What I am about to present is something that occupies my mind almost daily and has done so for years. I obsess over it partially because I find it so incredibly useful and seemingly neglected in knowledge and I am extremely excited to share it because I perceive the good it could do in the world is beyond shocking. This idea is built upon arguably one of the most hidden and important truths in reality that I have discovered after years of study and constant logical reflection, which was done to a fair amount in solitude. The secret gives way to my newly created idea, the fallacy of universal implausibility.
The fallacy of universal implausibility has many applications and I believe it would be applicable it seems to me in conversations about the speed of light, as well in regards to reality as a whole. However, it seems to me by far that its most powerful application is in regards to evil. I will therefore focus in this post in talking about it and the idea behind it both in regards to generalities as well as applying these ideas to evil.
The extremely hidden and important truth that I speak of is, in accordance to my understanding, that the truth of evil itself seems implausible. Thus if humans try to cast down as likely falsehood statements about evil that seem implausible, and they fail to realize that to their limited understanding the truth of evil seems implausible, then they run the risk of dismissing the truth as falsehood. To share the fallacy of universal implausibility in more full sense than this I have put the four points of it below.
Four Points of the Fallacy of Universal Implausibility
1. You cannot say that something is false or likely false because it seems implausible in regards to a certain thing, if you cannot show how that certain thing is plausible (which would mean upon attempting it one would struggle).
2. If questions can be presented that demonstrate that to your current understanding that the truth of the thing in question appears implausible, then your inability to answer these questions establishes that the truth appears implausible to you.
3. Therefore, if you say the implausibility of a view in regards to that thing means it is false, and the truth in regards to that thing appears implausible to you according to your limited understanding, then your statement says the truth is false and is not a valid truth statement.
4. This is because you are using the implausibility of that which appears universally implausible including in regards to the truth, to say something is false when that would disprove the truth. Thus, in advocating this contradiction, you have committed the fallacy of universal implausibility.
More Reflection on the Incredible Usefulness of these Ideas
These ideas can help to diffuse the persuasive power of truth statements that attempt to use the implausibility of evil against you wrongly. In my estimation, the greatest application of the fallacy of universal implausibility is against the statements “all the experts agree” and claims that you are a conspiracy theorist or that you advocate conspiracy theories. Which usually act as an attempt to dismiss you truth claim outright.
Just imagine if we could talk about concrete evidence and the things that intellectuals know instead of constantly repeating the words “All the experts agree” and “You are a conspiracy theorist.” This would turn intellectual pursuits from something approximating hell to something approximating heaven.
If you think about the conspiracy claim, what is it claiming? It says that if your truth statement were true then it would make evil look planned in a way that wouldn’t make sense or would seem implausible to be planned. Thus your truth statement is false or seemingly false. Do you see the fallacy of universal implausibility emerge here? There are certain details behind this that people may use to try to wiggle their way out of this that I will talk about more in the video and in later posts. They could try to use probability arguments to say their implausibility is less than yours, or to say that they are talking about a smaller group of evil’s understandings that don’t relate to other questions, but it does not appear they will be able to use those either of which I will talk about more, but I can say for now that it seems they at the very least run the risk of this fallacy.
I have an idea called the evidential circle philosophy of ponerology that I I will share in the video, but I will save writing it up for another time, it would simply be way too long to write up here in this post of an already considerable length.
Below I will list six difficult questions that can help to demonstrate it appears to me that the truth of evil itself seems implausible.
My Six Tough Questions in regards to Evil
Question One
1. It appears to me that I am going to ask what seems to me possibly one of the hardest questions in regards to evil. This example is dependent on the historical claims of Adolf Eichmann but should these claims be incorrect, it seems exceptionally plausible that we should be able to find others that fit this example as well.
It is claimed that Adolf Eichmann was the leading bureaucrat of the final solution. It is said he was in charge of running the trains that brought Jews to the concentration camps in world war two. Furthermore, it is claimed by both Encyclopedia Britannica and an awesome course on evil at wondrium.com that at the end of the war when supplies were running low he was told to stop the trains, and instead he made them run faster/he was proactive in maintaining their efficiency. This is an even more potent example of evil it would seem to me because you wouldn’t be able to dismiss it as simply following orders if these details are in fact correct. It also seems to me most probable that we could find others in history that acted similarly to him. I believe they justify the following question.
“To what degree did he (or anyone acting like him) know that what he was doing was evil? If 0%, what then is he guilty of? If between 0-100%, what would that mean? How would we calculate that? How difficult would it be to calculate it? What would it mean if we couldn’t calculate it?” Lastly, here is the strongest question. “If he 100% knew what he was doing was wrong; and he had sufficient logic, evidence, and reason to know what he was doing was wrong without excuse and he did it anyway; how then could logic, evidence, and reason be the solutions to evil?”
Would this not seem to hint that evil cannot be solved to a degree by logic, evidence, and reason? Then would this not conclude that humans are broken and need something outside of logic and evidence to fix them? Does this sound like a certain worldview? Also in his brilliant course, “Why Evil Exists,” Charles Mathewes quotes Freud in allegedly saying similar things that seem plausible to him that match these thoughts in human brokenness that he called the “Death Drive.” I find this exceptionally interesting, and I am soon to finish his book Civilization and It’s Discontents where Mathewes claims he draws this observation.
Question Two
2. I think this next question is also possibly neglected and unthinkably awesome. I may very well talk about this in more length in the future. The first statement/premise is, “It cannot be a problem that we have failed to solve that which we are not able to solve.” Next, we can think about looking at the world and saying there is a lot of evil and many problems. Think about that claim for a second. If the problems/evil are not going to fix themselves, then is it not true that they can only be problems – and also only referred to as evil – if either humans or something above human ability is able to fix them all?
To use a suitable analogy, imagine if there were only one temperature possible in existence. The words hot and cold would be meaningless because they signal that a temperature spectrum exists when it doesn’t. Likewise, if we called the hottest temperature cold, that would also be incorrect because it signals that the hottest possible temperature is on the lower end of a temperature spectrum which would also be a false statement.
Therefore, if we think about morality like this temperature example, then would it not be the case that calling something evil signals that it is on the lower end of a moral spectrum, but if certain problems cannot be solved then we are saying that the highest possible good outcome we are able to achieve is on the lower end of a moral spectrum and thus make a similarly false statement as if we said that the hottest temperature in the world is in fact cold. I think this is specifically challenging to those who believe that humans are all there is as far as intelligence and likewise get mad at evil in the world as a problem, because their ability to get mad, and call these things evil and problems depends upon humans being able to solve them right now. Because if they couldn’t and there did not exist a power that was able to solve them above humans then the ability to label them problems and evil in my estimation disappears.Therefore another way to think of this seemingly to me is, “What do we make of our ability to call things problems and evil in relation to the power we perceive that we have or don’t have in solving them?” I think this leads to question five which I will discuss below.
Question Three
3. I will very soon dedicate an entire post to this question. I asked this question when I was fifteen years old and it has guided my life ever since,
“Why is there so much suffering and evil in the world, that we believe to be solvable, that the experts have not solved, if they are so smart we can’t question them and they can’t be wrong?” What are the most efficient and effective to go about learning to be most successful at solving that which they haven’t?”
You could ask an offshoot of this question, “One is constantly berated that he/she is immoral for questioning expert truth claims, but what if questioning them and demanding the concrete evidence behind their claims is the most efficient and effective way to think about solving that which they haven’t? Why do we treat them as such infallible guides to knowledge if observably there is so much that they aren’t solving?”
I will later discuss answers to the logical escapes people may use to try to diffuse these questions, even though I don’t think they will seemingly be too persuasive necessarily in their attempts to do so.
Question Four
4. If we are told that morality is justified by natural selection and Darwinian evolution, since morality is about preserving our natural life and passing on our genes, then what do we make of powerful inner drives that lead us to believe that the greatest act of morality is giving one’s life for another when that would simultaneously in many regards seem to be the greatest possible violation of preserving your natural life and in some instances passing on your genes? Could not a single man dying for his country to protect those back home be engaging in this kind of moral act?
One of the professors in the twenty-four hour course, “Law School For Everyone” on wondrium.com claimed that REGINA v. DUDLEY AND STEPHENS 14 Q.B.D. 273 (1884) is a court case taught to most new law students. In this case, it is claimed that two sailors who were stranded with two others killed a young boy because he was weakest and they reasoned that they needed to sacrifice someone to save the others from starvation. The court case proceeding appears to be available here, and I will link to an important excerpt read by one of the Judges that I believe relates greatly to the question I posed here,
“To preserve one’s life is generally speaking a duty, but it may be the plainest and the highest duty to sacrifice it. War is full of instances in which it is a man’s duty not to live, but to die. The duty, in case of shipwreck, of a captain to his crew, of the crew to the passengers, of soldiers to women and children, as in the noble case of the Birkenhead; these duties impose on men the moral necessity, not of the preservation, but of the sacrifice of their lives for others, from which in no country, least of all, it is to be hoped, in England, will men ever shrink, as indeed, they have not shrunk. It is not correct, therefore, to say that there is any absolute or unqualified necessity to preserve one’s life. Necesse est ut eam, non ut vivam, is a saying of a Roman officer quoted by Lord Bacon himself with high eulogy in the very chapter on necessity to which so much reference has been made. It would be a very easy and cheap display of commonplace learning to quote from Greek and Latin authors, from Horace, from Juvenal, from Cicero, from Euripides, passage after passage, in which the duty of dying for others has been laid down in glowing and emphatic language as resulting from the principles of heathen ethics; it is enough in a Christian country to remind ourselves of the Great Example whom we profess to follow.”
Question Five
This question is a partial extension of question three. It deals with moral anger or moral indignation as I like to say. Likewise in regards to question three, is not moral anger only justified in regards to problems that are solvable? If you are angry at evil in the world and you think that humans are all that exist and they cannot solve a percentage of that evil, then would that not invalidate your anger and show it to be irrational? Also, how could you be angry at the “evil” of those in the past if they did not have the capability to solve it? If you think that they did have the capability to solve it, why then do we fail even with orders of magnitude so much more intellectual advancements than they had? Is it not interesting to ponder the implications of the intuitive drives that we emphatically believe but seemingly sometimes fail to at least partially intellectually consider?
Question Six
6. If the desire inside us to sacrifice our life for others is a moral intuitive mistake of evolution, then how can we trust our moral feelings of what is moral as correct if one of our strongest feelings of morality is a mistake?