The Face of Evil

Those Who Learn Nothing From History Are Doomed To Repeat It

While it’s obvious to everyone who’s contemplated the famous Trolley Car Problem that there can be no such thing as absolute moral values and therefore there’s no simple set of rules by which we can live our lives, it’s also true that we have inherited our species’ evolved set of emotional guidelines that cause us to assess particular actions in certain ways.

For example, nearly everyone hates being cheated. This is a highly adaptive response because it reduces the chance of others taking advantage of us and thus increasing their survival prospects while diminishing ours. Of course, we’re always in an arms race with wannabe free-riders: the cheaters are continually looking for ways to avoid our cheat-detection mechanisms and we’re always trying to upgrade these mechanisms in order to detect the new cheating behaviors. By and large the cheaters are always slightly ahead of just enough of us so that human society always contains a certain amount of cheating, similar to the way that predators are always slightly ahead of just enough of their prey (otherwise the predators would all become extinct due to dying of hunger).

We will therefore generally regard cheating as “bad” (unless we’re the ones doing the cheating, in which case we will find no shortage of exculpatory reasons for our actions). We call this evolved emotional reaction “a moral value.” In reality it’s a value based on its…