unspeakablehorror (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
unspeakablehorror) wrote2024-12-31 04:20 pm
unspeakablehorror) wrote2024-12-31 04:20 pm
Entry tags:
Evaluating Ethics
It's important to be able to clearly articulate the actions you think are good or evil, and not just the people. People do a lot of things: some good, some evil, some morally neutral. The actions that are ascribed to people are sometimes falsehoods or half-truths, to serve either the purposes of positive or negative propaganda towards them. Thus different people will have different conceptions of whether a given individual is good or evil, even outside of any disagreement in politics or philosophy (which is also quite common).
To talk of good and evil people is a flawed shorthand to refer to what does have a moral evaluation: action. In fact a person can never be good or evil, they can only choose good or evil, and choosing one at one time does not preclude choosing another at another time. One symptom of allowing this flawed shorthand to guide our judgements is to be unwilling to acknowlege when actions one considers good are done by people one considers evil, or actions one considers evil are done by people one considers good. Another is an undue worry over whether oneself is good or evil, rather than evaluating the different actions one chooses separately. Just as others cannot staticly be good or evil, neither can you.
It is natural to have both positive and negative emotions to other people, both those you know personally and those you know of only from the reports of others. But it is important to distinguish these feelings from your moral evaluation of others, because it is fine to like or dislike people for behavior that is morally inconsequential or even morally neutral, but it is a problem to ascribe great good or evil to such inconsequential or neutral behavior.
Basically, I think we do both ourselves and others a disservice when we ascribe good and evil as a function of being rather than of changing action, or when we allow ourself to conflate personal feelings with moral judgments.
To talk of good and evil people is a flawed shorthand to refer to what does have a moral evaluation: action. In fact a person can never be good or evil, they can only choose good or evil, and choosing one at one time does not preclude choosing another at another time. One symptom of allowing this flawed shorthand to guide our judgements is to be unwilling to acknowlege when actions one considers good are done by people one considers evil, or actions one considers evil are done by people one considers good. Another is an undue worry over whether oneself is good or evil, rather than evaluating the different actions one chooses separately. Just as others cannot staticly be good or evil, neither can you.
It is natural to have both positive and negative emotions to other people, both those you know personally and those you know of only from the reports of others. But it is important to distinguish these feelings from your moral evaluation of others, because it is fine to like or dislike people for behavior that is morally inconsequential or even morally neutral, but it is a problem to ascribe great good or evil to such inconsequential or neutral behavior.
Basically, I think we do both ourselves and others a disservice when we ascribe good and evil as a function of being rather than of changing action, or when we allow ourself to conflate personal feelings with moral judgments.