Frankspencer
You've made a very interesting claim when you say that "I think all humans have the capability for bad, and that we more readily choose that than good, which requires self-control and self-examination." It has a certain amount of prima-facie power.

However - wouldn't you know it - I'm inclined to disagree in the end. It strikes me as being more plausible to say that noone acts except that they think that what they do is right, good, or worthwhile. Noone knowingly chooses to do the wrong thing - though we may think that they have misidentified what the right, good or worthwhile thing is. For example, when I kick the puppy, I presumably think that it would be worth doing: I expect to get some kind of reward for it in terms of enjoyment. I have, that is, identified the action as being, on balance, good in some sense. The moral problem concerns how I could have missed the (apparently obvious) reasons not to act in this way, not in my having chosen the wrong thing per se. And I suspect that the same applies accross the board: bad people aren't moustache-twiddling evil genii; they've simply made a mistake of moral perception or evaluation.

The problem with this account is that it's hard to see how some errors could be made. We might be able to understand some moral miscalculations or moral blindness, but some seems incomprehensible. How could Hitler have made a moral mistake that monumental, after all? I don't have an answer to that challenge; and that might be a fatal flaw in my account. But nor does any other account of wrongdoing that I've ever come across have a satisfactory answer, either - so I'm not alone in that. (Note that to say that H was just evil doesn't solve anything - if he was just built that way, then it's hard to see how we can ascribe guilt to him any more than we can ascribe it to a hurricane... and that looks mistaken, too.)
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Tue 11 Dec 2007, 15:32, Reply)