Title
Police. As much as I hate their current incarnation, I. Some form or fashion they are required to handle those that do harm to others intentionally.
Except here’s the thing: in every form and fashion, they don’t actually do anything to the ones doing the most harm
Money. It encourages greed, but it allows us to scale exchange of goods and services far more than we otherwise could
Government.
In an ideal world, everyone would get along and coordinate effectively in a voluntary manner. There would be no need for any government to enforce laws or provide services.
You consider any form of government evil?
HAHAHHAHA yeah
Yeah they are
Guillotines
Nah we have machetes
Existence. It’s also a paradox because without existence it’s impossible to be either evil or necessary.
Tax. Noone wants their money to be taken away. But it’s probably a good idea to have at least some government funded stuff.
I mean, corrupted administration aside, is it really even “evil” to fund a institution that forsee the development of your surrounding? If anything it’s simply quid pro quo, and people who generally against any taxation is always fishy to me.
It’s evil to take someones money. It’s necessary because it funds the surrounding. A necessary evil, as op asked for.
Literally the point of money is to exchange it for something.
You suck
It’s evil to take someones money.
Except when you are buying things? Look at it as living in society with roads, fire fighters and clean water requires a purchase.
There is nothing morally wrong with paying people who provide a service.
I think it’s the distinction of whether or not it is voluntary. Buying things is a choice, taxes aren’t (outside of voting for certain political candidates who promise to use taxes in different ways).
A lot of people out there have short-sighted mindsets like “Why do I have to pay for schools when I don’t have any kids?” or “I have my own insurance, why do I have to pay into someone else’s public healthcare too?” People can’t be relied on to make the spending choices needed to support a healthy and stable society on their own, so taxes and public spending make it for them.
To add on to that, not all taxes fund things for the public good. In the US at least, and other countries with large military spending, one must accept that a lot of tax money goes to fund the military industrial complex. Taxes are also used to line the pockets of corporations via bailouts and overpriced government contracts.
Now I also believe there is no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism, but taxes are nevertheless different from a voluntary exchange of currency for goods and services that one directly benefits from.
It is only if it’s taken without something in return though, akin to stealing or robbing, else taking someones money in return for a service or goods would count as evil. Taxation always come with expectation of something in return, it’s in some way similar to paying for service.
For the general masses that lack fucking brain cells. Some people actually comprehend the value of society and central public resources and WANT their money collectively put to good use.
That’s conservatives for you, whine about taxes but are total welfare queens. They don’t see having no income taxes in their states harm them, no schools no physicians.
Polarization is causing a lot of people to doubt that the collective money actually will be put to good use. In a lot of places (like my country, Israel) they’re damn right, it’s not.
I might be wrong but I think people would gladly pay 50% of their income as tax if it meant they would get their basic needs met and see the money be put to a good use. Imagine getting just half your pay but be able to fully use it on whatever you want and not have to worry about food and rent. Or at least that’s what I’d like to believe.
The Blackfoot nation on which Maslow based his hierarchy of needs would actually have a celebration each year where they’d give everything they’d amassed away.
The actual basis for the “hierarchy” of needs is essentially that a community takes care of each other so that all needs are met, and this is found not just in Blackfoot but along the majority of indigenous cultures. (I write in quotes because it was never really a hierarchy, it was more of a cyclical chain of getting needs met)
There’s a really good read on what inspired the Hierarchy of Needs here. Most of the changes that Maslow made to his findings were actually due to him wanting to make it more palatable for his individualistic colonial audience.
The tax being on your income and not entirely on corporations always felt like a fairly biased distinction. If companies paid the entire income tax long before it got to you, and you were simply paid ~2/3rds as much, I feel like people’s opinions would be different despite not much changing.
Tax laws are usually made to make it easy to collect, hard to dodge taxes.
If companies pay all the tax I could create a company, invoice my current employer, pay myself a salary that is equal to the entire profit margin. There is nothing left to tax.
You could try to patch the loophole but then you’ll break down something else.
That sounds backwards to me. If companies are paying all the taxes, why would you insert a second company into the chain? Then both companies would be paying a tax portion, and your salary would be that much less than if you just had a job.
Or were you thinking that you could bamboozle the government out of the tax revenue by saying “Oops, no profit! Salaries cost too much!”? I don’t think that would work unless the entire structure was built with one directive in mind: “Reward Hollywood accounting”
Where I live a majority of the voters are generally okay with high taxes (35%-50%) as long as it’s only shared with other people who works and pays taxes.
And what about the less fortunate? The infirm and disabled? They can rot?
Plenty of people think they’re already getting more than they need and anyone who says otherwise is just pretending to be ill to get a free ride at the taxpayers’ expense, and could just get a job if they wanted. The right wing press pushes this narrative and people fall for it.
Agreed, just wanted to see if the OP would admit to it as well. Fully expect either no response or a passing of the buck along the lines of ‘I want to help who need it, but people hypothetically could take advantage of the system so let’s just scrap the whole thing.’
I didn’t read it as the OP expressing their own opinion, but instead sharing what the majority of voters in their area think.
Surgery, especially on animals.
In any other context, someone cutting you open, slicing bits out or rearranging them, them sewing you shut would be considered horrific, but we do it because we know that the short term suffering out weighs the long term harm of not doing it. When you choose it for yourself it might not be too ‘evil’, but an animal would not understand, even if you know it will mean they get to live a long, happy life, free of the pain and suffering that issue would otherwise cause.
Killing hitler and the nazis. Not just the top guys. Also the bottom layers of the system.
Killing is bad. But…its nazis.
Same also goes to all other dictators and their helpers. Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, Putin, Assat, Lenin
These control freaks keep popping up, and so we’ll have to do it again.
Yes. And maybe also rework all our democracys that its not one person with power* but a council like in switzerland and rework it that these kinds of people have no chance of ever poping up aka ENSURE THAT PEOPLE HAVE NO LIVING PROBLEMS aka make sure everyone has housing, food, water, education no matter how much money it costs. Oooh nooo that would hurt the shareholders. Nawww too bad. LETS HURT THEM MORE!
Maybe the way isn’t just killing and incarcerating the past generation of murderers without a demolition of the ideologies and attitudes that led to it, in order to rebuild a society that ‘naturally’ abhors violence, that enjoys <-> tolerates other tribes while always recognising that people are people, that our differences are basically superficial and nobody is born evil, that life is ‘sacred’ and money is secondary… Maybe then, we could better prepare for rich fuggs who seek to profit from war and disunity and will use the 80% of unthinking sheep for their benefit. You can’t just kill ideas like racism, like vacuous consumerism, like “Crusades good! Lebensraum! God wills it!”, people need to give them up willingly before. If not for the sake of doing what’s right, at the very least for the sake of long term safety.
We shall see in the next 20 years how this plays out through the decline of the US and EU, and the eventual total collapse of at least one of those.
Prison seems the obvious one. It’s obviously (to me, that is) not desirable to deprive anyone of their freedom, but for persistently violent people I don’t think there’s a better solution, unfortunately.
nah, the justice system is absolutely fucked. in a world where we remake the law around restorative and rehabilitative justice rather than punitive, we’re probably not even going to be calling it “prison” anymore
I agree that separating people who do not abide by the contract of society is necessary, but I think we (America) are wrong to make it a punitive experience. Separate them and let them live their lives as comfortably as they can. Causing additional suffering does not seem to be necessary.
Currently trying to lock up as many of the populace all the numbers show cause less crime. At some point we are going to have to question if there is a higher percentage of psychopaths out of prison than in.
Edit: note, a large group of people would say “we need to lock up more people to solve it” and a large group of people would say “we need to let out all the not-psychopaths who aren’t a threat to society and then only arrest those who are a threat”. And somehow both would think they were humane. And propoganda would role out to convince the first group they should lock up the second group. Because compassion or empathy is a threat
Agreed. I don’t even believe in free will, so prison makes even less sense to me - in the sense that we’re punishing people for doing something they couldn’t not have done. That said, I have no doubt that the fear of imprisonment acts as a deterrent - at least to some extent. And just because someone can’t help themselves doesn’t mean they should be allowed to roam free, harming others.
Ideally, we’d place people like that on a private island with no one to harm, where they could still live a good life. But since that’s not realistic, prison it is. I still think prisoners should be treated well, no matter the crime. Punishment itself doesn’t make much sense to me - but the fear of punishment does. And that fear isn’t credible unless we follow through.
I remember listening to an episode of hardcore history about capital punishment, it detailed public executions throughout the ages, and the takeaway is this:
You could literally publicly rip people limb from limb with horses and rope, people are still going to steal, assault, and rape.
If seeing someone getting skinned alive isn’t enough of a deterrent, I don’t know why prison would be.
Sure, but the fact that fear of punishment doesn’t deter everyone, doesn’t mean it doesn’t deter anyone. Good example from my own life would be speeding; the fear of losing my license is the main reason I don’t do it.
Sure, but I wouldn’t exactly categorize speeding as an ‘evil’ act - just reckless.
But then there are malicious crimes. These kinds of crimes are driven by motivations which regularly transcend punishment.
I’ve been meaning to read some stuff about how to approach criminal justice if we don’t have free will, but I keep reading other stuff instead. So many books, so little time!
I still think prisoners should be treated well, no matter the crime.
Yes, absolutely. Even for the worst of the worst, their should be rehab attempts, whether it’s anger management, getting them away from gangs - whatever it is they need. I think there are only small numbers of people, if there are any at all, who are really irremediably violent and dangerous, but even for them I’m not exactly happy about putting them away indefinitely.
Its simply a matter of harm mitigation.
It simply isnt fair to the rest of society to place people who actively seek harm onto others, back on the street.
I think this is less of a case of ‘dont keep them in prison for the rest of their lives’ and more of a ‘we should improve prison conditions’ type of argument.
Right, but we mitigate that harm (good) by depriving people of their freedom (bad). It is necessary to do it, for the exact reasons you suggest - to reduce evil overall.
Violence against fascists.
I bought a Pixel so could install a degoogle OS on the phone. This largely removed Google from my life.
Shame they’re making that harder going forward by removing pixel specific info from the build tree
I considered that risk before getting a Pixel 8 and it burns a little yeah. I’ll use it like every other phone that stops getting updates for a few more years in the worst case scenario, then move to FairPhone I guess.
The updates will take a little longer that is all. GOS is not in the same boat as other custom rom devs - they don’t have build trees either.
GOS is talking to a couple of OEMs about getting a GOS phone produced.
If it’s just longer update gaps that’s fine. The news last month was pretty doomer so I didn’t take it too seriously.
Luigi mangione
Evil that’s necessary isn’t evil, just painful.
Anyway, my example: a fever? 😅
Conscription.
Not sure why anyone’s downvoting this. If someone you’ve never met thinks that you have to put your life on the line, and therefore may possibly die, to further a cause - let them explain that cause. If they can’t convince you it’s more important than your life, then maybe it isn’t.
See: Vietnam, etc.
Edit: My bad, I was thinking, “What’s a good example of evil?” - Conscription should never be “necessary”. The only thing conscription does is protect the status quo. Keep the upvote - it was an honest mistake on my part.
Vietnam is a good example of a bad example. WWII is a better example of the necessary evil part, especially countries that were invaded.
Lobotomy, electroshock and castration are historic treatments for various extreme mental disorders that were, probably mistakenly, considered necessary evils lacking other treatments.
These days prozac, benzos and lithium fall into a similar category.
I’m not sure if you’re comparing SSRIs to castration but I’m gonna assume you’re not.
I dont think any prescriber would consider any of those medicines necessary. a much better example would be steroids like prednisone. it weakens your immune system, but it’s absolutely necessary at times.
SSRIs are rarely necessary, but are a useful tool. too much to say on this.
Benzos are a short term solution to enable more longer term treatments. they’re absolute monsters of a drug class, but really effective for sure.
fentanyl would be a better example of a necessary evil. it’s synthesis revolutionized surgery.
finally, lithium is a funny example – we still don’t even really know how it works!! but it’s a mood stabilizer and can be hugely beneficial for managing bipolar disorder. that said, one can attempt to manage bipolar symptoms without medications, but it’s certainly going to be harder and possibly less effective
Electroshock is still a “treatment” in many countries.
