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| Thread: On the Origin of Good and Evil |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 3 · «PREV |
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Keksimaton
Promising
Supreme Hero
Talk to the hand
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posted July 21, 2011 09:58 PM |
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Well, I'd say that one function for morality is one of negotiation. When there's a situation where two people have a conflict, a moral point of view can work as a sort of trump card that resolves the situation.
Let's say that two men are about to get into a fight. Someone coming up and saying: "It's evil to raise your hand in anger against your own clansman!" can resolve the situation and keep the two from fighting, if we assume that everyone in the situation can agree on that value judgement and treat it as normative.
For this "moral trump card" to work we need to have some level of conformity.
In some religions and philosophies the role of this "moral trump card" is enforced with connecting the moral evaluations into a sort of "moral reality" where these values exist as irrefutable truths. This of course is to give the demand to conform more weight.
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Noone shall pass, but no one besides him shall pass.
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Miru
Supreme Hero
A leaf in the river of time
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posted July 22, 2011 05:58 AM |
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Good and Evil are more heuristics than logistics - things you get a sense for but are hard to quantify.
As I said in my leveling system thread, I like how D&D separated out lawful / chaotic, but I think it can be further separated into other things like Order/Chaos, Sympathy/Indifference, Personal Sacrifice/Greed, as well as things people include in their judgment of others evil such as convenience and familiariness.
Order / Chaos meaning how much someone is willing to follow laws and principles
Sympathy / Indifference meaning how much compassion you express towards others
Personal Sacrafice / Greed meaning whether you do what is right or for the best of all, or help yourself
As for the last two they need a bit of explanation, but think in terms of aliens.
If there was a situation where there were hundreds of trillions of aliens across they galaxy and their survival somehow required our extinction (humans or all others must die), the good thing to do would be kill all of them humans, but most humans would see them as evil because they are trying to kill us and are aliens we don't know or care about.
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I wish I were employed by a stupendous paragraph, with capitalized English words and expressions.
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JollyJoker
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
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posted July 22, 2011 08:17 AM |
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I don't find these things so hard to explain, when we consider that we are "missing" a couple thousand years in human history. 5000 years are a long time - and this is the time we can look back into the past with a certain amount of detail.
The reason is, that at that point human civilization had already come a long way and was able to leave things that would survive that long.
Furthermore we know that in the time 10.000-14.000 years ago the change came from hunter/gatherer to permanent settlement and active agriculture.
That leaves basically 5000 years where the development took place from settling down to having relatively big towns, which is quite a lot of time.
Generally I don't believe good/evil is necessary in raising children. Education, 10.000 BC will have been dictated by necessity, not by understanding, so children will have been simply taught certain things as "being that way".
However, "children" (as an example for humans that don't KNOW a lot, but live and experience life anyway), tend to a) personalize everything and b) put themselves into the centre, so everything that happens is somehow connected with them or induced by them or is meaningful for them, which accounts for the development of religion, which in the beginning has been a personalizing of "observed forces".
Which means, that we have two "levels of existance" here:
a) the role of the individual within the world, who is a plaything of external forces and may have good or bad luck and so on.
b) the role of the individual within his/her social surroundings (family, clan, hamlet
b) will have led to behaviour codices about the sharing of work useful for the whole respective community and will have led to laws eventually.
a) will have led to the same for everything outside of that (if forces become personalized it means you can try to influence them, win them over, soothe them, and so on.
In that situation communities are relatively small, and life is dangerous. Good is simply a word for a benign force. For example the sun as the giver of light and warmth. Evil is just a word for malign - this might be a term for a clan of reavers or a natural force that seems malign.
So in the end good/evil is simply the distinction between friendly and enemy for a forming collective mind which - like that of a child - brings everything into relation to themselves.
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