Your intuitions about what’s good and what’s evil are fully consistent with morality being relative, and with them being social constructs. You are deeply embedded in many overlapping cultures and groups, and your beliefs about good and evil will naturally align with what they want you to believe (which in many cases is what they actually believe, but there’s a LOT of hypocrisy on this topic, so it’s not perfectly clear).
I personally like those guidelines. Though I’d call it good to help others EVEN if you benefit in doing so, and evil to do significant net harm, but with a pretty big carveout for small harms which can be modeled as benefits on different dimensions. And my liking them doesn’t make them real or objective.
The first paragraph is equivalent to saying that “all good & evil is socially constructed because we live in a society”, and I don’t want to call someone wrong, so let me try to explain...
An accurate model of Good & Evil will hold true, valid, and meaningful among any population of agents: human, animal, artificial, or otherwise. It is not at all depentent on existing in our current, modern society. Populations that do significant amounts of Good amongst each other generally thrive & are resilient (e.g. humans, ants, rats, wolves, cells in any body, many others), even though some individuals may fail or die horribly. Populations which do significant amounts of Evil tend to be less resilient, or destroy themselves (e.g. high crime areas, cancer cells), even though certain members of those populations may be wildly successful, at least temporarily.
This isn’t even a human-centric model, so it’s not “constructed by society”. It seems to me more likely to be a model that societies have to conform to, in order to exist in a form that is recognizeable as a society.
I apologize for being flippant, and thank you for replying, as having to overcome challenges to this helps me figure it out more!
An accurate model of Good & Evil will hold true, valid, and meaningful among any population of agents: human, animal, artificial, or otherwise.
I look forward to seeing such a model. Or even the foundation of such a model and an indication of how you know it’s truly about good and evil, rather than efficient and in-.
Your intuitions about what’s good and what’s evil are fully consistent with morality being relative, and with them being social constructs. You are deeply embedded in many overlapping cultures and groups, and your beliefs about good and evil will naturally align with what they want you to believe (which in many cases is what they actually believe, but there’s a LOT of hypocrisy on this topic, so it’s not perfectly clear).
I personally like those guidelines. Though I’d call it good to help others EVEN if you benefit in doing so, and evil to do significant net harm, but with a pretty big carveout for small harms which can be modeled as benefits on different dimensions. And my liking them doesn’t make them real or objective.
The first paragraph is equivalent to saying that “all good & evil is socially constructed because we live in a society”, and I don’t want to call someone wrong, so let me try to explain...
An accurate model of Good & Evil will hold true, valid, and meaningful among any population of agents: human, animal, artificial, or otherwise. It is not at all depentent on existing in our current, modern society. Populations that do significant amounts of Good amongst each other generally thrive & are resilient (e.g. humans, ants, rats, wolves, cells in any body, many others), even though some individuals may fail or die horribly. Populations which do significant amounts of Evil tend to be less resilient, or destroy themselves (e.g. high crime areas, cancer cells), even though certain members of those populations may be wildly successful, at least temporarily.
This isn’t even a human-centric model, so it’s not “constructed by society”. It seems to me more likely to be a model that societies have to conform to, in order to exist in a form that is recognizeable as a society.
I apologize for being flippant, and thank you for replying, as having to overcome challenges to this helps me figure it out more!
I look forward to seeing such a model. Or even the foundation of such a model and an indication of how you know it’s truly about good and evil, rather than efficient and in-.