The point is that some things are pre-analytically evil. No matter how much we worry at the concept, slavery and genocide are still evil—we know these things stronger than we know the preconditions for the reasoning process to the contrary—I submit that there is simply no argument sufficiently strong to overturn that judgment.
In the American civil war, some people fought against slavery and others fought to continue slavery. If your statement above is correct, it would seem that everybody who fought to continue slavery was evil. Was their pre-analytical “sense of evil” somehow missing or damaged? If your statement above is correct, it would seem that there is no possible case in which a rational argument caused a person to change sides in the civil war. This seems highly unlikely to me.
Culture, including ethics, evolves over time. Actions that were once morally acceptable are no longer considered morally acceptable. I don’t claim to understand all the forces that govern the evolution of ethics, but it is plain to see that our ethical systems have evolved. Slavery was once accepted and considered ethical by many; now it is not accepted. Women were once not allowed to vote; now they can vote.
To say that something is “pre-analytically evil” seems to be an excuse for avoiding rational, scientific analysis of the epistemology and ontology of our ethical judgments.
The point is that some things are pre-analytically evil. No matter how much we worry at the concept, slavery and genocide are still evil—we know these things stronger than we know the preconditions for the reasoning process to the contrary—I submit that there is simply no argument sufficiently strong to overturn that judgment.
In the American civil war, some people fought against slavery and others fought to continue slavery. If your statement above is correct, it would seem that everybody who fought to continue slavery was evil. Was their pre-analytical “sense of evil” somehow missing or damaged? If your statement above is correct, it would seem that there is no possible case in which a rational argument caused a person to change sides in the civil war. This seems highly unlikely to me.
Culture, including ethics, evolves over time. Actions that were once morally acceptable are no longer considered morally acceptable. I don’t claim to understand all the forces that govern the evolution of ethics, but it is plain to see that our ethical systems have evolved. Slavery was once accepted and considered ethical by many; now it is not accepted. Women were once not allowed to vote; now they can vote.
To say that something is “pre-analytically evil” seems to be an excuse for avoiding rational, scientific analysis of the epistemology and ontology of our ethical judgments.