I don't normally visit this section of RatSkep but I figured that here would be the best place for my question.

My question isn't what is evil or even what defines evil but more so why is it evil with regards to perspective. We say Adolf Hitler was evil according to the perceptions we have about him but Hitler and many of the Nazi party saw his actions as good (Admitted inference by me into Hitler's motives and assume true for argument's sake). So why is it evil? Is it perceived as evil if it breaks enough social contracts? Does the social contracts demography and power status play into that perception? For instance, US slavery practices in the south were considered evil by the slaves yet the view was not considered evil by their southern white counterparts. After the civil war when the whites of the north, who held the slavery is evil, won and imposed their perceptions onto the southern whites, now the weaker demographic, we began to see a shift in the overall view that slavery was evil in the US.

Is evil just a perception based on the dominant demographic's social contract and within a said demographic, does the perception of evil change over time based on the waxing and waning of influence of (sub)social contracts found within the dominant demographic? I'm hoping I'm asking this question the right way.

Sovereign wrote:Is evil just a perception based on the dominant demographic's social contract and within a said demographic, does the perception of evil change over time based on the waxing and waning of influence of (sub)social contracts found within the dominant demographic? I'm hoping I'm asking this question the right way.

Words like "morality" and "evil" are ambiguous, because they can be used in two markedly different ways, and in discussions they often veer from one meaning to the other without participants noticing. Quoting from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

The term “morality” can be used either
1.descriptively to refer to some codes of conduct put forward by a society or,
a.some other group, such as a religion, or
b.accepted by an individual for her own behavior or

2.normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be put forward by all rational persons.

What “morality” is taken to refer to plays a crucial, although often unacknowledged, role in formulating ethical theories. To take “morality” to refer to an actually existing code of conduct put forward by a society results in a denial that there is a universal morality, one that applies to all human beings. This descriptive use of “morality”is the one used by anthropologists when they report on the morality of the societies that they study. Recently, some comparative and evolutionary psychologists (Haidt, Hauser, De Waal) have taken morality, or a close anticipation of it, to be present among groups of non-human animals, primarily other primates but not limited to them. “Morality” has also been taken to refer to any code of conduct that a person or group takes as most important.

Among those who use “morality” normatively, all hold that “morality” refers to a code of conduct that applies to all who can understand it and can govern their behavior by it. In the normative sense, morality should never be overridden, that is, no one should ever violate a moral prohibition or requirement for non-moral considerations. All of those who use “morality” normatively also hold that, under plausible specified conditions, all rational persons would endorse that code.

If "evil" is being used descriptively, then the perception of what is evil does change in different societies (though all societies have some prohibitions against harming some others). With this meaning, "evil" is reasonably easy to define and there is plenty of evidence for it, it's unproblematic for materialists. The normative version is trickier for materialists; there doesn't seem to be any real basis for claiming that something is evil-in-itself, but (speaking for myself) I'm not entirely happy at not being able to denounce racism or slavery just because many successful societies in the past have accepted them. I think that in the end I have to accept that (for example) slavery isn't evil in itself, it's merely divisive and damaging in large-scale modern societies.

Thanks for the reply and I guess that does answer my question.

Sovereign wrote:
So why is it evil? Is it perceived as evil if it breaks enough social contracts? Does the social contracts demography and power status play into that perception? For instance, US slavery practices in the south were considered evil by the slaves yet the view was not considered evil by their southern white counterparts. After the civil war when the whites of the north, who held the slavery is evil, won and imposed their perceptions onto the southern whites, now the weaker demographic, we began to see a shift in the overall view that slavery was evil in the US.

Is evil just a perception based on the dominant demographic's social contract and within a said demographic, does the perception of evil change over time based on the waxing and waning of influence of (sub)social contracts found within the dominant demographic? I'm hoping I'm asking this question the right way.

This may turn out a bit of a rambling post; I'm writing as I'm thinking.

I don't care too much for the word 'evil', but I think I can start by saying that 'evil' - as I see it, and without looking it up - is some deliberate action that is detrimental and/or destructive towards other living, conscious beings, especially if that action is due to perceived negative attributes that the subject being harmed have no say in (skin color, sex, cultural upbringing, heritage etc.).

What it seems to me to be about, is justification. If someone straps me to a chair and starts burning me with an iron poker, I would then say that's evil. The person burning me would probably have a justification in mind that would make it OK to him/her, and not evil. But if we somehow turned the tables, so that suddenly the other person was now strapped to the chair and I was standing there with the hot iron poker, the person in the chair would not then suddenly think it would be OK for me to burn them; they would now see the act as evil as well. Even if I came up with a justification, they would probably not go "Oh - OK then, go ahead, you have the right".

If you had somehow been able to 'magically' turn the tables on the US slavery (and similar with Nazis/Jews), the whites now suddenly being slaves would then see it as evil. But they would probably have tried to justify their own previous actions as slave owners, by saying something like 'but black people are basically animals that you could treat however you want' or some such.

Such atrocities seem to go along those lines of justification; either put down the people you are oppressing and dehumanize them, and/or elevate yourself to a place where you are acting on behalf of some higher Good, often a deity or a political ideal.

I think such justifications change over time, for example people over time got to personally know and observe black people who were slaves in the US, and found that they were every bit as worthy of a good life when given a chance. Abraham Lincoln, even being who he is in history, said some pretty nasty things about black people by our standards, but that was the norm back then. But he and others did recognize that they were human beings with the same faculties and emotions and so on that whites had, and therefore the justification of dehumanization slowly eroded in the minds of many (and eventually, many enough).

Then of course you have the justification of revenge. That is perhaps a trickier one. But often, it seems to me, if an action can be called evil when revenge is the proposed justification, then the action is out of proportion to the act one is meant to revenge.

Anyway... not sure if these thoughts were self evident, or quite the contrary just stupid, or if they addressed your question at all. Just my attempt at an answer.

Brings up the is/ought problem, doesn't it? I don't like being burned with a red-hot poker, but then to say 'you ought not to do that' is quite different. I suppose the concept of evil contains an 'ought', for which there can be no evidence.

Evil as a judgement rather than an IS.

SpeedOfSound wrote:Evil as a judgement rather than an IS.

Sorry, I'm weak in philosophy. Could you flesh that out a little? I think I get what you're saying, not sure though. I'm assuming that you statement is along the lines of nothing is evil, we just judge it to be evil for whatever reason based on our definitions.

Sovereign wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:Evil as a judgement rather than an IS.

Sorry, I'm weak in philosophy. Could you flesh that out a little? I think I get what you're saying, not sure though. I'm assuming that you statement is along the lines of nothing is evil, we just judge it to be evil for whatever reason based on our definitions.

Each instance is a specific judgement. We spend a lot of time trying to find a universal meaning for a word and sometimes words don't work that way. Wittgenstein gets into this a bit. So there is no way to specify what evil is without some specific conditions that then lead us to a judgement.

Now take that judgement of the specific and vary the time and culture or even the individiual and you may get still different results.

But! Killing cute little puppies is ALWAYS evil!

I recently came up with an idea about existence being a judgment also. ...and nothing more.

Good & Evil are ascriptive human mental constructs. They don't exist in nature.

Shakespeare wrote: "There is nothing either good nor bad but thinking makes it so." but he was just channelling Epictetus: "Men are not upset by things. Men are upset by the views they take of things."

AlohaChris wrote:Good & Evil are ascriptive human mental constructs. They don't exist in nature.

Shakespeare wrote: "There is nothing either good nor bad but thinking makes it so." but he was just channelling Epictetus: "Men are not upset by things. Men are upset by the views they take of things."

Amazing advice can be taken from this for all aspects of life. This is essentially the attitude adopted that is the basis of recovery from addiction.