Hmm. A problem I have with his argument is that it's based on the idea that all life is of equal value--sentient and unaware. I don't buy into this at all. It makes no sense to say that pulling a carrot is evil. To do so is to in effect say that evil isn't really bad after all (or put another way, that nothing is bad (or everything is bad)). Such assumptions destroy our ability to discern the relative value of anything. Such logic would say that buying a candy bar for $30 is as good and reasonable a deal as buying a house for $30.

People are of infinitely more value than carrots. Killing people is bad. Mowing your lawn is not. Cutting your hair or trimming your fingernails is not. Killing the heartworms in your dog or the bacteria infecting a wound is not bad. It is not evil to kill the protazoa that is causing malaria. It is not evil to disinfect your bathroom or to wash your dishes.

Things have relative value from bacteria to dogs to people. People are not plants. Plants do not think. They can't feel pain. I'm not saying we should destroy every plant we come to--of course not, but pruning your roses has nothing to do with mass murder.

I don't think he's necessarily saying that all life is of equal value. Merely that life, in any form, is of greater value than non-life. Evil, as he defines it, is the desire to destroy life for no greater purpose than to satisfy a compulsive whim.

I see a qualitative difference between pulling a carrot in order to eat (or killing an animal for the same purpose), and the act of killing something because its very existence makes you feel somehow uncomfortable, even if it is not harming you.

So maybe a more specific criteria needs to be defined. Evil is the will to extinguish life for any purpose other than:

1. Sustaining one's own life.
2. Self-defense. (Which could include fighting bacterial infections, mosquitos, and the like.)

If we proceed under the assumption that human life is automatically more valuable than other forms of life (the basis of which I could question, but I'll leave that alone for now), then there are still wildly varying degrees of evil.

Killing people for the sake of "racial purity" being the highest, I think. Killing herds of buffalo for kicks and giggles, also evil, but to a lesser degree. (Can we agree so far?)

Killing rats merely because they give you a creepy feeling. Is that evil? I would say yes; again, to a lesser degree.

Killing rats because they're devouring your food, and/or spreading disease. Now we approach uncertain territory. If what the rat does is truly threatening to human life, then no, it is not evil to kill rats in such a case. But I submit that there are many people who kill rats when no such threat exists (referring to them as "pests"), and that by doing so, they venture a tiny measure into the territory of evil.

The same could be said of insects.

As for plants, while I would agree that that they don't think on the level we do, saying that they don't feel pain at all seems premature to me.

When I was a kid, I remember one time I went camping in the mountains with my parents. We had a small hatchet. At one point, out of sheer idleness, I took it out and started cutting the bark off a tree. My mom said, "Don't do that, you're hurting the tree. When the sap comes out, the tree is bleeding."

You might not consider such an anecdote an authorative source for determining the sentience of an organism. But what criteria do you use? Are we not built out of essentially the same chemical compounds found in plants, rearranged into a slightly different configuration? Who are we to say that they can't "feel" anything?

If you see a plant and want to kill it (or cut part of it off), I think it is worthwhile to ask why you want to do so. What is your motivation? What fundamental need is met by pruning roses, or pulling up dandelions?

I think Ran is suggesting that we examine this. If we find that our motivation comes from wanting everything to be brought under our absolute control, and anything that can't must die, then we have a small taste of evil. I'm not saying such a definition is the end-all, but it is interesting to think about.

I agree that destroying things for the fun of it is bad, and living things are superior to inadament things. But I think a clear difference exists between plant and animal--and from animal to animal. Biologically speaking, animals all have nerve cells which allow feeling and thought. Very small animals may have only one nerve. People have billions, and we can engage in complex reasoning and ask questions about right and wrong. On the other hand, plants don't have nerve cells. I think it is safe to say that the tree cannot feel. Of course that does not excuse damaging it on a whim.

Yes, plants and animals are made from the same basic elements, but so are completely inadamate objects. I don't think this is a satisfactory critera for life or worthiness.

How is there anything wrong with pruning roses? Is there something wrong with my going to the barber and getting my hair cut? Giving your yard a "hair cut" if you will, is not a fundamentally sadistic activity. Yes, motive is extremely important! Some things are always wrong regardless of motive while other things are not intrinsically wrong , but can be done for wrong reasons. So someone could get a sadistic thrill out of killing grass I suppose. But I bet most people looking for a sadistic thrill will be doing something a bit more drastic than cutting grass away from a sidewalk.

Reminds of a scene from Family Guy where Peter asks a Catholic priest if dogs go to heaven. The priest says, only people and apes that can do sign language go to heaven.

There are sliding scales to life -- single celled reactions to emotions to intelligence to homo-sapientist-sapiens. Would a single cell feel pain? Actually, some people, namely Presidents of this country argue that a single celled organism is host to as much of a soul as any of us.

But can you really divorce creatures from the systems they are part of and say the creatures are alive, but the system is not? Is the forest alive, or only the trees within it? I would argue that a forest itself could be considered a living organism, and even if it's ok to cut down a tree (cut a hair, kill a single cell), perhaps it's wrong to destroy the forest (kill the organism).

Moreover, since we make up these rules as we go, we have to realize there is no ultimate truth -- and whether people want to admit it or not, we all decide our own truths, whether we decide to use a religious leader's truth or our own. And therein lies the conflict: for some, the truth we decide to accept is that our own "success" is all that matters (selfishness). Others say that family members matter, but no one else. (Nationalism seems to be an off-shoot of that.) Still yet, you could say that in humanism, we decide that human life matters, but not other life. It's true that when we finally extend morality to species outside our own, we don't quite know where to stop that extension.

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't consider it.

I don't think you read Ishmael like I did. The question Ishmael raised isn't what we should/shouldn't consider evil, but whether we can really judge that at all.

I think an early story was that of three animals, each in some way competing with the other for food, even devouring each other. If the fox ate the swallows egg, the fox would be happy and the swallow would curse the gods. If the fox went hungry and the swallow lived, the fox would curse the gods and the swallow would be happy; etc.

So who can say who should live and who should die? That was Daniel Quinn's interpretation of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. When Adam and Eve acquired the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the knowledge of who should live and who should die, they were cast out of the Garden and forced to till the soil. With that knowledge, however, they could kill the animals and cultures that competed with them, and thus were able to till the soil.

I don't think Quinn considered killing or eating them evil or not evil. It was balanced or unbalanced. It was unbalanced to raise animals in captivity for the express purpose of killing them, killing them to feed overpopulation of the world.

In this case, the part I was referring to was the one characteristic Ishmael mentioned that makes the Takers' behavior different than any other animal. It's the root cause behind the unbalanced state of Civilization. Remember that part?

[/me goes and digs up the book, and hunts down the appropriate section.]

Though he doesn't use the word "evil", he does say it is a law (like a law of nature) that is never broken by any species. Any species that breaks this law cannot survive for the long term. That's why human civilization on its current course is on the verge of collapse. Here we go. Chapter 8 (page 126):

"...There are four things the Takers do that are never done in the rest of the community, and these are all fundamental to their civilizational system. First, they exterminate their competitors, which is something that never happens in the wild. In the wild, animals will defend their territories and their kills and they will invade their competitors' territories and preempt their kills. Some species even include competitors among their prey, but they never hunt competitors down just to make them dead, the way ranchers and farmers do with coyotes and foxes and crows. What they hunt, they eat."

Ishmael nodded. "It should be noted, however, that animals will also kill in self-defense, or even when they merely feel threatened. For example, baboons may attack a leopard that hasn't attacked them. The point to see is that, although baboons will go looking for food, they will never go looking for leopards."

"I'm not sure what you mean."

"I mean that in the absence of food, baboons will organize themselves to find a meal, but in the absence of leopards they will never organize themselves to find a leopard. In other words, it's as you say: when animals go hunting -- even extremely aggressive animals like baboons -- it's to obtain food, not to exterminate competitors or even animals that prey on them."

"Yes, I see what you're getting at now."

"And how can you be sure this law is invariably followed? I mean, aside from the fact that competitors are never seen to be eliminating each other, in what you call the wild."

"If it weren't invariably followed, then, as you say, things would not have come to be this way. If competitors hunted each other down just to make them dead, then there would be no competitors. There would simply be one species at each level of competition: the strongest."

"Go on."

"Next, the Takers systematically destroy their competitors' food to make room for their own. Nothing like this occurs in the natural community. The rule there is: Take what you need, and leave the rest alone."

Ishmael nodded.

"Next, the Takers deny their competitors access to food. In the wild, the rule is: You may deny your competitors access to what you're eating, but you may not deny them access to food in general. In other words, you can say, 'This gazelle is mine,' but you can't say, 'All the gazelles are mine.' The lion defends its kill as its own, but it doesn't defend the herd as its own."

"Yes, that's true. But suppose you raised up a herd of your own, so to speak. Could you defend that herd as your own?"

"I don't know. I suppose so, so long as it wasn't your policy that all the herds in the world were your own."

"And what about denying competitors access to what you're growing?"

Again... Our policy is: Every square foot of this planet belongs to us, so if we put it all under cultivation, then all our competitors are just plain out of luck and will have to become extinct. Our policy is to deny our competitors access to all the food in the world, and that's something no other species does."

"Bees will deny you access to what's inside their hive in the apple tree, but they won't deny you access to the apples."

"That's right."

"Good. And you say there's a fourth thing the Takers do that is never done in the wild, as you call it."

"Yes. In the wild, the lion kills a gazelle and eats it. It doesn't kill a second gazelle to save for tomorrow. The deer eats the grass that's there. It doesn't cut the grass down and save it for the winter. But these are things the Takers do."

"You seem less certain about this one."

"Yes, I am less certain. There are species that store food, like bees, but most don't."

"In this case, you've missed the obvious. Every living creature stores food. Most simply store it in their bodies, the way lions and deer and people do. For others, this would be inadequate to their adaptations, and they must store food externally as well."

"Yes, I see."

"There's no prohibition against food storage as such. There couldn't be, because that's what makes the whole system work: the green plants store food for the plant eaters, the plant eaters store food for the predators, and so on."

"True. I hadn't thought of it that way."

"Is there anything else the Takers do that is never done in the rest of the community of life?"

"Not that I can see. Not that seems relevant to what makes that community work."

The rest of the chapter expands on these ideas in a fascinating way, but I don't feel like typing it all. Anyway, what I was referring to was the desire to exterminate other life for no reason except that it might someday be a competitive threat. If anything can be called "evil", that seems like a good candidate for the root cause.

Maybe in a way, you're right though. Loaded terms like "evil" are very open to subjective definition, and as such, it probably is more useful to talk in more specific language. We could approach it from the perspective that the universe containes no "evil" per se, only various forces pushing and pulling this way and that. Even child rape is merely the product of many molecules and electrons bouncing off of one another. Evil is nothing but an arbitrary mental construct.