Are Some Children Just Born Evil? (1 Viewer)

[RobertR]

You're making a false distinction. You can't assume your neighbor's politics are the same as yours, any more than you can assume he has the same religion. Whatever generalizations you make about politics in a region can also be made about religion (x% Catholic/Protestant/Jewish/atheist, x% liberal/conservative/libertarian etc.)

 

[MarkHastings]

Through definition. Even though it may not be 100% solid, it sure is a lot more solid than "because I say so".

Kind of like the legal system, it may not be 100%, but facts always win over opinion.

But I can see where a lot of people don't agree with that mentality. To each their own.


p.s. There are people who don't believe that fullframe (i.e. MAR) DVD's aren't bad. Are they wrong? Why?

 

[RobertR]

So teaching blacks in a Southern state is evil because the law defines it as such? Criticizing those in power is evil because the law defines it as such? Buying a product at less or more than the government mandated price is evil because the law defines it as such?

 

[MarkHastings]

Robert, how come you didn't quote this part

 

[RobertR]

Because the examples I gave make it a LOT less than "100% solid". There are a LOT of evil laws. It makes your "laws must be good because they're defined as such" logic flawed. You can't define something as X when it can be shown that examples of what you're defining AREN'T X. It's absurd to say that what is legal can't be evil because it is legal.

You can't say "legal=good" and "illegal=evil" if you know for a fact that it's not always the case. And if you know that some laws are evil (you do admit that, yes?), then you must be using some means OTHER than legality to determine that they are evil. So what is that means?

 

[MarkHastings]

I guess

 

[Max Leung]

I suppose a bunch of researchers can travel around the world with an MRI/brain scan device asking people all sorts of moral questions - then collate the resulting brainscans and figure out the common moral ground that most humans share.

Scientists have already scanned a small number of people whilst posing various moral questions.

(Interestingly enough, when a math problem is posed as a moral/ethics question, the subjects almost always get the answer right, but when posed as a more abstract problem, they have a much harder time.)

BTW, I like the examples of animal behavior posted here - humans don't have a monopoly on weird practices. Except watching reality TV shows. Yeeesh.