Evil is knowingly causing harm in order to derive pleasure (or profit, but what is profit if not deferred pleasure?). How evil it is depends on how serious and lasting the harm.
Evil came into being when the first animal that was smart enough to know what it was doing did something harmful that it didn’t need to in order to derive that pleasure.
Humans happened long after that. (Or around the same time if you prefer your religion’s creation story.)
If you’ve taken antibiotics, you chose to cause harm to millions of living things for the pleasure of not feeling sick, maybe as simple a pleasure as just not coughing or not having itchy feet, who knows.
Point is, the living things you killed will never be revived. You caused extraordinary amounts of serious and lasting harm all for your personal pleasure.
You must be absolutely wracked with guilt over this massive evil you and so many others have and are still committing
I didn’t mention necessary evils in my main comment. With necessary evils, the pleasure is more of a secondary effect to relief of some kind. The fact we even have the phrase in our language for the concept and that it contains the word “evil” would seem to serve my point.
Also, consider that the harm is minimised by the fact that those bacteria cannot suffer in any meaningful way.
For where the harm is greater, tens of thousands of pages of law have been written about where the line between pleasure and relief falls. How evil an act is deemed to be is ultimately indicated by the severity of the enforced consequences (prison sentence, etc.). Or at least that’s the idea.
Maybe it was a man-on-man killing by someone in danger with no other apparent reasonable options. Maybe they just felt like it and are only saying that. Maybe they were clumsy or incompetent. Was that with malice? etc. etc.
And then there’s those enforced consequences. They’re also a necessary evil.
Eating flesh to survive is a necessary evil for those that are smart enough to understand they’re killing another animal, and it’s not evil for those that aren’t. It’s probably not an either-or, either. There might well be another sliding scale there.
It’s what they evolved to eat and they have no means of creating an alternative. Carnivory almost certainly evolved in parallel with brains increasing in size, which is a curious consequence. You eat flesh, so your brain gets big enough to try to tell you to stop eating flesh.
There have been instances of predator animals temporarily adopting the offspring of the adult prey animal they ate. I think it would be wrong to call that a guilty conscience in a non-sapient creature, but whatever the ‘merely’ sentient equivalent is, I bet in some cases, it’s that. In others it might well just be a snack for later, but it’s curious how they treat that child with care and respect before they do.
FWIW, I’m no saint here. I eat meat even though I could probably get away with not doing that.
Evil is knowingly causing harm in order to derive pleasure (or profit, but what is profit if not deferred pleasure?). How evil it is depends on how serious and lasting the harm.
Evil came into being when the first animal that was smart enough to know what it was doing did something harmful that it didn’t need to in order to derive that pleasure.
Humans happened long after that. (Or around the same time if you prefer your religion’s creation story.)
If you’ve taken antibiotics, you chose to cause harm to millions of living things for the pleasure of not feeling sick, maybe as simple a pleasure as just not coughing or not having itchy feet, who knows.
Point is, the living things you killed will never be revived. You caused extraordinary amounts of serious and lasting harm all for your personal pleasure.
You must be absolutely wracked with guilt over this massive evil you and so many others have and are still committing
I didn’t mention necessary evils in my main comment. With necessary evils, the pleasure is more of a secondary effect to relief of some kind. The fact we even have the phrase in our language for the concept and that it contains the word “evil” would seem to serve my point.
Also, consider that the harm is minimised by the fact that those bacteria cannot suffer in any meaningful way.
For where the harm is greater, tens of thousands of pages of law have been written about where the line between pleasure and relief falls. How evil an act is deemed to be is ultimately indicated by the severity of the enforced consequences (prison sentence, etc.). Or at least that’s the idea.
Maybe it was a man-on-man killing by someone in danger with no other apparent reasonable options. Maybe they just felt like it and are only saying that. Maybe they were clumsy or incompetent. Was that with malice? etc. etc.
And then there’s those enforced consequences. They’re also a necessary evil.
But these are all evils.
Was the first carnivore evil? Sating hunger is pleasurable. Was it knowingly doing harm? How many brain cells did it need to know that?
Eating flesh to survive is a necessary evil for those that are smart enough to understand they’re killing another animal, and it’s not evil for those that aren’t. It’s probably not an either-or, either. There might well be another sliding scale there.
It’s what they evolved to eat and they have no means of creating an alternative. Carnivory almost certainly evolved in parallel with brains increasing in size, which is a curious consequence. You eat flesh, so your brain gets big enough to try to tell you to stop eating flesh.
There have been instances of predator animals temporarily adopting the offspring of the adult prey animal they ate. I think it would be wrong to call that a guilty conscience in a non-sapient creature, but whatever the ‘merely’ sentient equivalent is, I bet in some cases, it’s that. In others it might well just be a snack for later, but it’s curious how they treat that child with care and respect before they do.
FWIW, I’m no saint here. I eat meat even though I could probably get away with not doing that.