[Itse]

Originally Posted by nik-

Just because it happens and has happened before, doesn't mean it's not evil. Your second assumption is just laughable, but actually kind of sad. I'm not even sure what you're trying to accomplish there.

I'll give you my favourite example of "what is evil, anyway?" I hope it helps you see my point.

After the Finnish civil war the winning side executed or just flat out murdered something like 20,000 people from the losing side. Relative to our population at the time, that rates pretty high in all time genocide lists. The war was over after all, they had surrendered.

Were the people doing it "evil"? I have a really hard time seeing it that way, because after those events the violence stopped and those people turned Finland into a really good place to live by any reasonable standard, and I can't see Evil people doing that.

Was the act evil? Yeah, I'd say so. But even an extreme evil act does not make evil people.

Furthermore, it is said that killing all the "reds" was a deliberate choice, done mainly to stabilize the country. Was it really necessary? Nobody can say because we can't test the other option, but what we do know is that the country has been really stable since. Is the motive on excuse? Not really, otherwise we'd have to excuse Hitler too.

But it does make the question of "evil" somewhat complicated.

It doesn't take evil people to do evil things, especially in a war.

The existence of an act in previous wars doesn't render the act "not evil".

I agree, but if an act can be described both as "evil" and "typical in those circumstances", I think it follows that the people committing those acts are more likely to be "normal" rather than "evil".

Of course some people say that the fact that normal people often do evil things means that people are evil by nature. It's a philosophical position I don't personally hold, but I can see why some do.

That said, if all people are evil, then doesn't that make the whole concept of "evil people" rather meaningless? (Which of course is exactly the conclusion a lot of people have drawn.)

To get back to the point, ISIS doing evil things does not mean that ISIS is in itself evil. It mostly just means that ISIS is fighting in a civil war.


Does it make those specific executions okay? No, but then again I have no context in which to evaluate what happened. What I saw was people shooting people, and not in any particularly gruesome way. Maybe the people needed to be executed for there to be less fighting? I don't know.

Of course if you think that using dead bodies to instill fear is particularly evil, I'm not going to say you're wrong, but to me a dead body is just an object. You generally can't do evil things to objects. (Doing things to a body it can make me call a person sick though.)

For me to call people evil, they would have to do things that are seriously unnecessarily cruel. Torture for example is IMO evil.

In Afghanistan some warlords murdered whole villages by locking them up in metal crates that they left out in the sun. That was evil.