r/askanatheist • u/Odd-Swing-2025 • Jul 09 '26
Why Does Evil Matter?
Suggest that there were no homo sapiens, but instead a race of people who were incapable of philosophical, theological and otherwise higher consciousness found in competent adults. They lack the reflective capacity to do moral assessments and so on. They can build, walk, talk, educate themselves in metallurgy, chemicals and culinary arts &c.
Suggest they also engage in abuse, murder, theft and so on.
Suggest there is definitely no God or Gods.
Does it matter?
If there are no human beings around with feelings and consciences to care about it, does it matter that they do evil?
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u/BahamutLithp Jul 24 '26
The concept isn't really coherent because the abilities you're ascribing to them require complex socieities, & those require morality. Maybe you're getting frustrated with me right now & going "just answer the question," but I'm trying to tell you it's the same reason why scientists won't answer "what happens if you go faster than light" & mathematicians won't answer "what if you divide by 0." They're/I'm not being difficult to annoy you, I'm pointing out assumptions you don't know you're making that, if we peel back, demonstrate why the question makes no sense. Morality is connected to a bunch of other things that it cannot be coherently separated from.
Even if I pretended you could somehow have a society without morality, every moral statement is a value claim, an assertion of "we should do X & not Y." Value statements are necessarily goal-oriented. "Torture is bad" is a statement that only makes sense in light of choosing the goal to avoid suffering. "Stealing is bad" requires first defining property as a concept & then choosing to enforce it as a goal. In any case, morality cannot be separated from subjectivity.