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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 473019" data-attributes="member: 4937">Fred: I really don't see the point in debating this with you.  Your mind is made up.  You have a seriously vested emotional interest in believing that all morality is relative.  If you really want to believe that, I can't stop you.  I pity you, but I can't stop you.Of course there is a correct answer."So, tell me, if I am wrong in my beliefs, am I "evil"?"You know part of the reason I have to be vague is because you aren't committing to anything.  I don't know what in the world the hypothetical 'I' is wrong about, and I certainly don't know if their wrongness merits the label 'evil'.  If your beliefs are evil, they are evil.  I don't want to get to much into judging people, because that's really not my place and less useful anyway, but if you believe and do evil things, those things you believe and do are evil."If there is proof of no elven god and an orcish pantheon and there is only one elven city that would slaughter orcs just to survive, are they "evil"?"I'm not even sure I understand the question, and it is so hypothetical as to be pointless anyway."What if Hitler won World War II? Whould he retroactively become "good"?"Of course not.  Do you think so?  Clearly you don't, and therefore you must be willing to admit that some things are good and evil.  Since you are willing to admit that some things are good and evil, why aren't you willing to admit that we could reach widespread (though not necessarily perfect) agreement on what they were?  Not that are belief in what evil or good is would change what they were, but merely I don't think that they are so hard to identify as you hint that you claim."What about Communisum? If the U.S. and Western Europe became Communist during the Cold War, would capitalism become evil?"People are afraid of lots of things.  And when people are afraid of things they label them evil.   People like to label what is different as evil.  Ambitious men like to label what is different evil for thier own purposes.  Does this make it so?  Communism and Capitalism are just beliefs based on valid ideas about destributing property.  Neither of them is enherently immoral, but neither is either enherently moral.  However, one of them works and one of them doesn't.  Specifically, Communism fails because it fails to recognize the cause of the evil that men do.  As such, when implemented it brings about ultimately great evil and suffering, not because it is evil, but because men do evil things.    The same is true of Capitalism, for any system that neglects that greed is an evil thing is bound to have failings, but at least it works on the assumption that men are greedy."What if God is really a fraud? What if capitalism actually doesn't work and brings moral decadence? What if the terrorists are right?"What does this have to do with anything?  Men do not need 'capitalism' to be morally decadendent.  They've done a fine job of it for centuries without it.  And as for the terrorists being right, what is more clearly evil than claiming that you 'love death' and 'hate life' and that you are on the 'side of death'.  What is more clearly evil than killing strangers in cold blood, caring not one wit whether you kill children or women or men or yourself or your own people or your allies or anything else, and killing them specifically because you say it is right for you to kill the weak?   No.  Just because a man says that he is good for loving death and murder does not make it so.  I find a hard time believing that you are willing to accept every opinion as valid.  Would _you_ change and become a terrorist if that became the prevailing opinion and if not, then why?And don't tell me 'because it's wrong', because you are denying such a concept exists."But if you KNEW (cast something like detect thoughts), THEN what would you say?"I thought I answered this question?  It depends.  BUT, once I do know, then I can make a judgement.  I'm not going to blindly make a judgement about what I don't know.  However, I did give an example of thoughts I thought I could judge.  Give me an example and see if we cannot agree upon it.AND NO, I'm not furthering myself from the alignment system by saying that, in essence, a person's beliefs depend upon his beliefs.  I don't know how you get that.  "Consider Mr. Gray the fighter, who would slaughter even children of people his race/nation would hate (say, killing even cambions and tieflings because they have demon blood, and are highly prone to be unchangeable "evil"). Is he good or evil?"Let's remove the hypothetical from this.  I can't make any judgements on cambions and tieflings and fantasy creatures.  I have no experience with them, and as a made up thing, their nature is whatever the author believes it to be.  BUT, if Mr. Gray slaughters children, then the act is evil.   If Mr. Gray goes out of his way to kill children, if he doesn't try to avoid killing children, if he enjoys killing children, if he doesn't mourn that which he has killed, if he intentionally killed children simply because they are members of some particular race, then yes I think we can be fairly certain in how we characterize the actions.  Do you disagree?"Note that people's opinions of beliefs change from time to time, through centuries of rising and falling empires."Of course they do.  So what?  Sometimes the human race grows in wisdom, and sometimes it doesn't.  Generally, for every ground it gains, it loses its principals somewhere else.  Often one society holds more dearly some truth than another.Yes, the example was shallow.You offer me an example of what is in all likelihood a shallowly written character, of a fantasy race, of a fantasy setting arbitrarily or not labeled evil, who may or may not be well conceived and executed, and whose alignment was assigned for reasons I don't understand by people I don't know, and you expect from that to offer some sort of proof or disproof that morality is relative?  We're not exactly talking about a citation by a major poet or philosopher, or even an author I can easily investigate in the library.  We're not exactly talking about academic material.All I have to say on the matter is as long as she has done no evil, then she has done no evil, and I can think of no reason to assume that she is evil.  Now, if I knew a list of her crimes (or even just her actions or even just her thoughts), then maybe I could draw some conclusions.  And to make matters worse, you are throwing in the hypothetical 'well what if a race is enherently evil' to which I have no answer having never encountered such a race.</blockquote>

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