While I'm no fan of Google, the premise of this article annoys me. Good and Evil are such a simple concept and have no place in reality. Good and Evil are always subjective to the viewport. I don't disagree with the facts of the article, just that its cast in the simplistic light of "Evil" for dramatic effect.
Maybe Google removed the Don't Be Evil because of articles like this pushing a Good vs. Evil narrative.
I don’t agree. While Good and Evil are certainly relative, normative social constructs, in any given place and time there are a lot of behaviors that are widely accepted as “good” or as “evil” — and most of them (e.g. don’t commit cold-blooded murder) are not even near any gray area and are fairly universal and serve important, widely valued pragmatic interests.
It seems overly pedantic to me to act like just because deep, technical moral philosophy can be quite tricky, it means we should abandon big, first-order, obviously pragmatic notions of good and evil.
> In any given place and time there are a lot of behaviors that are widely accepted as “good” or as “evil".
Philosophically that's a loaded topic, and gets to the subject of "objective morality". I could bore you with arguments I suppose, but the key is, that's not a given -- even on the "big, first-order" good and evil definitions.
But what's worse is when you're judging and using those judgments for your argument, when you could just be supplying facts and letting us come to our own conclusions.
E.g.:
A: Nuclear weapons are very, very evil.
B: The US used Nuclear weapons to end a long, protracted, brutal, and deadly war.
A is a judgement, which I may or may not agree with. B is a fact, which also seems to diminish the power of A.
I don't agree. I think the existence of widely accepted notions of "good" and "evil" is actually an empirical claim. It says nothing about whether society is right, just whether you could list off some claims and get an unambiguous majority to agree with statements like "Murder is evil".
Also, nuclear weapons seems exactly like choosing a topic already known to be in a gray, contentious zone but then acting like it's a high leverage and useful example for widely held beliefs about morality. We tend to sensationalize and focus so much on these gray zone topics, that we forget just how huge the space of basically agreed moral principles is.
There certainly are great moral philosophy problems. I remember when I first read Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons and thought about "The Repugnant Conclusion" it was eye opening. It would definitely be useful for people choosing large-scale policies or facing real problems of humanitarian crisis or population ethics.
But on a day to day basis, it's childish and useless to point at that kind of academic moral philosophy and argue that we should just treat "good" and "evil" as relative fictions. No way. There's big, obvious, widely shared views that define what our linguistic constructs of "good" and "evil" generally mean in a day to day context, and serve super useful, pragmatic functions in the operations of society.
> I think the existence of widely accepted notions of "good" and "evil" is actually an empirical claim.
Quit moving the goalposts. Objective morality is not the same as whether lexical definitions of "good" and "evil" exist in all the world's languages.
My real point which you left out is that judgements about such things should really be left to the reader. Saying such things like "x is evil" really doesn't help the conversation.
> Quit moving the goalposts. Objective morality is not the same as whether lexical definitions of "good" and "evil" exist in all the world's languages.
What are you talking about? I was only ever talking about the lexical part, which was what the original parent of these comments was talking about (e.g. removing the lexical part just because the objective part doesn't exist in complex moral philosophy terms). No goalpost moving (I'm really not sure what you're talking about with that.)
> My real point which you left out is that judgements about such things should really be left to the reader. Saying such things like "x is evil" really doesn't help the conversation.
What? Again I am not seeing a connection either to your earlier comment or my original point. But regardless, I disagree with the claim that "Saying such things like "x is evil" really doesn't help the conversation".
It absolutely does help when there is a commonly understood lexical (as you call it) notion of evil that's widely accepted.
Maybe Google removed the Don't Be Evil because of articles like this pushing a Good vs. Evil narrative.