@jmaxi
But that doesn't answer the point.

Look: if you're going to make sweeping assertions along the lines that all individuals are basically good and all groups are basically evil, you're either going to have to provide some evidence, or to show that your claim follows as a matter of logical necessity. Either way, though, you're going to need evidence. And that evidence is going to be pretty hard to come by unless you can give an account of what "good" and "evil" are, since you won't know what you're looking for.

One might also want to know what the boundary conditions are: how many people have to be in a room before they become evil? Two? Or more? Would two people in a room be good, or just indifferent? Would two people enjoying a quiet pint become evil because it's something they're doing as a group?

Additionally, one might want to know how absolving oneself from moral resposibility equates with evil, and how the Zalbardo and Milgram experiments, with their particular conditions, extrapolate to humanity as a whole.

Oh, and while we're at it, what does the phrase "my philosophy" mean? Speaking as a professional philosopher, I'd love it if I could get paid for saying whatever crossed the expnase of my apparently-empty mind. There's more to it than that. No, really. There is.

I think I'll stop and go for a cup of tea now.


EDIT: No I won't.
What do you mean by "faith"? You're treating it as an innoculation against thought...
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Fri 16 May 2008, 11:47, Reply)