Are Good and Evil Objective?

[lookingforabargain]

@Danny_Zou

In which case society has judged them to be capable of future good and should not be locked away, thus furthering utilitarian goals

It would further utilitarian goals to release a murderer who’s very unlikely to continue murdering others but is very likely to contribute to society if released. You believe society can judge some mentally ill people to be capable of future good and release them for that reason and then when I give the example of a person who murdered someone out of revenge but is unlikely to ever repeat it for whatever reason, you turn around and say

@Danny_Zou

There is a certain psychological boundary that is crossed whenever a crime is committed (you can look at my definition of crime again if you want) that is capable of being crossed again after a crime is committed. Thus, in order to prevent such a crime from occurring again, punishment is instituted

@Danny_Zou

Simply because conditions can always rearise

Not necessarily. If you’re an adult and you murdered your former caregiver for a reason that could only happen because they were your caregiver, then it may or may not be reasonable, depending on the specific details of that situation, to assume they won’t just keep murdering people. It can’t be proven with certainty but it can be proven beyond a certain amount of doubt that would be acceptable for the purpose of informing the decision to imprison them or let them go

@Danny_Zou

Even if the number of results becomes perfectly even, with half chances of + gain and half chances of - gain, then it’s 50/50 chances in which case it’s better to go for a 0 net gain

You’re telling me that if the chances of the prisoner causing more harm than good or more good than harm if released are equal and the net gain of inaction is 0 then you should choose the option with the net gain of 0. In that example, the option with the net gain of 0 was not releasing the prisoner. However, if the chances of the prisoner being more beneficial or more harmful are still the same but this time the action being considered is whether or not to imprison the prisoner in the first place, then by the same logic we should do nothing

@Danny_Zou

See, the problem is it doesn’t mean committing crime. It means, literally, doing bad. Lowering their value

Okay. The point still stands

@Danny_Zou

I reject that on the basis that I can put those parts together to make a logical whole. All those details you mention: felonies, misdemeanors, both, pardoning, etc. can be added up into a single value, that is, the value of wrongness

That’s not a valid basis. I can compress your list of possibilities even more and make something like this:

1. You release the prisoner and fewer people are harmed than benefitted
2. You releasing the prisoner and more people are harmed than benefitted
3. You don’t release the prisoner

I could even converge all of this into one possibility and call it a logical whole but speaking of logical holes,

@lookingforabargain

@Danny_Zou

I’m saying that “we attempt it and we fail” and “we attempt it and we succeed” can be put together to make “we attempt it” so that we reach a point with a small amount of set possibilities

That isn’t what you did

@Danny_Zou

Oh but it is:

Am I supposed to believe you didn’t split the possibility of attempting something into attempting that thing and failing and attempting it and succeeding?

@Danny_Zou

• The cure succeeds, more people are saved than those lost. Net gain +.
• The cure succeeds, less people are saved than those lost. Net gain -.
• The cure fails, all people involved are lost. Net gain -.

You could’ve made it into

1. more people are lost from the attempt than are saved
2. less people are lost from the attempt than are saved

@Danny_Zou

@Danny_Zou

The cure succeeds, more people are saved than those lost. Net gain +.

This encompasses all the following little details: the number of people saved, the number of people lost, the resources expended, the values of the number of people saved, etc.

@Danny_Zou

The cure succeeds, less people are saved than those lost. Net gain -.

This encompasses all the little details mentioned above.

@Danny_Zou

The cure fails, all people involved are lost. Net gain -.

This encompasses all the details of the number of people lost, the resources expended, the values of the people, etc.
However, I do see a flaw here and that is that I claim “all people involved are lost”. It should actually read “people are lost”, but that still means there’s a net loss, whether half the people are lost, most of the people are lost, etc.

Relevance?

@Danny_Zou

Same with the Americas. You can argue that they’re living better, they have plumbing, they have homes with modern supplies and modern medicines. But at the same time we see poverty, we see lack of access to those modern medicines, we see divides and conflict and wars and more that can all be partially traced back to that colonial history

People under the poverty line in america can still have a much higher standard of living than the vast majority of native americans could before our expansion. We do see a lack of access to some modern medicines but this would still be much worse if the americas remained relatively underdeveloped which is what would have to come from us not being able to use force to extend our influence there

@Danny_Zou

People decry the expansion on lying theft and coercion simply because those values easily show that we did not have utilitarian goals in mind when we invaded

but this does not follow. A consequentialist would only care based on the effects of these things. These actions wouldn’t be inherently bad for utilitarian goals which is why I said the people who decry our invasion of the americas have the understanding that people will recognize the invasion as unjust without referencing a cost-benefit analysis or denying that much improvement has resulted from it. In addition, in the case of our expansion to the pacific, we did have utilitarian goals in mind when we invaded which you can see in the doctrine of manifest destiny. This is obvious from the iconic painting associated with manifest destiny, “american progress”.

@Danny_Zou

it was bad for everyone involved

It wasn’t. For the most part, the people who got land benefitted

@Danny_Zou

…I mean like it really shouldn’t, because if you take the view that nothing has value , then nothing is good and nothing is evil since there’s nothing you value and everything is pointless and we’re all gonna die one day

This isn’t much of a counterargument but I’m sure you already know that, as you’ve already admitted you don’t believe any of this

@Danny_Zou

And if we state that some things have value , then that means that either the statements some things have no value or nothing has no value are true?
And the thing is, we can quantify “no value”. We call it 0. Thus, the statement everything has a value, and some things have a value of 0 must be true

I’ve tried interpreting this different ways and I can’t see how you got that conclusion