Evil

[ravage]

@picoico

The sympathy will have to be well earned, and itself stand the test of what one would deem to be reasonable. That means addressing those issues that others would dismiss (to cite your recent example) as mere cop-outs (which itself is a cop-out).

I am deliberately framing the argument as to not consider cases where that avenue is available. This does not mean that such arguments arent legitimate, I am granting the validity of such arguments and moving on to harder cases.

Why? Because sympathy is rooted in questioning one’s position…to cite the example, what were the circumstances of the punishment, was she really guilty, and so on. If we are to suspend such questioning and say, for the sake of argument, that she was indeed guilty, then a reasonable person may well think she was an idiot for doing what she did when the punishment was so severe.

Even if a reasonable person were to say that, does it mean that ‘idiots’ as per your definition should be punished like that? Why shift the focus from the punishment to the individual? Is there no intellectual bias there?

A reasonable person imbibed in a particular tradition, of course…to those external to that tradition they would need an excuse to justify such an action. And there lies the rub. Do we expect the same on the other side of this argument? If not why?

Have you never judged an action of a culture you were external to? When you read of ritual sacrifices of virgins in a culture, or when you read Quranic stories where traditional practices of deviant cultures what is your reaction, and why?

Given that there are two sides to this coin, how can we navigate ourselves outside of what is inherently a subjective jungle? Attempting to be rational is not really a solution…rationality doesn’t perform well on subjective matters, specifically on matters of the heart.

That is true. However my view is that subjectivity itself is questionable in religious terms, where there is an objective (Godly) view of the world, and any subjective dissent (whether rational or irrational or non-rational) is in opposition to the collectivist/group-think/consensus view of religion.