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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9529398" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I disagree. That, to me, is putting on a jersey. It devalues the moral/ethical thought--or worse, is one of those pernicious "maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle" things that pretend centrism is always awesome.There is a difference between "Good with teeth"--which I agree is required--and "Something pantomiming in the flayed skin of Good, going off and doing all sorts of objectively Evil things."Okay. I'm not interested in a Good that becomes a monster in the name of utopia. That's not what I call Good. That is exactly the sort of monster that the things I would call Good prepare to fight.But it isn't compelling. That's the point. You've just made yet another "but what if the people who THINK they are Good are actually just Nazis with better publicity?"Which is exactly what the thread told us to presume. It's literally there, explicitly:It literally is the case that, per the thread, Good is to be defined as altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of sentient beings.Precisely the fact that it can be used for "good" or "evil" is why it is not, and cannot be, Good.Then it is not Good. It is something monstrous to be opposed.It is a perfectly feasible, logical endpoint. It is not a Good endpoint. It is merely something masquerading as Good. It may bear the label "Good", but it simply, flatly isn't actually Good. Just as an author can just fiat declare whatever they like, regardless of whether it makes sense or is even logically sound, they may give something the label "Good", but that does not make whatever got that label actually Good. It may be any number of other things, but it is not Good, neither by my own definition of the term, nor by the definition given to us in the OP.Maximal benevolence can still be quite dangerous. (I would use a Biblical analogy here, specifically to angels rather than the Big Man Himself, but you asked me to not make such references.) Per the parameters of the OP, it has to be maximally benevolent: it must be genuinely altruistic, genuinely respecting life, and genuinely concerned for the dignity of sentient beings. The thing you have described is almost certainly not altruistic except under tortured or insane "logic", it does not respect life in the least (since its goal is, by definition, to end every life, everywhere, forever), and it does not respect the dignity of sentient beings because it doesn't want there to be sentient beings, plural, it wants there to be one and only one being.Being actually capable of doing it vs always wishing to do it are two different things. Further, choosing not to act when all of the active choices are bad options may be the best choice. This is why I used the "local maximum of a mathematical function" thing earlier. It may be that some maneuvers are simply unacceptable, no matter what downstream consequences they might have: sure, if you move in the [2,4] direction you might get to a higher maximum than what you're currently at, but it would require moving toward something Evil first, and that is simply unacceptable.That doesn't mean that Good--fully sincere, maximal-benevolence Good--cannot still be dangerous. It absolutely can! It can be supremely dangerous! But it will never be dangerous by way of choosing to do something that is short-term horrendous with the justification that it will be long-term utopian. Superman stories, such as some of the better comics (e.g. Red Son, Kingdom Come, and What's So Funny About Truth, Justice & the American Way?) and animated media (specifically the DCAU Superman) are quite good at demonstrating what a dangerous maximal-benevolence Good can look like. E.g. just because Supes is maximally benevolent doesn't mean he's omniscient; he gets played by Lex Luthor more than once in JL/JLU because Lex is subtle and crafty and knows how to push Superman's buttons. He may be maximally benevolent, but he still gets angry, he still feels jealousy, keeps secrets, doesn't fully trust others to get tasks done, etc. There are times where he simply can't save everyone, and he mourns the loss. Everything he does comes from a place of wanting to do the truly most benevolent thing each time, every time, but he still makes mistakes and misjudges situations. The DCAU Superman is an excellent display of a truly, completely unvarnished Always Good character who is still dangerous, even shocking at times when he's backed into a corner and has to come up with a third option.</blockquote>

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