164
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
164 points (96.6% liked)
News
23409 readers
2051 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
My problem with Singer’s approach is that it is intent agnostic; it paints with broad strokes and claims that causing bad things, whether intended or not, is evil. It also claims that failing to stop bad things from happening is evil.
Me putting on a clean shirt after a workout, even though it will increase my laundry water usage, is not done maliciously. So I don’t think that is evil, even though drought exists somewhere in the world.
And if a child could stop a robber by turning a key in a door, but is too scared to do so, that doesn’t make them evil.
On the other hand, if I chose to drive a car that can roll coal specifically so that I could cause ill effects (such as upsetting or doing harm to people or the environment), that would be malicious and therefore evil.
I don't necessarily agree with Singer's points either, but I think Singer is running on the reality that we can really only judge intent when it comes to ourselves, it's nigh-impossible to judge intent when we cannot know the contents of another humans mind. They can tell us how they feel, but some people are not honest about how they feel, and that can even come from things like social pressure or fear of rejection and other valid areas of feeling that are outside of "I am trying to deceive you for my own gain." However, despite that, often giving into social pressure or fears of rejection often result in people making decisions that make things worse, not better. Despite the intent, the "deception" still ends up causing issues among a group of people.
So while I agree intent matters, I believe the position Singer is starting from is "with literally billions of humans, it's impossibly to know intent of all of them and thus makes logical sense to judge by action."
I think it would be more effective to critique his idea that evil exists as he describes it. Nature, from whence humans came, is brutal and unforgiving and many animals in nature eat their mates or their children for survivals sake. He would call those actions "evil" although they are, in the context of nature, merely survival instinct. In this sense, it's easier to critique that he is essentially indicting nature itself as evil. Evil is a concept created by humans through our idea of "justice," which is also a concept humans created. I just think that's a more thorough way to debunk what he's saying.
I think it's an interesting idea to explore, but it doesn't mean we have to agree with it.