Is something that is good or bad subjective?

Is something that is good or bad subjective?


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Takes Two To Tango

The one who doesn't fall, doesn't stand up.
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What constitutes something being good or even bad? There is no definitive book that says that this is good or bad and who knows what it will take you if you did something that is believe to be either good or bad and ends up being something fortunate or unfortunate. But it's really how you look at it, it's purely subjective imo.

Was 9/11 a bad event, how about the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima was that a good event?

This is from the video below:

"The whole process of nature. Is an integrated process of immense complexity and really impossible to tell what anything happens to it is good or bad. Because you never know what's the consequences of the misfortune or you never know what's the consequences of good fortune."

 
Essentially, no matter how fucked up thing seem currently, they may lead to something good in the long run or no matter how good something appears, it may lead to a shit outcome in the long term?

The only way to objectively assess the impact of a chain of events is with the benefit of hindsight; Even then, it's down to how you choose to interpret the events themselves. Did the good outweigh the bad?

Would certainly seem to suggest subjective.
 
Plenty of good things can be bad for a lot of people, and bad, good. As for the actions themselves being morally bad, it depends on who's smiling when committing these atrocities.
 
The meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was a cataclysm. We lost an entire portfolio of advanced, impressive animals. Evolution had been tweaking and multiplying dinosaurs for 165 million years before and suddenly all that evolution was almost totally eliminated (birds being the living survivors today).

From this view, that was a tragedy. But for us, things worked out alright. Our ancestors at the time of the dinosaurs were pathetic little scurrying rat-things that sulked around in the shadows and didn't dare even evolve bodies big enough to be worth the dinosaurs' time to hunt us. With the Dinos out of the picture we mammals were able to spread and diversify and in time we get humans dominating the planet.

Or consider viral immunity. It's all well and fine to say something like "europeans had developed immunity to smallpox, so the virus comparatively swept like wildfire through the First Nations communities in the Americas." That seems, for the Europeans of the time, to be a pretty good thing, this immunity, but we know that this immunity was paid for with human lives, untold thousands/millions of Europeans dying at a young ag and thereby removing themselves from the gene pool. Each one of these stories is a personal/familial tragedy. Is mass death less bad if it happens spread out over time? - and even if you still claim it was "good" for the europeans to have evolved immunity, was the effect actually good? Was wholesale destruction of the indigenous peoples in the Americas actually good for Europeans? Was it good for overall human history?

Imagine if smallpox and other diseases hadn't decimated the people living in the Americas - The different groups from present day Canada down to present day Chile may well have been able to resist the European colonizers, or at least slow down and/or require more diplomacy throughout the colonization process. Maybe we humans would have been better off if the colonization of the new world was characterized by a healthy resistance to the domination by European traditions. Maybe it would have even been cooperative - A few interesting and seemingly "good" things are possible: slavery could have been curtailed much earlier, countless cultural traditions likely would have not been lost, humanity today might not have to deal with the same ugly scars in its social history and perhaps we'd all be better off because of that.

In the end, it seems pretty obvious to me that there is no such thing as univerasl objective morality, and this is a real big problem for humanity. On the other hand, if there was such a thing, that would maybe be a bigger problem for humanity because of the issues this brings up with free will, etc.
 
This has pretty much been settled. Value judgements are subjective. Something being good or bad is a value judgement, therefore it is subjective.
 
The meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was a cataclysm. We lost an entire portfolio of advanced, impressive animals. Evolution had been tweaking and multiplying dinosaurs for 165 million years before and suddenly all that evolution was almost totally eliminated (birds being the living survivors today).

From this view, that was a tragedy. But for us, things worked out alright. Our ancestors at the time of the dinosaurs were pathetic little scurrying rat-things that sulked around in the shadows and didn't dare even evolve bodies big enough to be worth the dinosaurs' time to hunt us. With the Dinos out of the picture we mammals were able to spread and diversify and in time we get humans dominating the planet.

Or consider viral immunity. It's all well and fine to say something like "europeans had developed immunity to smallpox, so the virus comparatively swept like wildfire through the First Nations communities in the Americas." That seems, for the Europeans of the time, to be a pretty good thing, this immunity, but we know that this immunity was paid for with human lives, untold thousands/millions of Europeans dying at a young ag and thereby removing themselves from the gene pool. Each one of these stories is a personal/familial tragedy. Is mass death less bad if it happens spread out over time? - and even if you still claim it was "good" for the europeans to have evolved immunity, was the effect actually good? Was wholesale destruction of the indigenous peoples in the Americas actually good for Europeans? Was it good for overall human history?

Imagine if smallpox and other diseases hadn't decimated the people living in the Americas - The different groups from present day Canada down to present day Chile may well have been able to resist the European colonizers, or at least slow down and/or require more diplomacy throughout the colonization process. Maybe we humans would have been better off if the colonization of the new world was characterized by a healthy resistance to the domination by European traditions. Maybe it would have even been cooperative - A few interesting and seemingly "good" things are possible: slavery could have been curtailed much earlier, countless cultural traditions likely would have not been lost, humanity today might not have to deal with the same ugly scars in its social history and perhaps we'd all be better off because of that.

In the end, it seems pretty obvious to me that there is no such thing as univerasl objective morality, and this is a real big problem for humanity. On the other hand, if there was such a thing, that would maybe be a bigger problem for humanity because of the issues this brings up with free will, etc.

Well said my friend, well said. Thanks for your insight.
 
Whether something is 'good' or 'bad' is entirely based on the perspective of those who witness or experience it. The world is infinitely more complicated than 'good' or 'bad', which don't even begin to scratch the surface of ethical and moral considerations that face most of us as 21st century humans. Objectively, the terms are meaningless - amounts of good and bad aren't always measurable. So while I think some things are good and some are bad, I understand this insofar as it is simply me imposing my definitions on the world I see around me.

Regardless, the concepts of both 'good' and 'bad' are fundamental to the human experience and as much as I'd like to view the world in an objective lens there will always be associated emotions in my brain about behaviors I find either good or bad, right or wrong, cruel or kind. Things are, in my experience, most often both good and bad simultaneously - good for one person and bad for another.
 
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The meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was a cataclysm. We lost an entire portfolio of advanced, impressive animals. Evolution had been tweaking and multiplying dinosaurs for 165 million years before and suddenly all that evolution was almost totally eliminated (birds being the living survivors today).

From this view, that was a tragedy. But for us, things worked out alright. Our ancestors at the time of the dinosaurs were pathetic little scurrying rat-things that sulked around in the shadows and didn't dare even evolve bodies big enough to be worth the dinosaurs' time to hunt us. With the Dinos out of the picture we mammals were able to spread and diversify and in time we get humans dominating the planet.

Or consider viral immunity. It's all well and fine to say something like "europeans had developed immunity to smallpox, so the virus comparatively swept like wildfire through the First Nations communities in the Americas." That seems, for the Europeans of the time, to be a pretty good thing, this immunity, but we know that this immunity was paid for with human lives, untold thousands/millions of Europeans dying at a young ag and thereby removing themselves from the gene pool. Each one of these stories is a personal/familial tragedy. Is mass death less bad if it happens spread out over time? - and even if you still claim it was "good" for the europeans to have evolved immunity, was the effect actually good? Was wholesale destruction of the indigenous peoples in the Americas actually good for Europeans? Was it good for overall human history?

Imagine if smallpox and other diseases hadn't decimated the people living in the Americas - The different groups from present day Canada down to present day Chile may well have been able to resist the European colonizers, or at least slow down and/or require more diplomacy throughout the colonization process. Maybe we humans would have been better off if the colonization of the new world was characterized by a healthy resistance to the domination by European traditions. Maybe it would have even been cooperative - A few interesting and seemingly "good" things are possible: slavery could have been curtailed much earlier, countless cultural traditions likely would have not been lost, humanity today might not have to deal with the same ugly scars in its social history and perhaps we'd all be better off because of that.

In the end, it seems pretty obvious to me that there is no such thing as univerasl objective morality, and this is a real big problem for humanity. On the other hand, if there was such a thing, that would maybe be a bigger problem for humanity because of the issues this brings up with free will, etc.

So do you think there is no such thing as good or bad, but just series of events?

And what's your take on a guy like Jeffrey Dahmer is he pure bad/evil?
 
While good and bad are societal concepts, the general understanding is that things that harm another person are "bad".
 
Good and bad are imprecise terms for the examples you’ve used, and many things can be neither. So, I’d say save good and bad for subjective statements, which are no less useful than objective descriptions really. When you want to be pinpoint accurate in a description, try to use terms that have footing in specific objective reasoning, and can’t be reduced to “I like it” or “I don’t like it.”
 
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