People would often reduce their own prize if it means that their opponent’s is reduced more.
This tells me we care more about relative status than absolute. See: anyone saying anything remotely critical of capitalism in the 21st century in the United States.
This poll asked people if they did “malicious online activity directed at somebody they didn’t know”
You mean the default way to gain status on Twitter?
But yes, pure cruelty does exist. What of the fact that chimpanzees are cruel but have no concept of evil? This tells me maybe cruelty serves a self-interested purpose in dominance-based status hierarchies. If the human bullies don’t know that, it wouldn’t be the first evolved behavior that humans do without fully knowing why.
Whenever I try to analyze evil, I find banality all the way down.
This tells me we care more about relative status than absolute. See: anyone saying anything remotely critical of capitalism in the 21st century in the United States.
You mean the default way to gain status on Twitter?
But yes, pure cruelty does exist. What of the fact that chimpanzees are cruel but have no concept of evil? This tells me maybe cruelty serves a self-interested purpose in dominance-based status hierarchies. If the human bullies don’t know that, it wouldn’t be the first evolved behavior that humans do without fully knowing why.
Whenever I try to analyze evil, I find banality all the way down.
But… how do you know that chimpanzees have no concept of evil?
Evil is not a semantic primitive that all human languages have. It’s a quite abstract concept.
“Bad” is, though.
That word doesn’t mean the same thing as evil. Bad is much less abstract.
Yeah “bad” is like “don’t climb the ladder or we get the hose”.