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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2420 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.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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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?

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?

By arbitrary, I mean that there's no particular characteristics that they must take on, other than the fact that they're fundamental values. A person could have a fundamental value of praising God or of making sure that the final digit of the S&P500 closing value each day is 6, or of watching Mrs. Doubtfire as many times as possible in their lifetime, or anything else. It's arbitrary.

Random, as I understand it, means impossible to predict (if not literally, at least practically). I coin flip is random in that one cannot, with confidence, claim that either of the 2 outcomes (ignoring the edge and the shape of actual IRL coins causing bias - again, practically) is more likely than the other. When I see, say, a woman wearing a nun's habit praying in a church, I believe that can make predictions about her fundamental values that are more likely than chance to be correct.

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.

It's not a high bar. Far from 'extremely high'. Lots of sociopaths exist. Lots of unprovoked cruelty occurs in this world, both from the sociopaths and from many other people. It was not to 'punish badness' that Germans tortured Jews.

If you read the literature, most of people committing the atrocities - including the Nazi atrocities - are not psychopaths. They are pretty usual people. That's the whole "banality of evil" thing. Put in the right circumstances, with the right motivations and the right indoctrination, a real lot of people would commit atrocities - not because they derive perverse pleasure from causing suffering - in fact, they very well may not - but because they consider it necessary to achieve some beneficial ends, or simply because it's the easiest way to go. Nazis didn't happen because German population suddenly turned mentally ill. They happened because Nazis were successful in convincing part of the population in their narrative, and scared the rest of the population enough to go along. That's what makes it so scary - it's not some insane Joker or Hannibal Lecter that does all those things. It's just regular people, in suitable circumstances, with suitable mind disposition.

Just because someone thinks they are doing something for good doesn't mean it's their true motivation though. People who enjoy cruelty, find purges orderly and tell themselves they're helping could also be included in a definition of evil. This would cover e.g. a sadistic cop.

Just because someone thinks they are doing something for good doesn't mean it's their true motivation though.

We'd get into very deep weeds here. How do we know what is "true" motivation and what is self-delusion? We can't read minds. How do we know if the sadistic cop enjoys causing pain, or enjoys the righteousness of his anger agains the criminals (in his own view)? I don't think it is possible, and I don't think it matters too much. If you do evil, and think it's good, it's still evil. There could be a possibility of opening the eyes of the evildoer to the true nature of their deeds, and thus convincing them to stop, but this possibility is remote and theoretical. Most people would find a million of excuses rather than admit "I was doing evil".

I don't think it has to be all that deep. It's not like you require a truly Freudian and unfalsifiable notion of a subconscious to understand the idea of someone who has a false narrative that gives them a license do what their baser self really wants to do. Confronting the fallible bad guy with a truth about themselves that they can't handle but deep down know is true is a common part of thousands of thrillers.

As you say, we're deep in the weeds here though.

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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