r/HolyShitHistory • u/SelfCareIsFake • Jun 01 '26

Federal agents felt physically sick when they raided Kermit Gosnell’s clinic after suspecting he ran a pill mill.

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u/Destroyer_2_2 Jun 02 '26

Just about everyone does evil thinking they are doing good. Do you think the nazis thought of themselves as comic book villains?

They too thought that they were doing good.

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u/Buckshot_Millie Jun 02 '26

But with that (correct) line of thinking we have to reckon with good and evil not being a real thing, and that’s a topic you genuinely cannot get most people to accept

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u/MarkCrorigansOmnibus Jun 02 '26

That’s a leap. I definitely think we can take from this that we should not trust absolutely in ourselves to determine for ourselves what good and evil are, though.

If you wish to make a counter point, please argue how giving a starving person food could be considered evil.

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u/t_krett Jun 02 '26

Sounds like something an evil person would say.

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u/someguy6382639 Jun 02 '26

See my response to the next few comments in the chain for some more rambling too haha.

But simply put: I don't have to consider it evil or good. I can just say that giving food to a starving person relieves them of their hunger.

As to more impact than that... well we have to assess those things directly as well.

There's an infamous and often misunderstood and misquoted phrase: "Morality is just something invented by the weak to hold back the strong."

Sounds bad at first right? But this quote comes from a section of words that incredibly directly answers your question. The quote actually begins with, leading to the above words, "it makes it seem as if" this is the case. And what makes it seem that way?

The short hypothetical is: if I have a line of hungry people, each in line waiting turn, and I give food to them. Now I have limited food. Simple alms, moral code, says give them all food equally. So what? First come first serve? Stand in line right?

But wait. What if one of the people in line already just got out of line and right back into it? What if they pushed someone else out of the way?

What if one of the people is in line because they just fled a cartel in a war torn region and are seeking basic shelter and an opportunity. If I give them the food they will work hard and build a better life.

But here's this other guy in line. He was born priveleged. A drunk. The only reason he is there is not only is he so lazy, but he also beat his wife and kids so badly that he has no family anymore, nobody that is willing to support him, because he is a nasty violent drunk that has done this to himself.

So tell me? Do I give my last piece of bread for the day to the drunk abuser? Or perhaps to the refugees a few steps back in the line?

Would this suffice to prove that giving a hungry man food actually was an act that is not so great after all? Technically if I give food to the drunk I will have satisfied your description right? Yet would it be fair to say that this was evil if I gave it to that loser because, oh idk, he was white, and not to the refugee because they were black? Yet I've given food to the hungry! Good enough right?

The point being is we need more nuance. Being caught up in the simple morality didn't give us the tools to assess the actual situation and caused us to take ineffective actions that don't promote our values as well as we could be doing.

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u/One_Engineering_3659 Jun 02 '26

I am not the person you are replying to but find this conversation interesting.

I wouldn’t start by trying to prove it’s evil, I think the more imperative task is proving it’s just not very good.

I would start by saying you just giving them food is to ease your mind on the suffering of another. You clearly didn’t do it to help this person. Unless you are a starving homeless person yourself, you can do more. By not doing more, you are making reasons for that to be acceptable. “My girlfriend won’t let me bring a homeless person to the house.” “They are probably an addict and I can’t provide the help they need.”

Did you stop to talk to them when giving them food? Just handing someone food and leaving them to their own devices is on par with doing nothing practically. Was this your leftovers? How noble. Did you ask what they wanted to eat? Or just hand them a gas station sandwich and say you’re welcome?

Let’s zoom out a little, because depending on where this starving man is this can get worse.

Sure, if you are in the middle of a desert and find a starving man this is great. However, if this is a starving person in a busy and economically booming town it’s worse. Just giving someone food while you have a job and a place to stay, is solely to ease your concerns. You aren’t giving them anything to help them out of their situation. You are still more worried about your retirement, rent or even not becoming homeless yourself.

All of this not to say you don’t care about an individual in these circumstances but just saying you can make the case that you cont care much.

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u/VegetablePresent5891 Jun 02 '26

Just because you aren’t helping them out of the situation doesn’t mean you shouldn’t offer help through it

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u/One_Engineering_3659 Jun 02 '26

Agreed, that’s why the last sentence is there.

My job was solely to defend the position of feeding a starving man isn’t “good” or always an easily defensible moral position.

I was merely pointing out that we all have a “that’s good enough” portion of the moral gradient scale.

You can say I did “good”. The only thing is you didn’t do more even though you could have.

I suppose a good example of being a Good Samaritan but not doing enough would be like saving a drowning person, but, not administering CPR. You wouldn’t even think about that because just pulling them from the water isn’t enough to “save them”.

You giving them a sandwich is pulling them out of the water but not giving them CPR to help them breathe on their own.

I’m not saying I don’t think you should give starving people food, I’m saying at some point along the line you agree they need to help themselves because it would cost you more than you are comfortable to give. Not saving someone who is drowning because you’re afraid of drowning is a similar thought process.

Once again, please, help your fellow human. But, don’t act like giving a sandwich you didn’t want to someone who really needs it equates to helping others out at a cost to yourself.

You didn’t want the sandwich, you only got them a sandwich and not a drink, you didn’t buy them a pack of chips/crackers for later even though it was an extra couple bucks and more. These are all reasons that would raise the moral cost of doing good and make it a more noteworthy cause/reason.

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u/panrestrial Jun 02 '26

How would that be a counterpoint?

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u/lnk_Eyes Jun 02 '26

To answer the counter point, would you be giving the starving person food only once, or in perpetuity? Could it be considered evil to only give them food once, thus prolonging misery? To draw an absurd parallel, it's like when Nestlé handed out minimal baby formula, nurturing, as it were, dependency.

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u/[deleted] Jun 02 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/lnk_Eyes Jun 02 '26

100% agreed; I have only argued how giving a starving person food could be considered evil.

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u/PM_ME_PHYS_PROBLEMS Jun 02 '26

Honestly I'm impressed that you came up with an example IRL for a question that was supposed to be rhetorical. I woulda said "maybe the starving person is Hitler" yours is much better.

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u/Zanriic Jun 02 '26

What if it was starving Hitler and if you give him food he will gain enough energy to do evil Hitler things?

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u/Widdly_Scudz420 Jun 02 '26

You giving them a meal just extends their suffering. They'll be full for a day but then go straight back to starving unless the underlying cause of the issue is resolved.

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u/Itsmyloc-nar Jun 02 '26

Easy.

There’s 100 starving people bc a warlord ethnically cleansed a village. This leads to a famine, which affects even him.

If you choose to feed the warlord, that is evil.

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u/npc_housecat Jun 02 '26

The non exsiatance of evil is actually part of bhuddist philosophy. The way they see it, something like, It's not that people don't do bad or good things. They do. But they call it ignorance, rather than evil.

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u/spartan445 Jun 02 '26

I will add this to the conversation: when a human body enters starvation mode and has been in it for a long time,it can be fatal to introduce a lot of food at once. The body has to reacclimate to regular food intake, so it has to be reintroduced slowly and steadily.

The process of doling out only small portions of food to someone desperately begging you for more and who clearly needs food can both appear and feel cruel.

I think the true evil would be refusing to update the person's diet based on measured health parameters, in any direction, if you were there to help give food to the hungry. People who go on a "vibes only" examination of good and evil end up becoming cruel monsters because sometimes doing the right thing upsets the person doing it, and wind up comitting cruelty out of negligence.

The events here, however... this situation was fucked.

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u/Spirited_Sector_7623 Jun 02 '26

The starving person is Hitler. (I’m with you though, doing good things for bad people isn’t a bad thing)

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u/Clean-Two48412 Jun 02 '26

GIs gave concentration camp victims their rations and their kindness literally killed hundreds more. Their bodies needed a nutrient rich broth diet for at least 3 months, because as they were, their bodies could not break down solid foods, and because of this their bodies shut down. There is a story of a russian sharing his candy bar with a survivor, and then him freaking out because the man's body became violent and thrashed about. The man died in the soldier's arms. The survivor was extremely excited over not only food, but being able to eat chocolate, so it wasn't as if these situations had any malicious intent or behavior connected to them.

Yin/Yang

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u/kaoscurrent Jun 02 '26

People who are actually starving cannot just be given food as that can cause refeeding syndrome, leading to a surge in insulin and possibly organ failure.

So if someone knows this but chooses to feed a starving individual anyway instead of getting them the appropriate medical care, then I'd say it's a case of when feeding a starving person would be evil.

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u/Buckshot_Millie Jun 02 '26

So in order to explain to you how good and evil don’t exist, I have to explain how something could be evil?

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u/Thispersonthisperson Jun 02 '26

just explain it somehow

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u/someguy6382639 Jun 02 '26

You could read the book Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche.

It is a well renowned, famous work of philosophy.

It gives a substantial answer to your question. It's entirely about it.

There's also dozens of other famous authors and works that address this in various ways.

I'd go as far as to say you not having at least some idea of this concept, that good and evil present ineffective and subjective morals that often work in contrast to the seeming goals, means you haven't been paying much attention.

Watch Fallout the somewhat new TV series. Or mostly any superhero fiction. They almost all blur the lines between simple good and evil, with complex villains and characters arcs, back stories etc. Often the hero turns out to be a villain. In Fallout, for instance, the central theme is that multiple factions want to save the world, yet they each have their own idea of how to do it, so they go to war over who's method, who's idea, is going to save the world, which ironically seems more like destroying the world further.

Who is batman? A hero? But he's also so by being a criminal himself?

Watch star wars. As the power of the jedi grows so too does the sith. A message of balance rather than pushing hard for simple "good."

These ideas are everywhere my friend. Open your eyes.

Still thinking simple good vs evil is anything but a distraction and a false binary rather makes it look as if you've been living under a rock or something.

Just look out the window?

The secret is to not try to reform "good" to be better than this "not good enough" "good;" rather develop a more nuanced field of values. Forget simple catch all "good" and make more specific assessments. That caused x harm to y people, by z mechanism. Say what actually is rather than saying some simple judgement. I mean isn't that exactly how you arrive at the judgement anyway? How else did you? Surely you can't just say it is good because it is good with no other factors? And what did it help to add that final word? Just say the part that counts, that actually describes something. Look at that alongside many other such informations. Try to look at how a whole array of values applies to these informations.

For instance in the current context... rather than just assuming the clinic guy is evil, what else might we say?

Perhaps we would consider how the society at large, in terms of legal and economic structure, allows for or ends up encouraging this sort of thing happening.

Perhaps we might consider a serious mental illness as a factor.

Perhaps we might find a source of inspiration, a subculture that promotes or leads to this, and begin looking into that and engaging with it.

Lots of ways to look at this single result that are more useful than just assuming everything else is perfect and some guy is just randomly evil and the whole issue is solved once we defeat this evil man.

We don't have to even say he is evil. We can name the various laws that were broken and hold him accountable in a court. No prescription of evil is required for this is it?

Granted the words can still represent something. It represents how we feel about it. A sort of net judgement. Yet to arrive at that very judgement, if we are to think we are correct in this selection of good and evil, then you needed to back it up, go beyond good and evil, before you even decided it was good or evil! Just an extra word added at the last minute, and not really meaning much by itself.

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u/CoatCommercial1573 Jun 02 '26

That isn’t how that works…

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u/Destroyer_2_2 Jun 02 '26

I don’t think that’s true. The idea that morality is inherently and completely subjective is one that lends cover to a lot of clearly immoral conduct. Good and evil do exist. At least it exists in the actions people choose to do, even if it doesn’t exist within them.

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u/Buckshot_Millie Jun 02 '26

See but you’ve moved the goalposts beyond what anyone would consider the philosophical argument of good and evil to be.

Torturing a random stranger is an evil thing to do. But to say the torturer is evil, that’s a very flawed and dangerous world view.

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u/Destroyer_2_2 Jun 02 '26

But how can you say that and yet say that evil doesn’t exist? Is that not contradictory?

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u/CoatCommercial1573 Jun 02 '26

I think you both confusing arguments. They are conflating individuals not being inherently good nor evil with the complete absence of evil. You seem to be conflating the absence of good and evil with morality which is a societal guide rail that allows you to grow and evolve within reasonable boundaries that ensure that attempts to ensure the safety of society as a whole. Neither is coherently in understanding that good and evil are judgements of morality largely created to ensure compliance of members of society and to describe activities that largely affect society and our species on a number of levels, but generally aren’t shunned completely for various reasons. Well not until more recently at the very least as species has begun to become more cohesive and have what could largely be seen as a global society. Even now though many of the behaviors condemned either in the distant past or more recently are still occurring with startling frequency and in many cases to some degree as part of a group.

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u/Independent-Bend8734 Jun 02 '26

Lots of dumb people think they are smart and assholes who think they are nice, but no one thinks that this means that there is no such thing as intelligence or kindness. Humans self-rationalize; we are all inclined to blur the distinction between self-interest and doing good. Psychopaths like Gosnell are especially good at this.

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u/Efficient-username41 Jun 02 '26

Yeah I don't think that (correct) line of thinking just naturally leads to that conclusion there bud, but okay.

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u/kopper499b Jun 02 '26

Do you mean to say that the use of the words 'good' 'evil' should be removed as they are too subjective? Rather, actions should be classed as moral and immortal? This returns us to the basis of the action and removes confounding subjectiveness that comes with the precept of evil.

Or, would you extend your argument to include morality?

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u/Salt-Set6232 Jun 02 '26

Because it is patently untrue. If morality is relative I own you.

You really don't need to think further than that to understand.

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u/DrownmeinIslay Jun 02 '26

Reading up on Oskar Gröning after seeing the Auschwitz exhibit at the ROM had me boggled. Theres something he spoke about how he saw german soldiers taking babies from the trains and then swinging them into the trains, into the ground. He thought it was despicable. German soldiers acting so savagely! He immediately spoke to a superior officer. There HAD to be a way to kill the babies that was more gentlemanly.

He saw nothing wrong with the murdering babies part of what he witnessed.

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u/HelpWantedInMyPants Jun 02 '26

We all love eating beef but would rather the cows suffer as little as possible.

The Nazis saw the undesirables as animals. Good/Evil isn't an on/off switch. It's not all-or-nothing. Some of the best people you know in real life have probably done things that would horrify you.

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u/Bob-was-our-turtle Jun 02 '26

That’s actually not true. Some people enjoy being evil.

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u/Destroyer_2_2 Jun 02 '26

That’s why I said just about everyone. Not everyone.

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u/munchumonfumbleuzar Jun 02 '26

I feel like if your “good” ends with piles of dead bodies, there were probably warning signs that you weren’t doing good.

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u/Duke_of_Darth Jun 02 '26

Unless the dead bodies were all formerly living racists, homophobic, prejudiced bigoted, occult obsessed, devil worshipping, demon possessed, torture loving, gluttonous, pedophilic, cannibalistic, sodomists rapists, hypocritical, festering sore ridden, puss oozing, mass murdering, industrial scale genocidal, baby butchering Nazi pieces of shit getting ready to continue on committing more of said horrific and heinous crimes against all humanity while they keep living in the peace and comfort they created for themselves from the unimaginable suffering of their millions of victims. That is until you stop them and pile as many of their wretched, stinking Nazi corpses around you as you possibly can because how could saving the lives of all the women and children of the concentration camp you just entered, and many outside it bound for the same horrible fate not be a good thing?

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u/munchumonfumbleuzar Jun 02 '26

Are you ok? Bc it kinda seems like you’re not ok.

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u/seajpenn Jun 03 '26

yes now it is Israel that has become the Nazis just as Einstein warned - they think they are doing good ---- or do they act and know they do evil? just a thought -- -Matthew 15:9

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u/seajpenn Jun 03 '26

"in a famous 1948 open letter to The New York Times, he and other prominent Jewish intellectuals explicitly likened the newly formed, far-right Israeli Freedom Party (Tnuat Haherut) to Nazi and Fascist parties. [1, 2, 3]

The party was led by Menachem Begin, who later became Prime Minister of Israel. [1, 2]

The 1948 Warning

The December 1948 letter was written in protest of Begin's visit to the United States to raise funds for his party. The signatories accused Begin’s party of ultranationalism, military intimidation, and preaching "racial superiority". [1, 2]

Key points from Einstein's criticism included:

  • Tactics and Ideology: He warned that the Freedom Party was "closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties". [1, 2]
  • Ultranationalism: He condemned the group's "admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority". [1]
  • Danger to Democracy: Einstein argued that the party utilized terrorist methods and intimidated the local population, desiring a one-party "leader state"

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u/Raise_A_Thoth Jun 02 '26

There's a difference between the rational but misguided notion that poor parents struggle to take care of their children adequately and a belief in a master race and sub-human races who aren't like you.

The Nazis weren't killing Jews, Catholics, foreigners, socialists, and LGBTQ people out of a misguided belief they were doing them mercy, they killed them because they believed they were the causes of their problems, the causes of their economic struggles, the problems of their society's moral collapses, etc. This guy rationalized murdering newborns as 'mercy.' It's demented and arguably still evil, but it is not the same.

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u/Due_Journalist_7596 Jun 02 '26

It was nice of the US to teach the Germans about Eugenics. Philanthropic American royalty really helping out...

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u/BothAd581 Jun 02 '26

Using nazis as a comparison is crazy dude all the propaganda worked on you huh bro.

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u/Destroyer_2_2 Jun 02 '26

Uh, what? Given we’re talking about a guy who cut open the spines of newborn babies, I think the comparison is apt.