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PaperclipPerfector  15hr ago (text post)   468 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 12, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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You're a member of the plucky rebels that are fighting against the evil empire that believes in X, an idea you find absolutely evil and abhorrent. The Big Bad Emperor is beyond your reach right now, but you can assassinate some of his most important supporters: Alice, Bob or Carol.

Alice is probably the better person between you two. She's smart, brave, loyal. There's only one difference: she sincerely believes that X is good.

Bob probably doesn't believe that X is good. Or that X is evil. He simply believes the side to be on is the one that is winning.

Carol probably doesn't believe that X is good. If anything, she probably finds it abhorrent, just like you. However, she is still doing her job and doing it well because otherwise she will be replaced by a true believer in X.

Which one of the three henchmen is the evilest? Which one should the plucky rebels assassinate first? If the answers to these questions are different, are the plucky rebels truly fighting on the side of good?

Which one should the plucky rebels assassinate first?

The one with the least guards (or the most predictable route). I mean, if you somehow arrived at the conclusion personal assassination is what you need to do to set back the Evil Empire, then it doesn't matter who of them loves kittens the most. You are not exacting personal judgement for the merits of their character, you are conducting a military action against the load-bearing components of the empire. As long as they are these components, their personal beliefs are of little relevance. Unless, of course, you can cause the same or more damage by other means - e.g. by inducing Bob to defect with an outrageous bribe or by converting Carol. But if that's not feasible, then see above.

Which one of the three henchmen is the evilest? Which one should the plucky rebels assassinate first?

Alice, Alice. Bob & Carol can be reasoned with, persuaded, or manipulated: only Alice believes that X is an unambiguous good; this is, as you assert, "absolutely evil and abhorrent": it's irreconcilable. You simply need to kill enough Alices to trigger a preference cascade. To prevent the Evil Empire from ever reconstituting itself you'll need to be thorough and completely erase every "true believer" in X, but you can save cleaning up the incompetent and ineffectual ones until after your rebels have consolidated power. The true believers like Alice are the biggest threat -- as they're smart, once they start to lose they'll cloak their belief in X and make it hard to differentiate them from Bob and Carol, then secretly advocate for X in the shadows. Hopefully the "X" in question is something like Christianity in Edo Japan and you can just demand the Alices to step on or desecrate some sacred icon and kill them if they refuse.

Agreed. Bob is likely to defect if it looks like the Empire will lose (or that he himself might pay the cost), and Carol is likely to either begin sandbagging or resign entirely.

In terms of evilness? Well, as a true believer in an evil cause, that would again be Alice. But I would say she is still more virtuous than Bob, who's an opportunistic mercenary.

I would rather Bob be killed, and Alice survive to reconstruction as a matter of personal preference, but in terms of pragmatic effectiveness, she's got to be the target.

Who’s most critical to the regime? You’re a soldier fighting a war, seeking a military objective(‘destroy the evil empire’), not trying to determine individual guilt.

I suspect that the tactically correct answer is to attempt to turn Carol as a source and kill Alice. But it’s going to depend on the circumstances.

For the purposes of assassination I don't care which one is the evilest. I'm not here to punish them individually for being evil, I want to do damage to the Evil Empire.

Killing a true believer and especially a sympathetic true believer seems like a great way to consolidate the Evil Empire followers around a martyr. Instead I'd say the plucky rebels should assassinate Bob, to send a message to the most apathetic, opportunist and amoral Evil Empire henchmen (which I expect to be the majority) that rather than the most loyal or the most efficient, it could be any one of them.

Which one should the plucky rebels assassinate first?

Why does it matter who you strike first? Timeline doesn't seem like strong evidence of guilt or righteousness; the most guilty Nazis or Confederates weren't killed first.

Because you want to minimize the area under the curve of the Evil Empire's power.

But how does the morality or lack thereof of the targets influence minimizing the power of the Evil Empire? It seems like the relevant information is not provided.

Assume all three are equally important for the successful existence of the evil empire.

I assume they only get one chance during the given strategically significant period of time.

How does the smart, brave, loyal person come to sincerely believe in the absolutely evil and abhorrent X? Is she simply misinformed and deluded? Either she or 'you' or both have fatally misperceived something.

I guess I would deeply examine my sources, my reasoning and my beliefs before doing any judgements of evil and assassinations, to try and find out who is in fact deluded, first of all.

How does the smart, brave, loyal person come to sincerely believe in the absolutely evil and abhorrent X? Is she simply misinformed and deluded? Either she or 'you' or both have fatally misperceived something.

I don't think this follows. I think it's entirely possible for two equally intelligent, brave, loyal, [insert good adjective here] people to look at the same set of facts and come to equal and opposite conclusions about the goodness of the exact same thing, because people can have arbitrary fundamental values that inform every other value they have.

If the difference is due to fundamental values, then Alice is not a better person than me.

I interpreted the original hypothetical as Alice being better in all things except for fundamental morality - hence why she thinks something as evil as X is good.

If the fundamental values are simply arbitrary or random, are they actually 'good and right' and worth holding on to?

They're arbitrary, but not random. They're not "good and right" in some sort of objective sense, and whether they're worth holding onto would depend heavily on the exact specifics. Whether it's possible not to hold onto those is also a separate question that I think the answer is No to most people in most contexts.

When you differentiate between 'arbitrary' and 'random' you are thinking that the arbitrary one is determined by the environment around the person, whatever it might be, while 'random' would be like a random number generator?

Yes, but how is that surprising? Look at the drama over trans issues, or mass migration, or MAID, or models of criminal justice... people end up with polar opposite values all the time, and it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how smart, brave, or loyal they are.

I set a higher bar for categorical Evil than what any of those issues represent. Someone supporting mass migration aren't being cruel for the sake of cruelty (my definition of evil).

That's a rather lax definition, it lets off the hook every utopian mass-murdering sociopath.

Have there been mass-murdering sociopaths who did it out of utopian dreams, rather than those being fig leaves?

Hard to say without being able to read someone's mind, and you might as well ask the same question about mass migration supporters.

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