It is if you are a person that regards yourself as an authority on everything, therefore, you are de facto a god, your intellect is that of a god, and no philosopher or homicide detective can know or understand more in their respective field than you already know about it. So, everyone must appeal to your authority unless perhaps they are a scientist too.-1- wrote:Supine, being an authority or claiming to be an authority is not part of the fallacy of appealing to authority.
I meant "But the I did not argue that appeal to authority is not a logical fallacy." So, I left out the "not" word by mistake.Supine, you wrote: "But then I did argue that appeal to authority is not a logical fallacy." Enough said.
I don't pretend to be an expert on evil. I'm sure there are some very wicked men that can teach me a lot more about evil than I know. What I am stating is that I acknowledge the existence of evil. Like I acknowledge the existence of romantic love.You are pretending to own the knowledge on evil.
I'm claiming scientist are wrong if they claim evil does not exist.It is a human concept, it can't be felt or known by anyone more than by any other. Your claiming that scientists are ignorant to a large degree on the concept of evil...
is-- like I said, or similarly how I said it -- ludicrous.
That is fine if that is your conclusion. If evil does not exist then Professor Jordan Peterson's and my view is not an "evil." It's just a view that does no harm to the surviving relatives of the young child that is abducted, raped, tortured, and then murdered by a serial killer.
And if evil is the degradation of a good or the absence of good, then when a young man throws acid on the face of a beautiful young lady in India out of revenge for her choosing to not be his girlfriend, you are saying evil does not exist in such cases, all that exists is merely what is legal and illegal?Evil is a concept that is not hard to grasp or understand.
To be more accurate about evil it is not merely the degradation of good but intelligence, understanding of the harm being done, and maliciousness or indifference being combined to those things.
Yes and no. One can try and grasp romantic love but one only more fully grasps it once they have had experience with it in the "field." Likewise, field work with evil deepens your comprehension of it.Do you think evil is a tough concept, one of the toughest ones extant, that takes years of practice or theoretical study to understand?
I can still recall, although I was a very young and a small child (I'm not even sure I was grade school at the time or past the 1st grade if that), my aunt hysterically coming into my parents house the night of a party they had going on. She was crying uncontrollably and face entirely bloody. I can remember her tell my father (her brother) that the man she was with, along with his father, beat her up.Did YOU personally experience evil in a study setting, or have you got a degree with honours in Evil?
And I have never forgotten the Marine in my last company, duty station, who was taken off duty and lost his security clearance as he was suspected of having raped, murdered, and mutilated the bodies of women stretching from Okinawa to mainland USA. A serial killer. He let me know one day he was guilty of the crimes he was accused of. He did not let me know by words. No, his admission--and warning to me--came through his eyes. Perhaps the first and last time I looked into the eyes of evil. His eyes not only stated he was guilty but something far more sinister and malicious and dangerous. They communicated he enjoyed taunting his victims (prey), seeing them crying, horrified and terrified, and he enjoyed murdering people. He enjoyed murdering innocent people. At least women, but for all I know he may have killed boys or men too. Might have began in his childhood for all I know. And this kind of evil, in the eyes of a person, you can only know in the field from coming in contact with it. You can not know it from a philosophy discussion or from a university lecture.
That is just two of my experience with evil. I have a few more. At least two more.
Yeah, scientists are so far removed from evil than 20 year long homicide detectives are, unless of course the scientist is evil himself or has someone evil in their life.-- Updated 2017 July 29th, 10:28 am to add the following --
Okay, I get it. You read Jordan Peterson's book on evil and you accept that he is an authority on the subject. He knows more about Evil than most scientists.
I may accept that. That is, I accept that Jordan Peterson has encountered more physical and experiential examples of Evil in his readings than most other people, incl. scientists.
But what I don't accept is your -- pardon my expression -- naive claim that scientists are so removed from Evil that they can't identify it as an anthropomorphical paradigm and therefore it is inappropriate for them refuse to apply it to natural (not man-made or related to man) phenomena. This I can't accept, and I say this is ridiculous.