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No Honour Among Thieves

A serial killer who kills four is objectively twice as bad as a double-murderer and yet both crimes are off the charts when it comes to morality. All crime is bad but it's still a consolation in terms of the number of victims to be slightly evil rather than fully evil:
"A gentleman thief is a stock character in fiction. A gentleman or lady thief usually has inherited wealth and is characterised by impeccable manners, charm, courteousness, and the avoidance of physical force or intimidation to steal. As such, they steal not only to gain material wealth but also for the thrill of the act itself, which is often combined in fiction with correcting a moral wrong, selecting wealthy targets, or stealing only particularly rare or challenging objects." - Wiki
 
Evil emperors who preside of evil empires and also inflict pain on their own citizens are yet more manifestations of their being no honour among thieves. Treason is more frequent problem among evil groups than good ones.


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Nero's Great Fire of Rome is an apt image of hell!
 
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One argument against the existence of God is not only that evil is allowed but that the amount of evil can be unlimited. It's one thing for God to physically allow people to commit assault in the name of free will but it's sad that there's no supernatural intervention to stop even genocides. We could say that the megalomaniacal ambition of evil people is often their own downfall. Instead of staying put in Poland, Hitler decided to invade the USSR and then Japan not being content with an Asian empire decided to attack America with Pearl Harbour. These hopelessly overambitious attacks ultimately led to the defeat of the Axis Powers. Had Hitler limited his expansion to Czeckoslovakia and Austria then for all we know we might still have a Nazi leadership in Germany today. Likewise the addiction felt be serial killers for more murder is often what leads to their capture. So maybe a benevolent God doesn't remove the pleasure felt by evil people because it often results in overconfidence.
 
One possible argument against God's omnibenevolence is even if He were coerced to allow evil under the doctrine of free will, then why wouldn't He at least warn people about the malevolent intentions of others. Sometimes the embarrassment of deception can be the cruellest form of pain. So many serial killers gained the trust of their victims before attacking them. Perhaps it's a simple case of you have to be one to know one. In other words an evil person might be able to identify the evil mindset of another person simply by their shared characteristics. So if God wanted to warn you that someone was evil, you yourself would have to understand the evil motives that they were under. Maybe this pre-emptive form of empathy is one reason good people can be corrupted into committing evil themselves. For example we see so many examples of supposedly benevolent theocracies failing catastrophically in medieval European history. A paradox is that to truly defend against evil to the fullest extent then you'd almost need to know an awful lot about the hedonistic sensations of evil.
 
Is it possible that extreme evil can morally deter bad people from committing lesser evil? In some sense it's very hard for us to know what the world would be like in an alternate universe in which serial killers and genocides never existed. For example if the Holocaust never happened then could people be warped into tolerating smaller ethnic cleansings? What if society allowed killings against ethnic minorities without ever reaching the intensity of a genocide? Yet in the longer term the casualties from ethnic cleansings could far exceed those caused by a short-term genocide. People know how evil it is to incite mass killings partially because we know from history how such logic could be a slippery slope to a genocide. Or what if sexist serial killers were pre-emptively annihilated by God and then you found yourself in a world where misogynistic or misandric murderers with sole victims were much more common. In our world criminal-minded people can identify that killing one person could lead you to kill more people and make a monster of yourself. Some criminals are less worse than others. I understand that this is an extreme style of argumentation and that it's hard to take God-like counterfactuals on matters of extreme evil. I suppose I'm reminded of those movies where people are granted a magical wish and it ends up creating a whole series of unintended consequences.
 
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Perhaps an infinite God might have justifications for evil who'd come up with paradox after paradox to tolerate evil. Maybe we should think of the deepest layer of the the physical world as a sarcastic psychopathic being capable of accidental good. Evil ghosts after all could be stronger than humans simply because they're ghosts. God doesn't reward evil only that evil is itself the reward for evil. If everyone defended against evil by being evil then we'd all just be evil. A trouble with imbuing the physical world as God is that the physical world contains natural evil. Yet it's clear that any potential creator must be somehow connected to the physical world. So we might have to interpret a benevolent God as a limited version of an infinite God.
 
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We say that capitalism is a lesser evil to incentivise hard work. Yet what if we reversed that statement where evil is a form of hard work. If evil pleasures far exceed good pleasures then an evil person could theoretically be far stronger than a good person. The problem here is that good people don't really have to be strong; there's safety in numbers!
 
This video is similar to post 28 about unlimited evil:

"If you were a nazi and wanted to win the war you should have enslaved the Jews... You should have had them work for the benefit of the victory..."

Why Hitler Was MORE EVIL Than You Think | Dr. Jordan Peterson
 
Maybe people should rarely try to emotionally understand the problem of evil given the paradoxical nature of temptation. To understand the mindset of a murderer is to give yourself the same risk of descent into criminality. As such an impersonal, academic approach to reconciling yourself to historical evil is one possibility.

"First, we must distinguish between the intellectual problem of evil and the emotional problem of evil. The intellectual problem of evil concerns how to give a rational explanation of how God and evil can co-exist. The emotional problem of evil concerns how to dissolve people’s emotional dislike of a God who would permit suffering."
https://www.reasonablefaith.org/wri.../existence-nature-of-god/the-problem-of-evil/
 
Michael McMahon said:
Perhaps an infinite God might have justifications for evil who'd come up with paradox after paradox to tolerate evil.
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So basically you would have God sitting around a long time ago, listening to the complaints of his creations.

"Why does it rain fire on our cities just because we wanted some kinky angel sex? How could a good god allow this?"
"Yeah ok, maybe I was a bit harsh on that one. I'll try to tone it down a bit. Don't wanna lose my temper and make that deluge mistake again..."

*800 years later*
"Why does the river turn into blood and our first born die just because we slaughtered some Jewish babies and enslaved their parents? How could the gods allow this?"
"Ok, so maybe I was a bit hard on them that time too. I guess 'll turn it down another notch."

*500 years later* "
Why did God let the Babylonians kidnap our people and make us write scrolls and compose songs that will eventually turn into some really great disco?"
"Seriously? You not only dissed me, but didn't even have a proper army to defend yourself? Was I supposed to make the Babylonians not be able to swing a sword? How? By making their arms fall off? Ok, I'll send you home, but I can tell you I'm starting to get tired of this sh*t."

*2500 years later*
"Why does noone like my Instagram photos? "
"Ok, I'm done..."


Evil is always challenging and inconvenient. But how do you have a meaningful universe without challenge or inconvenience? How does anything become better without challenge? How does anything grow? And if you get rid of some, but keep even one challenge/inconvenience in your universe, then that will by default become the worst challenge/inconvenience and the worst evil, which people cannot understand why a benevolent deity would permit. Ever notice how the rates of stress related disorders are actually higher for people with #firstworldproblems# than for people who live with actual challenges? It would seem that the absence of what we consider real challenge is quite capable of becoming a challenge in itself.

So come to think of it, I'm fairly certain that whether by evolution or design, the amount of evil that exists is exactly the amount that we are capable of dealing with as a species.
 
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HK.227 said:
So basically you would have God sitting around a long time ago, listening to the complaints of his creations.
Click to expand...

One way to interpret evil is that a theistic God doesn't care about anyone in the material world. If He cared about you then it'd be favourtism since He didn't care much about war victims. So you could say God will care about you once you died.



HK.227 said:
So come to think of it, I'm fairly certain that whether by evolution or design, the amount of evil that exists is exactly the amount that we are capable of dealing with as a species.
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It's tempting to view working for the economy as evil by the mere fact that God could have created a world where no one had to work. Are we all slaves of God? Yet you could gradually interpret your body differently and try to use it passively. Then you might be better able to ignore the pain of work if you dissociated. The only problem with living in a daze is that you might fail to appreciate others.
 
"When it comes to people, places, and things, the ambiguity of potential threat might automatically evoke an “adaptive emotional response." Feeling “creeped out” might be our way of emotionally reacting to something or someone whose intentions or meaning are unclear to us. This makes sense. Evolutionary selection pressures have attempted to help us to find ways of avoiding harm and we tend to respond to indications of incoming harm through either one of three responses: fight or flight are the most commonly known, but there is also a third option, which is freezing in place."
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ie/blog/inclusive-insight/202203/what-makes-someone-creepy

Sexual perversion might leave an imprint on your body or psyche for the same reason that adults in general have a different appearence than their prebuscent selves. The problem is that we view ourselves in a holistic way such that any allegation of creepiness is chaotic. So the idea of pre-empting evil people through their visual appearence would be full of false accusations. It's possible that even non-sexual thoughtlines could lead to a "rough" appearence simply because the body and mind are interconnected. The notion of a "false charm" is obscured by the fact that beauty and aesthetics are rooted in subjective features. It's commonly claimed that heterosexual serial killers could look charming even though any attractiveness could logically only be perceived by the opposite gender. A major difficulty is that it's possible to be perverted about literally anything. Don't ask why some languages use gender pronouns for inanimate objects! Although if you really had to catch out a dangerous stranger then it's theoretically possible that they might give off an unusual or intense vibe. This gets trickier in that perversions could counteract more perversions such that there's really no way of knowing. The trouble with justifying any perversion at all as a greater good is that it might always work in the context of an infinite length of time. We could use an extreme example of Vlad the Impaler killing his own villagers that inadvertently did good in deterring invaders. If we view animals as ill-intentioned beings then you can still see that they're not pure evil simply because they regulate the ecosystem. Anyone using academic arguments to warn others of the nature of creepiness should also be spooked out by the sheer lengths that such people could go to! Further still those who use a lot of dissociated met-jokes should be avoided in case it's caused by apathetic perversion! Thoughtline closed!
 
If you want to live in a state with unregulated gun ownership then you're dealing with a civilian army of sorts. As such a court martial is really needed to deal with gun crime rather than a court system. If unvetted civilians are to be trusted with sniper rifles then you'd almost need a death penalty to deal with those who ambush others. In other words they've so much power that only extremely high mandatory sentencing or a death sentence can deter others as a lesser evil. The trouble here is that while many view the death sentence as immoral it's not as immoral as unregulated gun ownership. Thus freer gun legislation runs the risk of absurdism.
 
Michael McMahon said:
One way to interpret evil is that a theistic God doesn't care about anyone in the material world. If He cared about you then it'd be favourtism since He didn't care much about war victims. So you could say God will care about you once you died.
Click to expand...
"How? By making their arms fall off?"

Michael McMahon said:
It's tempting to view working for the economy as evil by the mere fact that God could have created a world where no one had to work. Are we all slaves of God? Yet you could gradually interpret your body differently and try to use it passively. Then you might be better able to ignore the pain of work if you dissociated. The only problem with living in a daze is that you might fail to appreciate others.
Click to expand...
"Why does noone like my Instagram photos?"

:p
 
One response to evil is the death penalty even though it's deemed vengeful. Yet from a purely theistic perspective it seems contradictory to hate God over the existence of evil and yet condemn the death sentence. So society is itself choosing not to play God through harsher sentencing even though many reject God by the mere existence of evil individuals. Ironically it might seem easier to blame God rather than to be evil back to murderous prisoners. So a ban on the death penalty is merciful even though it is self-imposed relative to the free will of society at large.
 
It's unlikely that anyone is born pure evil. So if we want to pre-empt evil we could ask in an impersonal way why would a good person ever become evil. We could view them within the context of their thoughts being mostly deterministic. So if they commit evil then their thoughts and compatibilistic free will would become affected by their prior experience of evil emotions. Thus their self-restraint and personal countermeasures would continuously decline in a deterministic way. The best way to reduce the unfairness of evil is for everyone to be evil so no one is aggrieved. However you'd then be confronted with endless evil! One problem with fiction is that it allows people to experience evil themes even though evil is endless. Even adults shouldn't watch many crime movies if they're not being vigilant in their assessment. I agree that fiction should be legal in a free society but you could say the same about a rock climbing course! When you make a Ted Bundy film with teen idol Zec Efron as the serial killer then it's a worry if you excessively sexualise crimes that were mostly motivated by anger. You could say that an attractive actor really helps to underscore the deceitfulness of false charm. Yet you can always say that anything bad might be pervertedly good with reference to an unknowable future. So it's truly ironic to pervertedly make a real-life pervert even more attractive in a movie on the basis of doing good! The trouble is if younger or unstable people started watching serial killer films without understanding the level of ambiguity they'd be subjected to. For example a theme of cannibalism isn't too far removed from necrophilia. The idea of a serial killer having a really loving wife isn't too different from an accidental theme of masochism.

"Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, directed by Joe Berlinger (who also helmed Conversations with a Killer, featuring extensive audio of Bundy’s death row interviews) was nominally told through the eyes of Bundy’s longtime girlfriend Liz Kloepfer (Lily Collins), whose book provided the basis of the film... Online backlash to American Boogeyman’s trailer, however contained to the Twitter bubble, may suggest a growing distaste in projects which appeal to this curdled strain of true crime, the worst kind of voyeurism."
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/jul/13/ted-bundy-movies-american-boogeyman-chad-michael-murray

"This film is also an adaptation of Camille DeAngelis’s novel of the same name that follows two teens in love—and they both just happen to be cannibals."
https://www.wmagazine.com/culture/b...-chalamet-location-cast-release-date-location
 
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Good people will help other good people more than where evil people help others enjoy evil. This creates a bit of an absurdity paradox if evil people started helping other evil people more to compete spiritually against good people. Yet most evil people aren't motivated by pure evil.
 
If the nazis worshipped evil in the same sense that religious people worshipped God then they'd probably have planned for a much more gradual war. For example instead of a 1000-year Reich they could have had a 100 year war full of rest periods to regroup in order to ensure a victory.
 
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If evil women had to wear green face paint then we'd all forgive them just for looking sexy!

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The dilemma of the lesser evil principle is that most evil people could view themselves as a lesser evil to some extent. In fact we could all decide to be evil until God makes a perfect world! Anyone who is outnumbered by evil people could easily say they needed the strength of being evil to confront them. I could bully a totally innocent person and simply say I needed to practice my fighting skills for whenever I've to confront actual evil people! Yet good people should never have to rely on an individual's evil heroism if they also intend to promote the basic faith of morality. Needless to say a utopia isn't possible. Certain terror campaigns like the IRA's bombing sprees in Britain might have become really exaggerated out of the lesser evil principle. The hedonism of evil outweighs ethical pleasures such that any militants who support lesser evils are invariably tempted to become purer versions of evil.
 
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Sexual masochism isn't viewed as a big threat compared to the sadism of pure violence. Yet masochism is a complex concept. Technically any healthy form of pain from hard work to exercise could be deemed very mild masochism. Maybe a downside of masochism is that it could actually out-compete ethics as a form of good. That is to say masochism could be a metaphysical threat even if it's not always a physical threat. Moreover specific instances of masochism could delude evil people into thinking that ethical people don't mind being harmed. For example Putin's war in Ukraine is ironically minimally good in forcing people in the west to be more Christian in order to help Ukraine. Masochism as a concept could also be used to disprove a misotheistic claim of an evil God if victims enjoyed seeing other victims being hurt. Masochism exploits the mind-body duality where the physical world is dead and painless. In other words pain felt by the human body is self-inflicted by faulty human evolution of subconscious nervous systems. Yet such a disproof of an evil God would come at an unbearable cost of people being objectified or animalised and would be nothing more than a last resort if the world became pure evil. Nonetheless the subjectivity of pain in spite of our shared biology means that we can't scientifically prove that God is evil.
 
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The irony of the no honour among thieves principle is that it's parodied in the different genders. No matter how violent men our to women it's still the case that men hating men will always result in way more casualties. So if men were viewed as collectively evil for finding female gladatorial contests darkly sexy then any woman could simply watch a war movie in which men are blown apart with actual bombs and find it arousing!
 
If evil people are collectively victimised by other evil people more than good victims, then a logical response would be that evil people would try to settle the score by singling out good people to target. Yet any universal war between good and evil would never work because good people might never be identified as being good by evil people. In other words evil rejected the idea of good people and as such were left in a poor position to find well-intentioned people. Thus in a metaphysical war good people could simply blend in with evil people seeing as no one is perfect. This is a paradoxical reason why ethics can triumph over evil even if evil is collectively stronger.
 
A drug cartel could theoretically pass as an undercover police operation to attack other drug cartels without restraint. That each undercover drug cartel member would resemble a heroic ethical person willing to create a dummy corporation in order to outcompete even more evil rivals. The flaw in the logic is that drug cartels don't care about evil and so when they attack rival drug gangs it's only out of profit or vengefulness in a feud. So any traces of ethics is only an accident. The same could be said if every criminal was rebranded a terrorist as if every petty thief was a historian who disagreed with the modern culture when the thieves were really just hedonists.

"A dummy corporation is an entity created to serve as a front or cover for one or more companies. It can have the appearance of being real but lacks the capacity to function independently."
 
A mental heuristic to interpret inter-generational forgiveness for ancient war crimes is to view prenatal history as random. So if we’re in a worldview of doing good then it’s inevitable that history were full of unpredictable challenges. To view ancient history as deterministic might be too tempting to view your worldview of benevolence as flawed when evil outnumbered ethical people in history. Determinism is sometimes claimed to help alleviate the anger of victims of crime but it’s possible that whatever happened before your life was an unknowable part of the physical world and hence random.
 
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