You already asked this and several people explained that these are subjective ideas. You ignored the answers, and are now asking again?
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Why pose such a question if good and evil don’t exist? Why respond if good and evil don’t exist? Who cares about this question if good and evil don’t exist?
Well now…that’s just an excellent answer to the request that you define the words good and evil.
Not.
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It is important, because whether an act is considered good and evil can depend on context and on the viewpoint of the observer.
For example, anti-abortionists/forced birthers might consider abortion evil, while a 10-year old girl that became pregnant after being brutally raped by her drug-addict father might consider abortion a good thing.
Another example: Most people will consider killing someone an evil act. But if one can save 10 hostages by killing one kidnapper/terrorist, it can be excused, even a good act.
Therefore, good and evil depends heavily on context and who observes it. That’s why I would like your definition.
The classification of single acts into good or evil can be considered ethical dilemmas, ref. the trolley problem. For some interesting, yet absurd, versions of the trolley problem, have a look at the absurd trolley problems. Some of them are guaranteed to challenge your ethics thinking.
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To specifically answer your question, they exist as subjective concepts like the concept of the number 1. By subjective I mean that they only exists in minds capable of understanding those concepts. If there is an apple on the ground, a mind may think that there is one apple. This happens because the mind in question compared the definition of the number 1 to the apple. The apple doesn’t somehow embody the concept of the number one.
The concept of the number 1, like good and evil, doesn’t objectively exist somewhere. You can test if something is objective or not by theoretically removing all minds. If you remove all minds who understand what a $20 bill then all is left is a piece of paper with some ink on it. The piece of paper being worth $20 and the meaning of the text and numbers on it are all subjective. These are sometimes called shared fallacies, like American soil, this computer is mine, there are 5 cats, etc. Subjective ideas are only useful when they can be properly mapped to objective reality (using definitions) and other minds also know what they are.
God existing or not existing does not affect these concepts being subjective. I can explain this further if needed, but a god could only claim some form of moral authority over good an evil. That is why others are asking about definitions here because they matter a lot when talking about subjective concepts. For example, the Bible will say things are evil, but never say why, or more importantly, what the full definition of evil is.
This is a good question. Discussion on subjective topics are both interesting and can be helpful. Good and evil are extremes and there is a lot of middle ground here that ethics also covers. Personally, I would consider a poor single mom stealing something to feed her kids, maybe not good, but definitely not evil. A rich person stealing to get themselves richer I would consider to be evil. Once again, those are my definitions and having discussions to see what others use for definitions and why they use them is worthwhile. The goal isn’t to try to create some list of good and evil for some draconian purpose, but to improve ethics to help advance us as a species.
There are two mistakes that theists make here. First is that somehow good and evil existing means that their god exists. This is just another post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy (assuming the source). It is also quite circular: “We know good and evil exits because of god, we know god exists because good and evil exist.” The second is that we should assume the moral authority of god exists when we can’t prove that god exists in the first place. If people made up god and religion, then they made up the underlying ethics too, there is no way around that. Therefore, it makes no sense to believe in some religion’s morality if there is no evidence of it being true. In ancient Mesopotamia religions, which Judaism is a branch, they would claim their moral rules, aka good and evil, were true because the god they believed in said so. That’s nice and all, but without evidence of this, I’m going to assume it is just another person’s rules with really weak justification.
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I didn’t, though I’d imagine @Get_off_my_lawn was seeking clarity of your position, I have seen enough of your posts to know you’re evasive, and here to preach, but not debate.
What a stupid question, obviously to point out you already have an answer you’re ignoring, and now having repeated your question you’re ignoring it again, quelle surprise.
Lets try yes or no see if that helps, do you accept that people’s notions of what is evil or good are subjective and relative?
Why wouldn’t people care? People care about all manner of subjective beliefs they hold, you care about a deity you imagine to be real, yet it is an entirely subjective belief, and you can demonstrate no objective evidence it exists outside of your imagination.
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Exactly.
Is that nuanced enough for you @WhoAreYou?
Try this, was the Holocaust evil?
Now ask yourself if the Natzis thought it was evil?
See, relative and subjective.
You’d be amazed how many people struggle to understand that money is not objectively real.
Again this is exactly correct, and even if it claimed to be perfectly moral, we could only know it was so based on our subjective notions of morality, that’s why the imaginary deities people create tend to reflect the knowledge culture and morality of the societies and epochs from which they emerge, then change over time as these change. Most western Christians don’t burn witches anymore, yet the bible says quite clearly they should, hmm…
Ding ding ding, we have a winner…the argument from morality is a circular reasoning fallacy if ever there was one.
“Arguments from moral order are based on the asserted need for moral order to exist in the universe. They claim that, for this moral order to exist, God must exist to support it.”
All animals that have evolved to live in societal groups would necessarily have required the ability to learn what actions and behaviour the group would and would not accept, if they were to live long enough to reproduce, natural selection at work.
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As an example of the subjectivity involved in the terms “good” and “evil”, past mythology fanboys thought it was “good” to burn people alive for failing to conform to a mythology based doctrine. A disturbing number of present day mythology fanboys want to return to this hideousness.
This on its own destroys every piece of bluster and cant about “objective morality” by mythology fanboys, even before we recognise how ridiculous it is to present “Magic Man says so” as “objective morality”.
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Indeed, the ones like @WhoAreYou who proclaim a literal biblical truth of creationism, must never suffer a witch to live, and must view people as an abomination just because they happen to have been born gay, and must look on new born baby and when admiring it’s perfection admit it is cursed with “sin”. View a genocidal barbarically cruel deity that commits and encourages indiscriminate murder, promotes wars of ethnic cleansing, and sex trafficking prisoners as perfectly moral, and accept (as described specifically in Exodus 21) slavery as moral, and a great deal more besides.
Bullseye, that’s some good darts right there…
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I mentioned 2 mistakes that theists make and there are really at least 3. The third is that they tend to conflate relativism (absolute vs relative truth) with objective vs subjective reality. They want to think that some how us saying that morality is subjective is the same as saying that we are a relativist. The problem at the core of this is that a definition cannot be true or better on its own. How we define green isn’t truer or better than the way we define blue. Just like if I define murder one way, and you define it another way, neither of those are more true or better on its own. Something is only true when those definitions are compared against something they are meant to describe and they match. Better can be argued to the end of time. Usefulness is a more important quality as described above since us all having similar or the same definitions allow us to communicate.
Even if you have some god say that this is their preferred definition for something, it doesn’t make it better or more true. All they can do is try to enforce it through some kind of extortion. They would still be bound by the fact that it is inherently subjective.
From my personal experience, people who make this argument don’t understand basic philosophy, because even if their misunderstanding was correct, it would still take a logical fallacy to jump to their invisible friend being real.
@WhoAreYou still has not responded…
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Good post, I like this…
…in particular. It’s astonishing how many people, especially theists make this error. Dictionaries are compiled for clarity, as in communication clarity is more useful than ambiguity or confusion.
Since the first his posts have been evasive and dishonest. He is not here to analyse the snake oil, or test it’s efficacy, just to peddle it.
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It seems like a lot of folks we get in here are only interested in selling their invisible friend and just ignore it when their points are countered in a reasonable way.
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