Evil In Norway

[Declan]

I thought post-modernism was "having a beginning a middle and an end but not necessarily in that order."

 

Or wearing big suits and getting your records designed by Barney Bubbles.

 

I've skipped a few posts, so not sure how thst's relevant.

[thommo2010]

Am I missing something here? the guy murdered 77 people the majority being kids and people are talking about whether his reasons were good or not.

[Chinahand]

Thommo2010 - you got it! Welcome to LaLa Land and Evil Goblin World.

 

LDV - I feel this is basically playing word games. I agree with Zhuangzi from 300 BCE that morality is basically a learned social linguistic theory. It's perspectivist and objective.

 

What society has done is attempt to expand out to as large a group as possible social norms, but you will always be stuck when you try to rank all the necessary evils that exist - people won't agree. Oh no, pluralism!

 

I'm sure EG will approve, but I'm with John Gray on this:

 

Diversity of ways of life and regimes is a mark of human freedom, not of error.

 

Sure it makes it difficult - can you condemn slavery and religious or cult voluntary sacrifice etc. Only via a social context.

 

Informing people as widely as possible might reduce differences of opinion, but basically I don't there are any moral absolutes which apply in all cases.

 

They may apply in lots of cases, but that isn't good enough for an absolutist argument.

 

Sorry, but now that Spook is no longer with us is anyone really going to argue about moral absolutes? In our cultural context Breivik is an evil mass murderer with obnoxious views. He may think he's a hero and some other Nazis might too, but thank goodness that is a minority view!

 

In our context - and I think both LDV and EG understand this context - he's an evil S.O.B. and he can sit in prison and watch society reject his views. Good!

[La_Dolce_Vita]

Ok, to sum up. You seem to believe that evil is a term that is social constructed and that in our society we see murder as evil so this man did evil.

 

And you also seem to indicate, by mentioning semantics, that evil means nothing more than very, very bad. In other words, there is no difference between a very bad man and an evil man. I'd be happy with that. That's all I was interested in. But I avoid the use of the term because of its history and continued use as a quality that is not culturally bound and social constructed by and has the religious origin.

[La_Dolce_Vita]

But what makes someone evil? It can't be just the act, can it? I mean, if hypothetically the man was temporarily insane then we wouldn't think he was evil even though he did kill so many and if at some point they came to see their error and were remorseful then I don't think we would still see him as evil necessarily.

So is it something to do with the nature of that person?

[Evil Goblin]

If we don't have free will, then who/what is in charge of our will? That question alone turns it into not the simplest explanation.

Why does anything,other than the physical workings of the brain, have to be "in charge" of us?

 

There is no good reason to believe that my actions are already laid out. There simply isn't any evidence of that whatsoever. If I pick up my stack of business cards and throw them at the printer right now, would that have already been planned out? Who by? Why? What evidence is there for that?

No-one is saying that the future is determined - just the your conscious mind has no sayin what happens (although there are some physics theories which postulate that everything that has and will happen already exists and we are just moving through the sequence of frames).

 

If you believe that we don't have free will, then surely nobody is actually a murderer, or a pedophile, or a criminal of any sort, they're all merely following a path they have no control over. Which I simply can't agree with being true.

That's right - disconcerting, ain't it?

[Evil Goblin]

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[Evil Goblin]

@EG: The only notion of "self" I would suggest is consciousness. Which is a collection of electrical impulses and chemical reactions. I don't think you need anything further than that for free will, why do you profess that you do?

I think it is right that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon from the way our physical brain operates - but what has that to do with Free Will? You assume that you (who or what is this you?) are in control of your conscious mind whereas if consciousness arises from the physical workings of the brain you are actually under the control of those. There is simply no you to be found - the Self as an inherently existing being is an illusion. Our notion of self arises purely from the interdependence of our brains and body parts.

[Evil Goblin]

@EG I'll save my response for after you've linked the studies.

To define Free Will- the sense that we are in conscious control of our actions and are free to do or not do things which occur in our minds.

 

I assume that you have no problem with the brain being a physical system entirely beholden to the laws of nature and that changes in its functional state and material structure dictate our thoughts and actions, There is no question that all mental events are the product of physical events in the brain.

 

Accordingly, the intention to do one thing rather than another does not originate in consciousness - rather it appears in conciousness, as does any thought that might oppose it.

 

It follows that if whatever it is that exercises Free Will is to bring about the thought and actions, which it must do via the brain, then the conscious experience must precede the physical operations in the brain which give rise to the actions.

 

Libet, Gleason, Wright & Pearl showed in 1983 that the appropriate activity in a person's motor cortex can be detected some 300 milliseconds before the person felt that they had decided to move. Haynes in 2011 showed that two brain regions which contain information about which particular actions subjects would take would actually act a full 7 to 10 seconds before the decision was consciously made. Further studies by Fried, Mukamel & Kreiman (2011) & Wegner (2002) support these findings (as do numerous other studies).

 

If the physical activitites in the brain, entirely under the control of the impersonal laws of nature, precede conscious awareness, then it follows that conscious thought plays no part in the actual decision making - the conscious mind only becomes aware of the decision to act AFTER the brain has unconsciously made that decision.

 

Hope this is clear.

[Evil Goblin]

EG, LDV - do you think you have the capacity to learn via appropriate environmental stimulus to alter a behavioural pattern you currently have to a new one when presented with a certain situation?

Undoubtedly - the fact has been comprehensively proved by Behavioural Psychologists. But I don't see how that relates to Free Will.

 

My view is that society judges whether an individual has the capacity to learn what behaviour is appropriate.

 

If society judges that a person can learn then if they do not confirm to the accepted modes of behaviour then they can be held responsible for that failure.

The fact that someone has the capacity to learn does not necessarily mean that they will learn - that depends on their receiving the correct inputs to bring the learning about. Society bases its judgements on the illusions of Free Will, a state of affairs resulting from ignorance.

 

Free will hasn't got a lot to do with this - its a far more Skinnerian approach.

Nothing in Skinner's work requires Free Will - it's simply stimulus-response stuff and if anything supports the idea that Free Will does not exist.

 

Over the nature of good and evil - I still feel that you lot are playing at post-modernism here. If you personally had to deal with such events as happened in Oslo you'd not quibble at people using the word evil.

Maybe I wouldn't but that would be expressing a personal view. I think what LDV and I are looking at is just what is meant by "Evil" - it seems to have no objective existence but merely something people use to express extreme disapproval of something or other i.e. Evil is a subjective notion in human minds.

 

The golden rule (Do as you would be done by, do not do what you would not like to be done to you) isn't perfect, but is a long standing moral principle. I also like the precept: "put yourself in their shoes" - both would preclude mass murder.

There are flaws with that - for example, what if you are a masochist - should you impose suffering on someone because you would like them to impose suffering on you?

[Evil Goblin]

Am I missing something here? the guy murdered 77 people the majority being kids and people are talking about whether his reasons were good or not.

Yes - such questions are perfectly deserving of enquiry. In reality I suspect we do not really judge the actions themselves, but rather the purpose and intent underlying those actions. Suppose that Breivik, rather than shooting 77 people, had brought about their deaths by some negligent action but had no actual intention to harm them - would we look on him in the same light? It is not the deaths themselves we condemn but the purposeful killing of people for reasons with which we disagree.

[Evil Goblin]

I'm sure EG will approve, but I'm with John Gray on this:

 

Diversity of ways of life and regimes is a mark of human freedom, not of error.

I surely do agree!

 

In our context - and I think both LDV and EG understand this context - he's an evil S.O.B. and he can sit in prison and watch society reject his views. Good!

Agreed.

[Evil Goblin]

whether there at objective morals.

AC Grayling has a short essay entitled "Morality and Empathy" in which he advances a case for the objectivity of certain morals based on the activity of mirror neurons in the brain. Personally, I don't find it very convincing.

[HeliX]

For the most part, I would say that life is far too short to worry about things that there's simply no answer for. Sure, this all could be illusion, it could also be the Matrix, there's no way of proving either and frankly it makes 0 difference in practice.

 

However, your comment on consciousness and Free Will I can dispute quite happily. Creatures without a consciousness (jellyfish etc) can only react to stimuli in one way. I can choose how I react to stimuli. I could stick my hand under a boiling tap right now, and decide to leave it there. A non-conscious being would always pull their hand away instantly.

[Evil Goblin]

For the most part, I would say that life is far too short to worry about things that there's simply no answer for. Sure, this all could be illusion, it could also be the Matrix, there's no way of proving either and frankly it makes 0 difference in practice.

 

However, your comment on consciousness and Free Will I can dispute quite happily. Creatures without a consciousness (jellyfish etc) can only react to stimuli in one way. I can choose how I react to stimuli. I could stick my hand under a boiling tap right now, and decide to leave it there. A non-conscious being would always pull their hand away instantly.

You do not seem to get it, HeliX. You only have the impression that you can make conscious choices - the illusion really has got you, hasn't it? I suggest you reread my previous postings.