We can debate good vs. evil in an academic sense, but let's talk something a little more...tangible.
I just watched a Nat Geo. special on the Taliban. When Pakistani and U.S. forces rolled into the middle of their stronghold at the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan last year, they found a mosque in the heart of their camp. In it, there were painted pictures of a heavenly scene filled with flowers and virgins. It's where suicide bombers had their last rites before they carried out their mission. A little slice of heaven.
Next to the pictures, scrawled in blood, were the names of the suicide bombers and the usual "death to the infidel" "death to America."
Also in the compound was a mass grave where all the people that had been kidnapped or captured by the Taliban fighters eventually ended up, after being imprisoned, tortured, filmed for propaganda and then beheaded.
Now...what do you call that? More importantly, how do you deal with that? What's my definition of evil? Something that will never stop, and respects nothing, in pursuit of what it wants. It has no fear, it has no real weaknesses and it is totally committed.
That's evil. Take that example, stick it in the West with Christian branding, and I'd call it evil. Strip it of religion entirely, attach a name or nationality to it instead, and I'd call it evil still.
I think that you will find that your good is someone else's evil, and that pretty much every evil thing you can think of has, at some point, been done due to human morality. You can only have system of pure elements(such as good and evil) with strict definitions and measurable traits(such as racial traits, allegiance to an organisation that your government disagrees with, looking at the monarch's property the wrong way...). Human society currently has no objective means of acquiring such definitions...
I doubt we ever will. Human nature likes to defy categorization, and ultimately we are forced to rely on judgment and values to...judge values. It's a circular problem. I don't fault people for believing stuff, everyone has to believe something. But that means you eventually have to take a side...hence why I believe in fundamental concepts of good and evil. We're wired for it even as we struggle against it, and the freedom to have beliefs means there must be beliefs you oppose. What you oppose is therefore what is evil. I suppose we're fortunate that the world tends to agree on evil; just not who is committing it.
Actually, that problem only comes up because of the fictional class of "unlawful combatants" that the US invented to circumvent their own laws. Either you are a soldier and thus fall under POW, or you are a civilian and thus fall under criminal law. Note that civilian does not mean citizen of the US (or whatever country we are talking about). Criminal law can and will be aimed at citizens of other countries as well. Thus, that extra-class is actually not necessary, as anyone who is not part of a military is a civilian and thus subject to such civilian laws.
See my above example from that documentary. What would YOU call those guys? Civilians? Soldiers? Soldiers of what? Soldiers for whom? Extremist Islam? Are you going to make war on Islam, and in effect validate their stance as holy warriors?
Yeah, it sucks to watch us circumvent our own laws....but what option was there? As civilians we couldn't hold them or interrogate them. As soldiers, we were casting them in the light they wanted to be seen in. By sticking them in limbo, the US got the best of both worlds (along with a ton of condemnation.)
I wonder whether you would subscribe to my (incomplete) list of potential villains? If I were to subscribe to your agenda, I would definitely say those persons are evil incarnate and should be removed from humanity as soon as possible.
So, we have the problem of defining evil (unlike the world of comic books, people in reality don't define themselves as evil, you know) and then the big question of causing harm to innocent people.
And here we introduce the gray scale. Were we to
truly know these people, the scale would slide toward the darker or the lighter, I'm sure.
My answer though would be that there are lesser forms of evil in the world that we tolerate every day, and that the line for most people is probably on the darker side. But there IS a line, and where that line is something I think every individual has to decide for themselves as an individual. Where Bush's or the Pope's internal line is....who knows. I judge them by my metrics.
That's a murky answer I know....but that's why I prefer villainy in it's purist form. I don't have to mince answers. I like to think I know pure evil when I see it. But it's a label I don't like giving out. Some people are just more evil than others.
Author
Topic: Boing boing did an article about experiments in torture. (Read 4084 times)