The Human Animal (Animals)

by dhw, Wednesday, June 16, 2010, 17:11 (5273 days ago) @ xeno6696

Matt and I are still discussing the source of evil.-MATT: A key difference to why I consider all evil being social in cause ... if there was no other people, there is no one to do evil to.-The syntax of this crucial sentence is a bit difficult to follow, but the rest of the paragraph makes the meaning pretty clear, and the logic is irrefutable. Perhaps we should circulate it to all defence attorneys: if other people didn't have property, my client would not be a burglar; if women didn't exist, my client would not be a rapist; if the victim hadn't been alive, my client would not have murdered him. This is all true, but does it mean that the SOURCE of these forms of evil is property, women, victims? If there were no knives, there would be no stabbings, so should we say the knife is to blame, and not the person who wields it? -In an earlier post, you brought up the subject of accountability, and in response to George's comments about group-evil, such as racism, chauvinism etc., you even went so far as to say "it is up to individuals to guard against those parts of our nature that allow us to make these distinctions." There is no escaping the fact that each individual is distinct from every other individual. But that does not CAUSE us to commit evil. And so I'm afraid I shall continue to argue that the source of evil, in accordance with your admirable precept, is not the distinctions themselves but those parts of our nature that drive us to use the distinctions for harmful purposes.-
*** I shall respond eventually to your rather beautiful post on "The Illusion of Time", but the battle with Hitler, Mussolini, Saddam and Nietzsche has proved a bit illusion-consuming.