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Originally Posted by asaris
ratbastid -- I'm curious about something. What if we described acts that cause harm as 'vicious' and acts that help people (or however you want to talk about acts that most people would describe as good). Then a virtuous person would simply be a person who tends to perform virtuous acts and a vicious person would be someone who performs vicious acts. Would you have trouble using this way of describing people? I'm wondering because we do seem to mean something when we say that someone is good or someone is evil, and this would allow us to use similar language without talking in absolutes.
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I guess what I reject is the categorization of people into definition-oriented slots. The world is more complex, interesting, and beautiful than that. Hitler was very good to those near to him. Charles Manson paints beautiful landscape paintings. So absolute words like "evil" and "vicious" just don't adequately describe them, however many things they did that harmed others. Both of those people did very, very bad things, but it's too simple and too easy to call them "evil" or point to their tendency to behave viciously and call them "vicious". It doesn't tell you anything about the person. And I think it simplifies things to the point of absuridty to say that there is any such thing as a "vicious person". As if there was any one way that
anyone fundamentally IS! I guess I also have a real problem with saying that anyone IS any particular way, because how somebody IS in any particular moment is totally situational and subjective.
I don't mean to threadjack here, really I don't. I'm actually a little surprised I'm one of the few voices pulling for relativism on this subject.