Are all evils caused by insufficient knowledge? - BRETT HALL
BRETT HALL
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Are all evils caused by insufficient knowledge?
1/28/2020
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“All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge” is what David Deutsch has called "The Principle of Optimism". A reason this is a principle of optimism is that it means whatever is going wrong - whatever the evil thing is - whatever we no longer want (or do want but don’t have) is just due to some lack of knowledge (in other words: ignorance) on our part. If we try to create knowledge, seek solutions and search for answers, then with effort - sometimes great effort - we can find them.
Logically this is simply equivalent to “problems are soluble”.
There is some confusion, I believe following deeply entrenched traditional religious memes - about how “evil” should imply intent. This too is a moral claim, of course, about how words should be used. I guess the idea evil must entail intent comes from the idea that there was once considered to be “anger of the gods” or other beings (so natural disasters have traditionally been interpreted in the pre scientific era as evidence of god’(s)’ anger. When we learned lightning was just static electricity sparking, we regarded there as being “no intent”. So god's anger (or perhaps the anger of demons or whatever) was not there, so how can lightning be an evil?). Even avowed atheists inherit this way of speaking and thinking to some extent. Evil can only be evil if there is intent. "...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being" wrote Solzhenitsyn. This can be interpreted in a number of ways. Here's two of them. (1): there are mystical type forces (Satan versus Yaweh, say) or even just "psychological forces" pulling the soul (or mind) in one direction or the other. (2) People possess genuine knowledge (the good) and far more ignorance (sometimes bad) and the latter can cause real suffering. People can also sometimes know what just isn't so: and that's a form of ignorance which can also cause suffering of an even worse kind. The first "force" type way of thinking can be a useful way of framing things but it can also mislead one into thinking that all evil actions must be motivated by evil intent. But they need not be, even if evil philosophies - dogmas of all kinds - can act very much like psychological forces. But there too a person is a victim as much an as active agent. Their intents are...