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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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.
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?
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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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