7/21/12

Can Individuals or Groups Lie in Defining Evil?


If one lies about their definition of evil perhaps there is a reason for that, perhaps not. One may be disingenuous about definitions of course, or even accidentally wrong about a definition (what does soteriology really mean?), however that tends toward engendering false consciousness I believe.
J. Vernon McGee wrote that the Bible definition of evil refers to bad things of a natural kind, in contrast to wickedness that occurs when humans do 'evil' things such as massacring midnight theater goers at the premier of Batman; The Dark Knight Rising.
Jean Paul Sartre wrote about group lies as serialized 'use-truths' in Being and Nothingness.
W.V.O. Quine the late logician wrote a book named 'Word and Object'. Words can refer to objects of course as well as to the abstract objects of ideas, and of course words can be relational devices for referring to groups of words and obviously words can be used to describe abstract general ideas such as evil or 'redness' instead of a particular thing itself. Plainly different people regard some things as evil that others regard as good. Evil as a general subjective concept for itself is applicable in a variety of circumstances unlike the color 'red' that isn't used to refer to purple or blue as a referent object for-itself. Evil in the trophic hierarchy is a higher level of abstraction. I believe Aristotle wrote about such things in his logic.
Lies are existential utterances interpreted by some other or even for-oneself as being untrue. If individual A tells individual B on a rainy day that the sun is brightly shining then the falsehood of the lie is transparent unless person B interprets the lie as some sort of metaphor or emotive description.
If one lies about a definition of evil for political purposes in order to obtain political advantage for a class (the U6 unemployment rate of 17.7% is all the fault of G.W. Bush) is that uncommon? I think that people seldom lie about evil when it occurs to them for they recognize it as such painfully perhaps. In a social environment where many people live somewhat abstract cubicle lives with sanitized concepts reinforcing values of a dysfunction nature convenient falsehoods such as global warming cannot be caused by human Co2 emissions may be unchallengeable pragmatically in time to do the future much good. Falsehoods of a remote and abstract nature regarding definitions of evil are not directly verifiable for individuals not uncommonly.
The late Ronald Reagan in speaking with First Secretary Gorbachev on nuclear disarmament often said about agreements 'trust, but verify'. The need for that was plain during from 1972 to 1989 when the Soviet Union had signed off on bans on offensive biological weapons yet was secretly running full speed ahead with Biopreparat to develop new synthetic germs and viruses of the lethal kind for war on the cheap

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