[SEQ RERUN] Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?

Tyrrell_McAllister

Today's post, Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?, was originally published on 26 June 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

People want to think that the Enemy is an innately evil mutant. But, usually, the Enemy is acting as you might in their circumstances. They think that they are the hero in their story and that their motives are just. That doesn't mean that they are right. Killing them may be the best option available. But it is still a tragedy.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, in which we're going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order, so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Correspondence Bias, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.

Today's post, Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?, was originally published on 26 June 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

People want to think that the Enemy is an innately evil mutant. But, usually, the Enemy is acting as you might in their circumstances. They think that they are the hero in their story and that their motives are just. That doesn't mean that they are right. Killing them may be the best option available. But it is still a tragedy.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

...I think that counts as saving a soul. LW 1 - 0 Vatican.

You might in fact be a sociopath (rare, but not as rare as winning the lottery), though many people say things like "I have no objection against doing $socially_disapproved_action" but never do $socially_disapproved_action. But among people in general, goodness and sanity are hard enough that you shouldn't expect to approximate them well under anything but extraordinary circumstances. Most people set out to do good and end up slaying heathens or forcing rape victims to marry their rapist or something.

(The general cure for problems everyone fails horribly at is to try and actually get it right. We'll probably still get it wrong, but at least we make new mistakes that people can learn from rather than say "Failure mode 42, occurence 2.7e6".)

I think that counts as saving a soul. LW 1 - 0 Vatican.

You don't think Roman Catholicism has saved any souls? I mean, you can argue it does more harm than good, mostly due to lowering the sanity waterline, but ... none at all?

-2[anonymous]15y

Oh, and it's more "creating" than "saving", really.

2Armok_GoB15y

Yea, looks like reading that sequence post gave me a momentary idea of "everyone except me is a saint" and some other harder to articulate thing, by now my above posts sound like just as much bull** to me as they presumably do to everyone else. Shouldn't have tried to actually think when I were to tired to do it properly, my brain broke.