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PaperclipPerfector  16hr ago (text post)   507 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?

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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 an extremely high bar. Excepting rare psychopaths, almost nobody is being cruel for the sake of cruelty. The Holy Inquisition burned heretics for their own good - after their body had been destroyed, the important part - the soul - would be cleansed and would have a chance for eternal life. Who wouldn't prefer a brief short-term pain to the eternal never-ending torment? Communists exterminated millions - to give happiness and prosperity to billions (or at least they thought so - it didn't work out that way..). Nazis had the same kind of idea - their list of "bad" people was based on genetics rather than class, but otherwise same structure. Very rarely somebody sets out to do evil by trying to do evil - they always are the heroes in their own story.

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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