let us look at something that is both, good and evil, at the same time…….
what is the quintessential defination of evil? the Holocaust…
and yet depending on where one sits, the holocaust could have been
good or evil… if you gain or benefited from the holocaust, it was
good, if you were Jewish or understood the event as evil, it was evil…
but how can the Holocaust be both good and evil? It depends on whether
you gained or benefited from it or didn’t gain or benefited from it…
there were Germans who did benefited from the Holocaust… those
who financially gained from the deportations and deaths of the Jewish people…
for them, the Holocaust was a “good” event… they financially gained
by getting the jobs of the deported Jewish people or they were able to
get assets of the Jewish deportee’s, like jewelry or property or businesses
of the deported Jewish people…that is good if, if you understand
life to be a economic question… a business to improve oneself via
economic means… the more objects, the more material goods one has,
the “better” off one is…
it really depends on the “good” or evil" of the matter of the Holocaust
based on how one observes or understands “good” or “evil”…
One’s location or position decides if an action is “good” or “evil”
the observation location of a person, does he gain or does he loses
from any particular action decides if that action is “good” or “evil”
in other words, “good” or “evil” is a transactional event……
do you gain or do you lose in any particular event will decide
if the event is “good” or “evil” for you…….
if, if you look upon the Holocaust as being more then an transactional event,
such as all life is sacred or the point of existence is to be free, then an event
like the Holocaust becomes something different…… how we observe it, the event,
determines the “judgement” of the event…….
if we use freedom as our guide in understanding the Holocaust, then
it was “evil” or if we use life as our guide in the understanding the
Holocaust event, then it too is “evil”………………
but there are other standards one can use… for example,
we have the utilitarianism standard… which describes
utilitarianism as…
“utility as the sum of all pleasure that results from an action,
minus the suffering of anyone involved in that action”
so how would we weigh out the pleasure of the Holocaust
against the suffering of the Holocaust?
would we use the theory that if the majority of people benefited
from the Holocaust against the suffering of the minority, then
the Holocaust was overall, a “good” or was it an “evil”?
the problem with that theory, among many problems, is
how do we decide or determine the overall benefit or
suffering of the people? Does the suffering of those who
existed in concentration camps or died in them, outweigh
those who benefited from the removal of people into concentration camps?
what criteria would I use to somehow compare the benefit to some people
to the suffering of other people in the exact same action?
Does the suffering of some, somehow outweigh the benefit to others?
I think, but cannot prove, that suffering in some fashion does outweigh
the benefit to others from that suffering……………
no matter upon what standard we use or what criteria we use,
it will be an artificial standard, an creation of an viewpoint that can be
placed anywhere… is Schrodinger’s cat dead?
Depending on our “observation” of the event, yes and no………
it is the observation that determines the cat existence…
Schrodinger’s cat depends on the observation, the observer,
for us to “know” if the cat is dead or alive…………
applying the Schrodinger’s cat experiment to everyday life,
is to risk misapplying it to everyday life………….
but it does bring about a very good point regardless if
Schrodinger’s cat is dead or alive, it points out the
effect of the observer to any example we wish to understand…….
which is a better method then utilitarianism is to understand
events……………but it is still not ideal………
so the problem, the question becomes, is there a better way, a better
means to understand our problem?
or perhaps a better way to describe our problem?
the question of “good” and “evil” might not be the best way to understand
this question……….perhaps a different method might be used?
Kropotkin