Comment by jamiek88
6 hours ago
I glanced at this and moved on but then my brain did a kind of record scratch on this comment.
Great question does intelligence require selfishness / evil?
I’m gonna think about this a bit, but my knee jerk was to (violently) disagree with this but I don’t know why.
I think evil is an an artificial and subjective construct and therefore intelligence will somehow do something “evil” by someone’s or something’s standard.
But at the same time, I think it is an important construct because it prevents groups from descending into absolute chaos, which encourages the survival of the species.
As a construct, I see the concept of evil as the way that humans classify activities that cause psychological harm and those triggers are somewhat biologically and culturally shared.
And there seem to be people that don’t seem to “see” evil (e.g. serial killers), but once again I think it’s just they don’t share some biological trait with the rest of us (which doesn’t justify their actions either).
So despite having the opinion that evil may just be a construct, I still find it important because (1) I am selfish and don’t want to be psychologically harmed and (2) I am not selfish and am vaguely interested in the survival of the species.
> Great question does intelligence require selfishness / evil?
No.
E.g., a bunch of chimps who come upon food will probably become aggressive, whereas a bunch of bonobos will probably get frisky with each other.
They are closely related primates, and their level of intelligence is at least comparable. So it's quite unlikely that the chimps higher level of social aggression is a hard dependency of their level of intelligence.
Bonobos commit strategic infanticide amongst competing tribes.
> Great question does intelligence require selfishness / evil?
You think 'selfishness' and 'evil' are equivalent?
Matters of degree, no?
But that was poorly punctuated I meant selfishness or even evil not that they were equivalent.
Thanks for clarifying.
Re matters of degree, I would disagree. The opposite of selfishness would be selflessness. This sounds like a good thing, eg being altruistic is assumed to be 'good', but then, it could also be about imposing one's values on someone, and devaluing the self. It could be a means of control (was forced altruism in communist countries 'good', for example). It seems that 'selflessness' - selfishness's opposite - can also be characterised as 'evil'. If it's not clear whether selfishness or selflessness is evil, it's not clear that it's a matter of degrees.
Ayn Rand argues in the "The Virtue of Selfishness" that selfishness is a good thing, if you want to see a lovely alternative argument.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3URpIKFoyW0