. That would explain some of the things down there, some of the unearthly biological contraptions

Well, I believe that's where we will never come to agreement, as I do believe in "evil."

I guess all of the mass murderer's including many have which come into power in their countries and have been responsible for the needless slaughter of millions were just misundersood when they were young, never diagnosed as having a problem and of course it's society's fault and responsiblity for all of their wrongdoings.

I fully understand this individuals psyche, he picked up a gun, shot and killed another individual, and as I said saved us all a lot of time and money "trying to find out why he is so screwed up."

I'm sure the parents of the young person that was killed, the siblings and all of the other relatives would just love to analyze this individual and find out where we as a society went wrong. Right!!!

But, of course it wasn't his fault.

Jim

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Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody. -- Mark Twain

I don't believe in evil.

That's quite some statement to make. Not least, because as a corollary of that, you must therefore contend that the whole philosophical division of ethics is founded upon a false axiom. Which, as a corollary, leads to the view that the entire dsicipline of jurisprudence is also founded upon a false axiom.

An explanation of this will prove very interesting.


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Indeed. Without some definition of wrong, or evil, there is no moral standard. I bet this guy didn't believe in evil as such either. But sane people tend to acknowledge wrong, at least when it's committed against them.

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Maybe I should have been more specific. I believe that evil is a value judgement made by society. I do not believe that something or someone can be inherantly evil. I don't buy this whole thing of "I looked into [a person's] eyes and saw evil]. I don't believe you can look into the eyes of a baby and see evil, I don't believe that people are born evil.

Instead, I believe that actions and people are inherantly value-free, and are instead assigned values by society - right, wrong, evil, good, etc. That's how law works, on a foundation of value judgements held (for the most part) communally by society. There are some value judgements that are more widespread across societies than others, but they are still subjective value judgements. They are not made objective just because lots of people believe in them. Murder is not inherantly, objectively wrong just because the majority of humans believes it to be so, just like the Earth was not flat just because the majority of humans in the 1300's believed it to be so.

I do not believe that the school shooter was inherantly evil. What I believe is that he committed an act viewed as evil by human society and he committed it despite the knowledge that he would be assigned an "evil" value label and rejected by human society. Why? What pathology caused him to act in a way which would cause him to be rejected by humanity, even though humans are naturally social creatures?

Oldtimer - surely it's worth spending the money analysing one perpetrator of an "evil" act if it means we learn why this act was committed and how we can prevent it ever happening again?

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I like to think that whoever designed marine life was thinking of it as basically an entertainment medium. That would explain some of the things down there, some of the unearthly biological contraptions

I agree and disagree with a lot of the points made here.

Oldtimer, I do see where you're coming from about society as a whole being desensitized, but Moondog also made a very good point. horror in movies and on tv has been around for a long time. a clockwork orange was a good example and there are many other classic horror movies from the days of Vincent Price through the 60's and 70's with the Psychos, Halloweens, Friday the 13th's, Nightmare on Elm Streets, Exorcists etc.

I think the biggest difference between today and say 2-3 generations ago is that children are being exposed to those types of violence at too early an age. there is a reason those types of movies (and video games) have ratings and that is to say which general age groups should be mature enough to differentiate between right and wrong and know the difference between the fiction that is happening in the movie and the real life consequences should such events happen in real life. one of the biggest problems is that too many parents are nonchalant about monitoring what their kids watch and what games their kids play. games like Doom, Halo, Grand Theft Auto etc. are not meant for kids in elementary and even jr. high but that doesn't stop them from playing them right in their very own homes with parents one room away (this is just one of a whole bunch of reasons I believe you should have to have a license of some type to parent a child but that's another story).

a lot of parents like to go around blaming movies and games for the problems in society, but I think that the real problem is that too many parents don't take the time (or don't have the time in the cases of a lot of single parents) to monitor what their kids watch and do. after reading the article on crimelibrary.com about the columbine shootings it seemed pretty clear that the whole tragedy could have been avoided if the parents of the kids took more of an interest in what their kids were up to (one of the kids had a website with recipes of home made bombs he'd made for crying out loud) and also if the police had followed up on numerous reports made from the parents of another student who had been threated by one of the killers months prior to the school shooting.

you may have to really think about this next statement before you see where I'm coming from, but the SouthPark movie "bigger, better and uncut" really made a great point about the state of our (in the US anyway) society as a whole. too many parents are concerned about and fight against the violence, language and/or nudity/sexual content in video games, movies and tv today. however, if these parents would simply take the time to monitor what their kids watch then there's no need to change video games and what's on tv and in movies. sounds to me like those parents want to be able to leave their kids in front of the tv without having to keep an eye on what the kids are watching/playing.

also, tiny clanger, I do believe in evil and imo the 9-11 attack was a perfect example of evil. not only that but guys like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, the Zodiac killer, etc. are prime examples of evil. sure things happened to them throughout the course of their life, but imo stricter punishments for such activities would go a lot further to preventing them than studying them would. I do believe that people can change to some degree, but guys like those I mentioned are not capable (imo) of complete rehabilitation. I am all for the death penalty and I feel that if someone takes the life of another person in a premeditated and/or deliberate manner then they deserve to die. their victims did not get the chance to live their full life so why should they. a guy I recently read about but can't remember his name off hand spent more time on death row (17 yrs) awaiting execution than some of his victims spent on this earth. imo our (US) justice system is a joke with all the life sentences that wind up being only 15-20 yrs, anonymity for child killers, plea bargains, lawyer tricks etc.

There is short shrift given to the idea of rehabilitation in both countries, so we never really get to the root causes of violence. We punish, we exact revenge, we make no attempt to understand. And this fuels the problem, in my opinion. I believe that the act of premeditated killing is a symptom of illness of some abnormality in a person's psyche. I don't believe in evil. What I do believe is we have to learn more about this illness, this abnormality, to be able to treat it, to address it before it surfaces in other people. And we can't do that without hospitalising, studying and attempting to rehabilitate those who have already committed acts of violence.

I do not believe that such acts are the result of an illness in say 80% of such cases. in most cases there is some type of tragic element to the person's childhood that caused the person to grow up with a distorted sense of right and wrong. crimelibrary.com has hundreds of articles about killers, serial killers, rapists etc. all throughout history and all over the world and I'm sure there are hundreds or even thousands of other such sources for such information. through reading the many articles I have on crimelibrary.com one thing is almost always constant and that is that most killers have been abused/neglected/mistreated in some form during their childhood. again, this leads to my reasoning for parental licensing but I digress. once the child has gone through such trauma and grows up their values are basically ingrained and the type of person they are and the values that they have will not go through a complete makeover so in most cases by the time the person reaches the point of such crimes then they are, imo, too far gone. yes it's tragic that in most of these cases perhaps these people could have had much different lives if they'd had a better home life throughout their childhood which is why, imo, if you want to spend money on anything instead of trying to study an illness that i don't believe exists in most cases, we should spend more of our resources trying to make sure that children are given the chance to grow up into law abiding citizens who know the difference between right and wrong and have a respect not only for themselves but for others as well.

also, tiny clanger, I do believe in evil and imo the 9-11 attack was a perfect example of evil.

OK, so how was 9/11 evil and the Hiroshima bomb necessary?

It's a question of values. In itself, it was a value free act. It is only the values assigned to the act that make it what it is

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I like to think that whoever designed marine life was thinking of it as basically an entertainment medium. That would explain some of the things down there, some of the unearthly biological contraptions

Well, if we go by "values", it was evil because we perceive it to be so. Almost everyone looks down on the killing of those thousands of people. Perhaps the hijackers and plotters didn't share this belief and thought they would be eternally rewarded, but this was a twisted and sick act nonetheless. It's possible that some folks truly believe that killing is not wrong, but I don't see how these terrorists would come to think that way. To my knowledge, even their religious text looks down on murder.

As for the second part of your question, I don't see where anyone else mentioned the atomic bomb drops on Japan. However, they were necessary because despite the huge devastation the firebombing of cities and torpedoing of Japanese vessels wreaked, the government was not ready to give in. The power wielded by the atom bombs forced them to capitulate, saving the lives of many American and Japanese soldiers and Japanese citizens. I do believe, however, that it would have been better to have dropped the bombs on an unpopulated area of Japan where they would have had little effect except for a psychological one. Provided that the government would still have captitulated, it would have saved even more civilian lives. Many feel that the way the bombs were used (dropped on the two cities) was indeed an evil act.

Even if you feel that actions are not good or bad until they are judged, that does not excuse the perpetrators of any reaction from others. With the exception of children and the insane, a person inherently knows how an action will be received by others. This is why children need to be taught by good people (I agree with Jason's opinion that a license should be mandatory for parenthood) and the insane should not be in a position where they can harm anyone else.

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And when he gets to Heaven, to Saint Peter he will tell: "One more Marine reporting, Sir! I've served my time in Hell."

Ah, that nice ethical conundrum : "When is a moral absolute not a moral absolute?"

The key issue here is that we, as human beings, can choose by an act of will to aid another person or bring harm to another person (I'll not complicate the issue by beinging animals into this discussion even though as fishkeepers it would be apposite). An act in general becomes evil if it brings harm to another person, and the choice not to bring harm was present. That is what distinguishers criminal activity such as that perpetrated by Ted Bundy cited above, from actions such as self-defence. In the case of self-defence, a person is left with no choice but to bring harm to another human being because, in turn, that human being has chosen as an act of will to harm him. The right to preserve one's own life in the face of imminent danger is recognised by all reasonable systems of jurisprudence.

While there will be historians who disagree with the assessment, the difference between September 11th and the atomic bombings again becomes one of choice. The Allies considered that they had two unpleasant choices open to them: drop the atomic bombs (which resulted in 225,000 casualties) or fight a conventional war of invasion of Japan. Given the tenacity with which the Japanese armed forces, and indeed many civilians, fought to stop that from happening, military planners concluded that the atomic bombings constituted the lesser of two evils on the basis that the casualties resulting from a conventional invasion would be far higher than those resulting from the atomic bombings. Of course, the full import of the use of nuclear weapons was unknown at that time, but even so, it is possible after the fact to perform a calculation of the number of casualties that would have resulted if a conventional invasion had gone ahead. If that figure exceeds 225,000, then the conclusion to be drawn is that the atomic bombings was the lesser of two evils. Plus, of course, one has to consider that ethics is always a troublesome discipline to apply in time of war, and the attack on Pearl Harbor was regarded as a de facto declaration of war (I think it untenable to consider it otherwise). Military planners responsible for the end of the war with Japan were faced with the difficult task of minimising casualties in a situation where doing so posed potentially intractable problems, and the atomic bomb offered, on the face of it, a solution.

September 11th, on the other hand, was conducted by individuals who chose by an act of will to kill civilians. They chose deliberately to wreak as much death and destruction as they could in pursuit of their twisted world-view. Indeed, they regarded the slaughter of as many Amerioans as possible as 'glorious'. Since then, others following in their wake have issued similar sentiments, and indeed rejoice in the thought that someday, they will pursue a course of action that will result in millions of American dead. That, by any reasonable definition, is criminality writ on a Wagnerian scale.


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

tiny, like sirbooks said you are the first to mention the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I never said that act was evil or not and even now I still won't. I have never studied the war so all I know of it is what I learned on the days that I didn't sleep through US history so I don't feel informed enough to pass my opinion on wether that act was evil in nature or not. I will say though that the US gov. itself is certainly guilty of many evils of their own so don't think that I'm one of those people who say/think that what we (the US) do to others is fine but what others do to us is not.

I can speak of the 9-11 attacks though because of how recently the tragedy happened and from the articles and news reports I've seen and read of the event. I guess this is simply where we will have to agree to disagree because imo there is no way to say that the act of hijacking 4 airplanes with the premeditated purpose of flying them into federal buildings knowing that all onboard the planes will be killed as well as many of the people in those buildings is not in itself evil. the only ones who will not say the act was pure evil are those involved who are simply trying to justify what they've done.

I was using Hiroshima as an example of an act which we tag with very different values, and how those values can change between cultural groups, not making any point about Hiroshima per se. My point was that neither act was inherantly evil, it is how we perceieved them that made them that way.
"It was an act of necessity, " "in pursuit of their twisted world-view." Attaching values to the actions, values which are not universal. One act was evil, one act was necessary/both acts were evil/both acts were necessary. It depends on your worldview, it depends on your values. In themselves they were actions,nothing less, nothing more.

If actions have inherant good or evil, who decides? If the values are not universal, who is right and who is wrong?




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I like to think that whoever designed marine life was thinking of it as basically an entertainment medium. That would explain some of the things down there, some of the unearthly biological contraptions

I can think of one reason why Hiroshima evens out in the historical ethical balance - it was done to bring a war to an end. Bad news certainly for the people upon whom the bomb was dropped, but it can be argued vigorously that many Japanese lived afterwards that would have died unpleasant deaths in a conventional invasion. They also lived to see Japan emerge from the war to become a major financial and industrial power, with all of the benefits of an advanced nation - high technology healthcare, near 100% literacy and numeracy, an increasingly strong academic and research base that saw Japan become a net contributor to the advancement of Western civilisation, and they've still managed to maintain a good proportion of their indigenous cultural traditions into the bargain. Not only that, but the Japanese took a unilateral decision to renounce war as a tool of foreign policy in 1946, and were thus able to concentrate on turning their nation into an industrial powerhouse, propelling them into the ranks of the world's richest nations. The Japanese now have possibly the best longevity figures in the entire world, one of the lowest infant mortality rates, one of the highest rates of university education among their adults, and one of the highest per capita incomes in the world outside of the oil producing nations. In 60 years, Japan has become one of the good places to be on this planet - and you have to ask yourself the question, would that have happened if World War II had been brought to an end in a conventional land battle?

One can of course argue that as an impetus for change, having an atomic bomb dropped upon you is a pretty drastic one, and that there may be better ways of acheiving the end result. But then armchair commentators are always wise after the event. Personally I'd rather not conduct the experiment with the time machine and see the end result of a protracted Japanese land war in 1945, because I'm convinced that the results would have been far nastier.

If you hold to the belief that war is bad, and that ending a war is good, then you are led to the conclusion that the right course of action was taken. The killing stopped after the atomic bombings, and since then, no Japanese person has died in a war to my knowledge. Quite an outcome, don't you think?

As for the cultural relativist angle, I've one simple acid test to apply. Do your values work? Do they result in a better life for you and your kin?

Again, I cite Japan. Japan took on our values after 1945, and the result worked. Japan is a rich, healthy, well educated, scientifically advanced and culturally robust nation that has managed, while taking on our values, to preserve its individuality and intrinsic character. Japan works. Places that seethe with hatred for us don't work - they are, without exception, places to avoid, run by corrupt and murderous despots or descending into shambolic anarchy. Because we've learned the hard lesson from 300 years of European warfare, that basing our objectives on the principle of "how can we build a better place to live" beats hands down basing our objectives on "how can we impose our will on others". Took us a while to get there, but we've grown up. If you honestly believe the cultural relativist mantra that our values and our way of life are no better than anyone else's, go spend five years in Uzbekistan and see which you prefer - here or there.


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002