The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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What's that? Whence consensus?
I know it when I see it. I think it's not particularly controversial that genocide is generally considered to be, at the very least, in bad taste.
Not controversial among whom? Europeans had been fine with genocide as "kill them all" until about 19th century when the "white man's burden" took over, but if you extend the definition of genocide to forced population control and cultural suppression, then well into 20th century. Many non-European cultures are still fine with the former one (of course, when applies to really bad people over there). They may not be stressing this point when talking to Europeans, but their actions and even their words when not talking to Europeans show that clearly. I don't think it's as non-controversial as you think it is.
No, Europeans weren't fine with genocide before that. If nothing else, the concept of "genocide" (as "kill them all" as opposed to "please stop being like that, here is a school") didn't exist before industrial states. The closest thing in the European world would be the sack of cities or the expulsion of defeated enemies like various Indian tribes, but that was always justified as some kind of defensive fair play. The idea of systematically exterminating a helpless population, who had committed no crime to warrant a temporary state of exception, was anathema to European Christian culture. In the colonial cases where pre-modern Europeans took tiny baby steps towards "genocide", it was condemned by clerics (and, usually, by bean-counters pointing out that it was a waste of perfectly good human resources). Even when Caesar commits genocide the Roman sources treat it as "damn you didn't have to do 'em like that, but I guess that's how larger-than-life you are".
How about this one, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ta%C3%ADno_genocide
And yes, I agree that at least "kill them all" does not sit very well with Christian doctrines, but I don't think religious doctrines had ever been a major impediment to doing what people wanted to be doing.
Ah, Las Casas, the Genocide Studies Program at Yale, abuses of the encomienda system, and it turns out it actually wasn't smallpox. The greatest hits. I don't consider the Wikipedia page probative at all (the ESL involved is amusing but also suspicious: "However, descendants of the Taíno continue to live and their disappearance from records was part of a fictional story created by the Spanish Empire with the intention of erasing them from history.") The Black Legend runs deep, even if it's passed from Anglo-Dutch propagandists to anti-colonial academics.
I think it's entirely possible that, between diseases, resource exploitation, and the Malthusian conditions of the New World, the Spanish wiped out entire populations of natives, including many cultures smaller than the Taino. But "genocide" is the intentional destruction of a people based on their identity. If aliens landed their starship and crushed Switzerland, that would not be the Swiss Genocide.
I'll make two further points: first, I would hold up Las Casas as evidence that this sort of thing was not sanctioned by European culture of the time. The Church and Crown consistently attempted to reign in the frontier warlords and planters. Secondly, I have no basis to claim this and have looked up zero evidence, but I would bet that if we were to look at genetic evidence from Taino graves and at modern Dominicans, we would find a nontrivial fraction of Taino genes in the Dominican Republic (Haiti, obviously, is a monoethnic state founded on actual genocide, but the DR is a more representative sample).
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I definitely do not extend the definition of genocide to include cultural conversion, and even population control is iffy, unless the overt or wink-wink goal is to reduce the population of undesirables to zero.
The Holocaust? Genocide. They killed just as many Jews as they could. Gaza? Not a genocide. If the population in Gaza increased during the period of relevance, then clearly it's a very half-arsed genocide.
I'm sure that you could find majority support for child sacrifice at certain periods of human history, or at least as a widespread belief and practice. When I talk about consensus morality, I'm talking today. Even outside the West, attitudes toward it lean more towards liberal norms as opposed to Hutu and Tutsi willingness to get one in at all costs.
This definition is valid at, like, every snapshot point in time, then, yes? The same action could be "evil" at one point in time and "not evil" at a different point in time?
Yes.
I need to go hunting on SMBC, because he had to have made a comic about this. If not, he really needs to.
That is, I'm pretty sure you've just solved your problem of evil, in quite the unique way.
It certainly seems logically plausible that whatever god may have created the universe, at the time that he/she/it created the universe, thought, "Hmmmm, I wonder if it would be evil to create a universe where eventually, one day, maybe, depending on how things go, a two year old will get ALL?" Perhaps this deity looked around, took an opinion poll to gauge the vibes, determined from the (presumably otherwise empty) room that it seemed a-ok, and proceeded to create said universe. Guess that just wasn't evil, by a common sense and consensus definition of the term.
I'm not entirely sure what you're on about, but sure? Why not.
If moral relativism or the "problem" of theodicy are new to you, I suppose Google has sources that might be enlightening.
They're very not new to me, but apparently, they're pretty new to you, because you thought that this was a very serious issue for you. But now you've solved your own problem, in like a quarter of a second. Record time in philosophy! Just needed a common sense and consensus definition of evil!
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Whence a consensus that evil means "in bad taste"? I guess perhaps you're not incorporating consensus at this level of generality, so are you instead just asserting that your definition of evil is "something done in bad taste, as measured by some vibes about a consensus" or something?
The "bad taste" phrasing was obviously tongue-in-cheek, but the serious point stands. You can be a moral anti-realist and still condemn genocide, because "condemning genocide" doesn't require believing in moral facts. It just requires having preferences about how humans should treat each other, noticing that most humans share those preferences, and being willing to enforce them.
Those are all necessary and sufficient conditions in your definition of evil? We can go through them one by one, but maybe let's just start with the last one. If, uh, someone (who?) isn't "willing to enforce" a "preference", then it's, uh, not evil to go against it? What even is "willing to enforce"? Like, does the enforcement need to be realized? Can it be weighed against other things? If the someone (who?) is like, "Yeah, I'm willing to enforce this, but due to other considerations (other priorities, something inherently difficult about detection or enforcement, etc.), I'm not going to put too much time and effort into it," does that still count for determining whether something is evil or not?
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