Simon Paynton

I think it’s a healthy reality check for anybody.

My takeaway messages are: 1) make the most of life while we have it; 2) be grateful that we have it at all.

It depends how you define evil.

We could call it, causing harm for pleasure, or causing harm for some unworthy reason to do with self-preservation, such as might involve lies.

Baboons are a very spiteful species, and they also have a very strong dominance heirarchy.  Other species may well have been observed to be spiteful (causing harm for no…[Read more]

What I mean is, people from other groups are seen as weird, but if that group becomes a threat to “our” group, then those people are also seen as bad.

“Mother-nature wise, the purpose of life is to survive and create offspring.”

– this carries the implication that it’s also to thrive, and to do this, we need to put the right conditions in place, do the right things, have the right attitudes etc.

@tomsarbeck – I think the terms can be manipulated for political purposes, but surely the “others” only go from “weird” to “bad” when they become a threat to “us”.

Maybe he’s depressed.  The first time I got depressed, I spent the whole time asking, “what’s the point?”, presumably because my then-goals didn’t seem worthwhile (or rather, I didn’t have any).  What’s more, I felt it was impossible to get any or have any.

So, I think that evil is not so much a human invention, as an emergent property of: 1) all being competitive individuals 2) in a world where we have to cooperate to survive.

Natural selection is relative to those around us, so it’s not enough to be doing well, there is a tension between doing better than others and helping others.

Competition…[Read more]

This is excellent too

“What would you call or label the absence of evil?”

– peace.

We could say that those other kinds of horribleness are just different degrees and types of evil.

“some kind of superpower”

– not a superpower, but an energy – the competitive side of human nature that thinks only of “myself” and will either use or abuse others to get what they want.  This is separate from the prosocial cooperative side of human nature that thinks of “you” or “us”.

I’m coming to the conclusion that psychopaths usually hurt…[Read more]

Some of the things that people I know have been through at the hands of others can only be described as evil.  Where someone wants all their own pleasure at someone else’s expense, this can only be described as evil.

@unseen – I think “good” and “evil” are real and not constructs.  Hitler’s Germany was an evil place where people did evil things.  Evil reigned for a number of years.  Isis are evil, and where Isis reign, evil reigns.

@jakelafort – “The sophisitication of cooperation is quite remarkable not only intra-species but among different species.”

– it…[Read more]

It’s the degree of sophistication of human coopertion, together with its absolute necessity for survival, that lead to all the special abilities and instincts that humans have (sense of right and wrong, reputation, religion, for example, also rationality and probably language).

Wolves, elephants and dolphins also cooperate, but they don’t have to…[Read more]

The missing ingredient(s) that humans have that all other species don’t, is cooperation, and a thing which it probably caused – symbolic language.  Cooperation is necessary for survival in the environments and niches that humans live in.

Obligate cooperation leads to religion, to knowing good or evil, and to judging each other.

It leads to…[Read more]

It’s a stage we all go through.  The tragedy of life can be unbearable the first time we encounter it.  Over time, we learn to cope with it.  I think it took me years, it isn’t easy.