Re: Motivations, Principles, and Personality Traits

On Mar 28, 1:14 pm, CharlesRCap...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Mar 28, 12:19 pm, Will in New Haven

<bill.re...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mar 28, 11:47 am, CharlesRCap...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
The Palladium system of role playing games came up with a slightly
different approach which is to base alignment on principles. Some
people are Scrupulous some are Unscrupulous and so on. This benefits
from dropping the fallacy of Good and Evil,

Fallacy? It is certainly not a proven fact but calling it a fallacy is
even a bigger stretch.

Yes, fallacy. Point to a person and tell me that they are good and I
will find something that they do which someone else would consider
evil.

I don't buy it. Unless you are willing to define offenses such as
jaywalking as evil, most people never do anything that rises to the
level of evil.

Point to a person and tell me that they are evil and I will find
something that they do that someone would consider good.

That will always be true. It is also possibly meaningless. Good does
not cancel evil. Even if it did, it would not mean that certain
actions are not evil. It would simply mean that no individual could be
characterized as evil.

Good and evil
are a matter of opinion and perspective, elemental Good and Evil that
is associated with Judeo-Christian mythology simply does not exist in
reality. It is completely unsuitable for anything but the most
childish and simplistic examples unless you happen to be one of the
folks drinking the kool-aid.

It is possible to be a dogmatic reletavist and you illustrate this
like no one else I have ever met.

There are clearly good and evil _actions_ although most actions are
not so simple to characterize.

If I had any shred of respect for Bush left, when he came up with his
"Axis of Evil" it was obliterated by the complete disrespect that term
has for me as a citizen. That term tells me that Bush does not think
that the citizens of the United States are capable of understanding
the nuances of political and militaristic threats to world stability
(or lack thereof) those countries pose. The fact that he was probably
right that the average American citizen isn't capable of doing so (due
to a lack of effort more than anything else) did nothing to reduce the
insult.

Nations being characterized as evil is even more of a stretch than
characerizing individuals as evil. However, there are evil actions.
Some of them, many of them, have been committed by nation-states.


The Good-Evil dichotomy does nothing but obscure the details of the
discussion, fallacy pure and simple.

That there are evil nations is a fallacy. That there are evil
individuals is probably not a fallacy. That there are evil actions is
even more clearly not a fallacy.

--
Will in New Haven
.

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