trc@houti.UUCP (07/06/83)
Response to cca!charlie on life as the basis for good: You are correct that life is required for evil (as well as good) to exist. However, I think that if you analyze it, you will find that all evil is basically anti-human life, and that the degree of evil is relative to the degree of anti-human life. Happiness is a very important measure of human life, normally. (However, animals can be happy, and perhaps a psychopathic killer *might* be happy as he kills.) One example that makes the fallacy in your argument clearer is as follows: "Since a cure for cancer is good, and since cancer is pre-requisite for a cure, and since cancer also causes pain, cancer is the cause of both the badness of the pain and the goodness of the cure." Cancer does not cause its cure - it merely requires one in order to negate it. Cancer sets a localized standard of value - things that oppose it vs things that encourage it. Drug therapy vs cigarettes with high tar. In the case of human life, there is no more basic good, so in that sense one cannot "prove" it to be good. Life (and its opposite, death, or non- life) form a polarized basis upon which all actions can be categorized. They could be called "life-ish" and "death-ish". Good and evil are equally fitting names. Why should one care whether we are alive or dead? If one were dead, one would not be *able* to care. It is only life that allows the choice in the first place. Tom Craver houti!trc