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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GPS Info who wrote (201191)	9/4/2006 8:25:44 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I believe evil is important to many people, and variant among the subsets. We sometimes share a sense of group by equating those outside the group as evil, and those within “our” group as good. I made the point before that the group(s) that we belong to have gotten larger and larger through history. The UN’s charter seems to have as an underlying belief that we are now one interconnected globe that can’t survive future wars without this awareness. Yes, very good! I sometimes claim that history clearly shows the lengthening of the vector of morality. By this I mean human history shows a clear trend of treating things more distant from oneself more morally over time. Many arbitrary boundaries have been drawn (myself, my family, my extended family, my religion, my country, my species). I'm not arguing that these boundaries totally disappear, but I am arguing that there must be some theoretical basis for boundaries that matter, and morality must behave in a predicatable manner when crossing boundaries. I think you meant animal phyla developing after plant phyla. No, predation in animals arose before most plants existed. Animal life arouse in the oceans, prior to the evolution of plants. From this idea, if one plant species push out a less adaptable species, would this be an evil? Plant competition is certainly much different than predation. The dynamics are different than predator/prey cycles. I see this random creation of predation as the requirement for both predator and prey to evolve on this planet (and elsewhere) – ultimately giving rise to smarter hominids, and thus giving rise to concepts like evil. Well, I would agree that predation is a requirement for predators and prey to evolve, but I don't see predators and prey as nessecary for life, as evidenced by the plant kingdom. Note that some predation does exist in the plant kingdom, but it is not the driving force of evolution there. Do you think humans are required in the equation for evil? I believe this sense of evil resides in our brain’s limbic system, and we have had only a few thousand years to try to define it. No I don't see any requirment for humans in the definition of evil. Any theoretical definition must work for flies just as well as for humans IMO. Fundamentally, life is about the mutable immortality of each individual's DNA, at least that is what science teaches me. So I look for a definition of evil that makes sense in that context. Note how that contrasts with the widespread (but not universal) religious view that life is about the immutable immortality of the soul. It is not suprising that two such different views would lead to widely different definitions of evil.