[ExI] Worst ever

[William Flynn Wallace]

And Hitler loved dogs.  So what?  If you put the good on one side of the
scale and the bad on the other, where does Genghis Khan's scale tilt?  I do
totally agree that probably no one in history was totally, 100% evil, and
that good and evil are nebulous concepts (that they are endlessly discussed
by philosophers is one clue) applied by people with their own biases.  But
I have no trouble calling one murderer evil (if it is established that he
did not act in self-defense, blah blah blah).

What if a person does something with totally pure intentions, but it turns
out badly (involuntary manslaughter, for one - "Just having a bit of a
fight, eh?")?  Furthermore, he does not follow up to see the consequences
because he has no empathy and hence doesn't care, and so continues to do
the same thing?   Like Anders, I am a consequentialist.  bill w

On Thu, Aug 13, 2020 at 2:11 PM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> Quoting Bill Wallace:
>
> > It is my earnest hope that Stalin, Hitler, and Mao have set records for
> > killing people that will last forever.   Surely among the worst people
> who
> > have ever lived.
>
> Those guys might have been bad by 20th century standards, but none of
> them set any records. In fact the record is still held by Ghenghis
> Khan who killed over 40 million people. That is more than Stalin,
> Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot combined. Furthermore there were fewer people
> in the world back during the Mongolian conquest so Ghenghis Khan has
> been credited with killing fully 5% of the world population at the time.
>
> According to scientists, Ghenghis Khan killed enough people to stop
> deforestation and allow trees to regrow thus reducing carbon dioxide
> levels and temporarily reversing global warming.
>
> https://www.livescience.com/11739-wars-plagues-carbon-climate.html
>
> Ghenghis Khan also united pretty much all of Asia with part of Europe
> in the largest land empire of all time, making the Silk Road safe for
> merchants to travel and thereby promoting trade between east and west.
> He did lots of other surprisingly good things things too like
> abolishing slavery and torture throughout his empire.
>
>
> https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/68894/11-cultural-breakthroughs-genghis-khan-achieved-during-his-reign
>
> So perhaps real people are a little more complex than the simple moral
> absolutism of good and evil allows. In fact, whenever someone is
> called "evil" these days, it is almost always politically-motivated
> hyperbole.
>
> Stuart LaForge
>
>
>
>
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