TED Community » Kris Christenson

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Learning (above all), music, knowledge, beer.

An idea worth spreading

Art is a physical manifestation of an intellectual construct. Since there is no limit to what our mind can construct with time and effort, there should be no limitations on art.

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• A reply on Conversation: Is there good that is not based in knowledge and evil that is not based in ignorance?

  May 2 2013: So then is it better to help another survive at your own expense? To be frank I think this theory of yours is over simplified.

• A reply on Conversation: Is there good that is not based in knowledge and evil that is not based in ignorance?

  May 2 2013: Elaborate?

• A reply on Conversation: Is there good that is not based in knowledge and evil that is not based in ignorance?

  May 1 2013: There may be something to that. Knowledge equating to good would imply that greater knowledge would lead to greater good but it would seem that choosing to preserve yourself would not be an act of good. Of course, if we consider it from a utilitarian standpoint then it would actually be better to not save the person as if the car explodes while you are inside then you have twice as many deaths as you would have if you simply left them. Which means were more or less left with considering it in term of deontology. So then the question is do you have a duty to save a person in a burning car? If you do then Socrates' quote is not entirely correct, but if we're not duty bound to rescue people then it becomes unclear which is better; self sacrifice or self preservation. I'll have to take this one into consideration. Thank you.

• A reply on Conversation: Is there good that is not based in knowledge and evil that is not based in ignorance?

  May 1 2013: No, there cannot be a human act that is completely uninfluenced by human knowledge, that was my point about your burning car scenario. What I'm positing is that it's not the knowledge a person has that leads to the evil, it's the ignorance they have. To clarify, I am not supporting this position based on faith, I raised this question in an attempt to find a scenario that actually disproves it, which as of yet I have not found.

• A reply on Conversation: Is there good that is not based in knowledge and evil that is not based in ignorance?

  May 1 2013: Yes, it is the combination of the knowledge and the ignorance that leads to the terrorist act, meaning if the ignorance was challenged and they gained greater knowledge the act would not occur, making it the ignorance that causes the knowledge to be used incorrectly. As for the burning car, the pieces of knowledge I stated that they have are not knowledge that they gain in that moment but rather knowledge they gained prior to the event. They then use their knowledge to recognize the person needs help. As I said before, if they did not know it was a dangerous situation they would not know the person needs help and so would not give their help. Yes, they may not have all the pertinent knowledge but they have enough to recognize that the person needs help.

• A reply on Conversation: Is there good that is not based in knowledge and evil that is not based in ignorance?

  May 1 2013: Knowing how to build bombs is not evil in and of itself. I know how to build several different kinds of bombs but being a pretty radical pacifist I would never choose to harm another human being. In cases of the misuse of knowledge the particular belief that needs to be taken into account is the one that motivated the individual to commit the act. In the case of a terrorist it would be the false belief that their view point, or cause, or whatever they're fighting for justifies the deaths of innocents. This false belief is a form of ignorance.
  
  As for pulling a person out of a burning car, if you don't know the situation is dangerous would you feel any need to help them? When you see the trapped victim, you recognize that the situation is dangerous (which is a justified true belief and therefore knowledge) and that if the victim is left in the flames they will die (again this is knowledge).

• A reply on Conversation: Is there good that is not based in knowledge and evil that is not based in ignorance?

  May 1 2013: Or is it based in his ignorant belief that his own benefit is more important than the well being of others?

• A reply on Conversation: Is there good that is not based in knowledge and evil that is not based in ignorance?

  May 1 2013: In this particular comment I stated it a bit too sweepingly, my bad. I meant that in the case of the misuse of knowledge it's not the knowledge itself that is evil but the actions which are likely motivated by ignorance.
  
  You're absolutely right that people aren't entirely good or evil, they will tend to do what they believe is the best thing to do. But if we believe in objective morality (which I do since in subjective morality there can be no wrong) then often times what a person believes is best is in truth one of the worst things they could be doing. So then they are behaving in an "evil" manner because of their own ignorance.

• A reply on Conversation: Is there good that is not based in knowledge and evil that is not based in ignorance?

  May 1 2013: Moral Philosophers have been creating systems of objective morality for quite some time. Besides, what is a legal code other than an imposed objective morality? The Hippocratic oath is another example of the same. We have always had objective morality as long as we have had civilizations. It is always wrong to kill a child in cold blood, I can't imagine a single situation where that is excusable, again making it objective.

• A reply on Conversation: Is there good that is not based in knowledge and evil that is not based in ignorance?

  Apr 29 2013: Excellent bit about biology, it actually falls in line with some thoughts I had on other subjects but that's beside the point. I don't think evil is necessarily doing what you know to be wrong though. I think we would all agree that sociopaths will tend toward evil but they don't have a concept of right and wrong. If it's only wrong if you know it's wrong then a sociopath that lacks a sense of morality can't be considered to be doing wrong. Exactly whose ideas about morals are the best is a conversation for another day but I have yet to read a text on morality that says it's good to joyously slaughter people. Which brings me to your story about the boy. This could, in fact, be used as example of a situation in which Socrates was right. The classical definition of knowledge is justified true belief, so then ignorance would be any condition in which a person doesn't have justified true belief, including false belief, beliefs based on false evidence, and a complete lack of knowledge. The boy was actually ignorant because he had the false belief that he is justified in the slaughter of innocents because he made the incorrect assumption that if others do something to you it's justified to do that to others. The misdeeds of one cannot excuse the misdeeds of another, because if they do then nothing is wrong and morality doesn't exist, so there has to at some point be moral truth. Whether it's your motivation that makes it wrong or if certain actions are intrinsically wrong, it simply can't be that subjective. So if the boy developed this false belief that what he was doing was right then he would be ignorant and his evil deeds stem from his ignorance.