Strazdas:

You do not get drunk, you do not buy drinks, the bartender looses money, the drink maker looses money, the workers working at the plant looses money, they loose money they cant buy stuff, ect. There is always a loss, but like i said it isnt always obvious.

That's not a loss. The bartender never had that money in the first place, and there was no guarantee you were going to go out drinking. That's a pretty perverse idea of loss that you have. There's also a good chance the bartender, etc. would rather not have the money than have people fighting. Because not everybody is selfish to the detriment of people around them.

It seems to be that what you are trying to say is "all actions have consequences," which is a very different thing than "all life acts for self-interest."

I think the poster you were responding to was talking about this kind of callous, criminal self-interest at the expense of others, not all forms of self-interest. You dilute the meaning of both "evil" and "self-interest" with this false equivalency.

He said "at the expense of others". Not all expense of others are criminal, for example me wasting your time with this post is not criminal.

Except they were speaking in the context of a movie where the actions are criminal, and the losses are direct.

I claimed that all forms of self interest are at the expense of others. I was using HIS definition of EVIL to prove the point of calling such self interest evil wrong.

But that wasn't his definition of evil. It was something you made up.

I did not said all life exists because of self-interest. I said all lfie exists for self-interest. You should not claim me deluding words when you are putting words in my mouth.

OK, so it did not come about because of self-interest, but from the moment life started, it acted for self interest? That's some pretty fine splitting of hairs. How do you know that life even had a sense of "self" when it was created?

I'd really like you to provide some actual evidence. "Self interest" is such an abstract, external force that I don't think it can be programmed into the the fundamental building blocks of life. We are essentially just chemical reactions that respond to stimuli.

Both suicide and nihilism is created by self interest.

Again, citation needed.

I don't think "self interest" is an entity capable of creating anything. It's actually just a concept we have. For a theory that you believe underpins all life, that's pretty lacking. Can you point to self-interest? We can see DNA, we can see brain structures. Where, exactly, is the "self-interest" generated?

Are you really claiming that nobody has ever done anything that wasn't out of self interest? I'd argue that we act against our self-interest all the time. People get drunk and kill themselves in car accidents. People take out bad loans and get into debt to buy a shiny new TV. People smoke cigarettes and get lung cancer. People even sacrifice their own interest and their own lives for the benefit of others.

More often than not, i think people are just trying to stimulate their central nervous system, to light up their brains with dopamine or seratonin, or whatever brain function does it for them. This frequently does not align with self-interest.

And again, back to "all life" - plants and simple organisms don;t even have any self-consciousness - they are just chemically "programmed" to react in certain ways to things. There's no overarching sense of self, or what "interests" they should have, and those programmed reactions can actually result in the organism's death.

If you didnt plant the seed the ground may have retained its minerals which in turn may have became a thing people use in thousands of years, but you did not knew it, so you acted out of self interest and planted a seed and you deprived the future inhabitants simply out of ignorance. that is not evil, yet the two posters i mentioned calls it so.

No, the posters you responded to did not call that so. Again, you are talking about distant hypotheticals, rather than direct loss.

But again, what if the other person was never going to have sex with anyone else?

And what if pigs could fly? We can throw whatifs all day long which proves nothing really.

Exactly! That's what you've been doing this entire argument. You haven't proved a thing. You've made a bold claim about the nature of "all life" that is firmly in the "pigs flying" territory.

I have provided numerous examples of your theory not holding up, so I would say that you're not doing so well on the proof aspect.

If the person was never going to have sex with anyone else does not mean you dont deprive somone by having sex with him.

But that person never had that to begin with! Therefore, they aren't deprived of anything.

The fact is that there are situations in which self-interest does not cause a loss to others. The losses you are citing here are losses of a hypothetical "potential" thing which the other people never had in the first place. Not actual losses.

Correction: there are situation in which we do not know the losses caused by self-interest.

No, because what you are talking about are not "losses," unless you change the definition of "loss" to something else.

The poster clearly wasn't saying that all self-interest is evil. S/he was referring to a specific expression of one's self interest, where one's fun (or greed, I would say) directly results in another's misery.

Can you please point out in that quote where word "directly" is used, for i cannot find it.

Context and reading comprehension FTW. Go back and read those posts again.

Tohron mentions excess, misery and deception at factors in the "evil" equation. not some hypothetical losses, and not some losses that the participants were ignorant of causing. Pyrian also mentions deception as a factor.

They also aren't putting these forward as their "definition" of evil. They use wording such as "most people would agree" - and in this context they are being used as examples, not definitional statements.

I don't know how you made the leap in interpreting these posts into "any kind of loss or self-interest is evil." Seems to me that you weren't reading in context, or just wanted to use this as an excuse to derail the discussion into one of your own political/social theories.

You've also translated "misery" into any kind of potential loss of opportunity - as if the hypothetical chance of not having sex at a particular time with a particular person is misery.

It is to some people. Misery is defined as " Mental or emotional unhappiness or distress"

So, somebody who has never met this other person, who never even know of each other's existence, who might be on a different continent - by not having sex with them, is causing them emotional distress? Wow, this is getting bizarre.

I thought you said that all life acted for self interest. How is it in this person's self interest to get emotionally distressed about not having sex with a person that they do not even know exists?

Also, your idea of "self-interest" and "loss" is on the order of "hey, that man scratching his nose made me lose my future rocket-car and bikini-model wife!"

"I don't know anything about stocks"
"There is no difference between a crooked wall street firm and a legit one" (paraphrased)

You have to love the way if you degenerate a group of people on mass from a position of prejudiced ignorance liberals will descended upon you with righteous fury. Unless that is they are the ones with the prejudice doing the degeneration, then its just fine.

The stock markets provide jobs for hundreds of thousands of decent people who pay there taxes and live own lives. It also provides a much needed source of funding for businesses which in-turn creates many many more jobs and opportunities. Just because you don't understand it and Michael Moore made himself rich by telling you to hate them does not make it OK to be prejudiced against a whole group of people or businesses; especially when you don't actually understand why your being prejudiced and just relying on things you heard other people say about the supposedly evil free market.

testiou:

The stock market is evil, destroys jobs and kills people. For example food speculation - or "the real hunger games".

The free market is evil - thats why he doesn't exist anymore. Free market ment child labor, price-fixing agreement, no sick days, no vacation, etc. The "free market" didn't regulated itself and stopped those things. So the state had to make laws.

You are precisely 180 degrees wrong. If you want evil look the other way at Socialism and all its variants. Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Khmer Rouge all of whom murdered millions in the name of the state. Luckily all these evil Socialist states no longer exist, but if you abhorrer the free market feel free to move to Venezuela or North Korea.

However, I suspect like all western socialists you enjoy the many benefits given to you by the free market and capitalism, and then use the comfort and free time it affords you to criticize it.

Kingbingo:

You are precisely 180 degrees wrong. If you want evil look the other way at Socialism and all its variants. Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Khmer Rouge all of whom murdered millions in the name of the state.

Since when was Nazi Germany socialist? It was a fascist regime. Similarly, the Soviets and Khmer Rouge were Communists. Don't let the facts bother you, I guess.

Kingbingo:
Luckily all these evil Socialist states no longer exist, but if you abhorrer the free market feel free to move to Venezuela or North Korea.

However, I suspect like all western socialists you enjoy the many benefits given to you by the free market and capitalism, and then use the comfort and free time it affords you to criticize it.

No Western developed country has a free market today, including the USA. In fact, the US economy has been successful and prosperous largely because of regulation of the market. A completely unregulated free market would be disastrous for people, and the market. Western countries are successful because they are mixed economies, blending capitalism, socialism and democracy. Different countries have different blends of these ingredients, but they all contain varying degrees of them, though.

Nice straw man, though. It's almost like you haven't updated your black & white Free Markets vs. Communism argument since the 1950s.

I suspect like all western free market supremacists, you enjoy many comforts of life such as clean air, labor laws and freedom of expression because of aspects of socialism, even though you criticise it.

testiou:

Nazi = National Socialist ... an ideology combining the nationalism of the right and the socialism of the left.

So you're just going by the name, then? The Nazis' supposed "socialism" is nothing like what modern socialism is.

You shouldn't judge a book by its cover. There are countries which call themselves "People's Democratic Republic" where those terms don't apply. Just because a group calls themselves something, doesn't make it true. Much like "Christian Science" doesn't have anything to do with science.

You must be quite gullible if you take the names people give themselves at face value.