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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Notes -
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.
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 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?
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