But most people do work with a implicit belief in objective morality even if they seldom do stop to think about it. Isn’t it a bit misleading to use it in another sense without clarification? Though of course the kind of person who typically visits LW would probably not be confused.
Also let me point out that “evil” has a whole host of associations in Western popular culture and especially in fiction, saying something is evil can in certain circumstances be like saying something is Elvish. Sure most of these don’t ever make it into serious thinking, but they are there and can be employed in say propaganda.
Nor were their motivations completely opaque or untranslatable, as “alien” implies—any human could understand their position given the effort to do so, unpleasant though it might be.
Well baby eaters aren’t really that hard to understand. Looking back it seems that I may have affirmed the use of alien to describe this without thinking about it too much, a tendency to complete patterns in familiar ways I suppose .
I don’t think the question of whether one’s top goal(s) rely on an objective morality would really change the sense of “evil” for most people.
It’s unclear to me whether your second paragraph was intended as disagreement, since evil in fiction is often even more relative than I would argue. :)
But most people do work with a implicit belief in objective morality even if they seldom do stop to think about it. Isn’t it a bit misleading to use it in another sense without clarification? Though of course the kind of person who typically visits LW would probably not be confused.
Also let me point out that “evil” has a whole host of associations in Western popular culture and especially in fiction, saying something is evil can in certain circumstances be like saying something is Elvish. Sure most of these don’t ever make it into serious thinking, but they are there and can be employed in say propaganda.
Well baby eaters aren’t really that hard to understand. Looking back it seems that I may have affirmed the use of alien to describe this without thinking about it too much, a tendency to complete patterns in familiar ways I suppose .
I don’t think the question of whether one’s top goal(s) rely on an objective morality would really change the sense of “evil” for most people.
It’s unclear to me whether your second paragraph was intended as disagreement, since evil in fiction is often even more relative than I would argue. :)