If you’re a Nazi and you take a pill that causes you to believe Jews are dangerous nonsentient vampires, is killing Jews thereafter less evil? Well, probably in that case all the evil moves causally upstream into the pill-taking. But that, I think, is the same thing we’re saying about the pill that is Mormonism.
And of course there’s no reason for it to stop there. For some reason we haven’t explicitly talked about this here AFAICT, but if you’re a materialist there’s no hope of assigning ultimate evil to people anyway, and there’s no point in trying. I’m not saying you disagree.
I don’t know by what words to call it, but there is something that to me differentiates the moral qualities of Joseph Smith teaching Mormonism to his followers, and Wednesday’s parents teaching it to her: Joseph Smith (I assign high probability) explicitly knew Mormonism to be false, and spread belief in it, knowing its likely consequences, in order to increase his own wealth, status, and opportunity for sex.
That is also the case we’re considering in the context of this post—someone who has evidence that Mormonism is false, but chooses to ignore this evidence for personal gain, and spreads belief in Mormonism by first spreading it in herself.
From one perspective, assuming that spreading lies for profit is actually wrong, that most people would see it on reflection as a less preferable option, and assuming that JS wasn’t a mutant, he was mistaken about whether he improved his life by doing so.
Beyond that, I’d find it hard to call any insane person “evil.” How do we blame somebody for receiving incorrect sensory inputs?
Of course, this gets into all kinds of analytic philosophy and the “social construction” of sanity. Which is precisely why I want us to be careful what we call evil.
If you’re a Nazi and you take a pill that causes you to believe Jews are dangerous nonsentient vampires, is killing Jews thereafter less evil? Well, probably in that case all the evil moves causally upstream into the pill-taking. But that, I think, is the same thing we’re saying about the pill that is Mormonism.
but the pill was administered you by your parents, who received one from their parents...
if the evil moves upstream to the pill-taking then all (or most) of the evil of mormonism moves upstream to Joseph Smith.
And of course there’s no reason for it to stop there. For some reason we haven’t explicitly talked about this here AFAICT, but if you’re a materialist there’s no hope of assigning ultimate evil to people anyway, and there’s no point in trying. I’m not saying you disagree.
I don’t know by what words to call it, but there is something that to me differentiates the moral qualities of Joseph Smith teaching Mormonism to his followers, and Wednesday’s parents teaching it to her: Joseph Smith (I assign high probability) explicitly knew Mormonism to be false, and spread belief in it, knowing its likely consequences, in order to increase his own wealth, status, and opportunity for sex.
That is also the case we’re considering in the context of this post—someone who has evidence that Mormonism is false, but chooses to ignore this evidence for personal gain, and spreads belief in Mormonism by first spreading it in herself.
From one perspective, assuming that spreading lies for profit is actually wrong, that most people would see it on reflection as a less preferable option, and assuming that JS wasn’t a mutant, he was mistaken about whether he improved his life by doing so.
fixed =)
Beyond that, I’d find it hard to call any insane person “evil.” How do we blame somebody for receiving incorrect sensory inputs?
Of course, this gets into all kinds of analytic philosophy and the “social construction” of sanity. Which is precisely why I want us to be careful what we call evil.