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What does "evil" mean to you here, even? It's hard to see it as anything other than an "opposed to my values", paired with a certain claim to license to transgress normal boundaries in order to bring the evil person or action in line with what your values are. The former is okay, but the latter surely is out of place in this forum, being somewhere in the space between "shaming" and recruiting for a cause (even if that cause is just to stand by and do nothing to interfere as you proceed to smite evil). At least I don't think you can argue that calling something evil is merely the former - I expect that if I started calling your preferred views on sexuality evil, it would rain downvotes and possibly reports if I am obstinate enough about it, which surely would make no sense if I were just communicating my values.
Telling a knowable lie when you have a professional responsibility to speak truthfully is evil.
The problem with the way you've phrased it is, well, who defines responsibilities? Police states always say everyone has a responsibility to report dissent; is lying to cover dissidents or the persecuted evil? But if the responsibilities set in law and by dominant organisations can be void, then who decides? You? But then your statement reduces to "[I think] telling a knowable lie when I think you were morally obliged to tell the truth is evil". Well, no shit doing the opposite of what's morally obligatory is evil. That's practically vacuous.
In this particular case there are enough hypocrisies and contradictions that the issues with the full version of this statement don't really engage, but come on, man, that was a soundbite extraordinaire.
That sounds like a more convoluted way of saying "have a professional responsibility to speak truthfully", otherwise where are you getting the idea anyone should avoid being hypocritical and contradictory?
My point here is that these are basically the same people promulgating and violating the responsibility, so they're in a sense estopped from raising the defence of "that responsibility is fake and void"; they could have chosen not to define that responsibility in that way.
To more directly answer your question, though, I think there's at least an imperfect Kantian duty to do so and plausibly a perfect one (if everyone's a hypocrite about the same thing, the denunciations can be said to cease to have meaning).
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I'm totally okay with use of the word "evil". Evil is inherently subjective. Tyrants quite often think they are doing the right thing. So did Chinese parents who bound their girls feet, or people in south-Saharan Africa who perform genital mutilation. Even criminals who seem obviously motivated by selfishness often have a victim narrative that excuses their actions.
Which is to say this. In a sense no one is truly "evil". We are all flawed. To understand all is to forgive all.
But let me defend the user of the word "evil". I think the evil done by some doctors is more than just an ideological difference. It is the unwillingness to engage with the actual harm that is being done to some patients. In the same sense, it would be "evil" for a general to bomb a city without considering the lives that would lost. Perhaps they would do it anyway out of necessity. But if they deluded themselves, saying "nobody died, the media is lying" then it would be evil.
Many doctors who perform gender transition surgery seem to have the same attitude as that general. They don't want to consider the awful truth that some of their patients are harmed in horrible ways.
To me, this is evil.
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I wish I could give you a cogent answer to that. Moral philosophy has always been a tough nut for me to crack, and whenever someone brings it up I usually head for the nearest exit. Still, I don't think it's as simple as "being opposed to my values". Many, many people are opposed to my values, and it's no skin off my nose. Like I indicated by saying "that's been a sticking point for me too", I think it's the deception that does it for me, combined with the raw amount of effort and coordination required to sustain their project.
It's not quite that. I was hinting at a broader point that I should have probably made explicitly. I've been trying to come up with a way to bring this up without running into Godwin's Law, but so far it's the only analogy I have. Give or take a few posters here, we tend to have no issues with calling Nazis evil. The sheer scale of the horror they created is a bit much for most people (which is why even their sympathizers tend to deny or minimize it), no matter their reasons for going through with it, we tend to think they should have stopped and reassessed what they're doing before things got this far. By contrast we don't do that with progressive ideologies, even when they rack up a similar, or greater, body count. "Ho hum, things got out of hand, but their heart was in the right place", and I'm saying their heart being in the right place only makes the ordeal more horrifying.
WPATH is no Lenin or Stalin, they aren't even French revolutionaries, but they did fall into a failure mode common to progressive ideologies, and I'd like that failure mode acknowledged, and remembered next to examples of conservative failure modes, like various forms of chauvinism.
Now, it could be you're just a very consistent moral relativist, and you'd say the same thing, if someone hinted at, say, the people running the Tuskagee experiments being evil. If so, I guess I'd have to approach the argument from a completely different angle, but I'll need to see receipts to believe you are actually this consistent.
I think the thing is that these people do mostly share some distorted version of my values in the way that the Nazis don't. The Nazis tried to exterminate a people that they thought were vermin while invading their neighbors in a war of aggression. While the WPATH people are doing what they're doing out of a mistaken application of empathy and harm reduction. The modal true believing Nazi is a hateful bigot, the modal true believing WPATH person is someone who cares a lot about trying to alleviate suffering even if circumstances tragically end up such that they are causing more suffering. The camps weren't the Nazis trying to turn the jews and undesirables into Germans, they were built for the horrible purpose that they were used for. Trans healthcare is built to help people.
I think we should exterminate vermin, and you probably do too. So Nazis do share a distorted version of our values. Of course, we don't think humans qualify as vermin, and Nazis do think that, but that's what makes it distorted--it's still a version.
This feels like quite a stretch. Maybe it's just the time I've spent among the progressives in my life but I know the type of people who, through blinding empathy, advocate for things like the WPATH guidelines.
There are certainly leftists who resent, hate and advocate for violence against people that I can see as analogous to nazis, as there are rightest for whom the comparison would be taken as high praise. So I don't think I'm just incapable of comparing modern people to nazis.
Rather than thinking of the consequences would you rather live with empathetic but misguided people or slightly more correct, with their own wrongness, people who advocate for and are willing to partake in violence against their out group?
Consequentialism in a moralish society has this quirk where straightforwardly evil people can't get public support and thus can't do much harm and thus rank low on consequential harm measures. While moral empathetic people can get lots of support and thus can cause lots of, inadvertent, harm and thus can score high on harm measures. This is a dynamic to look out for and we should always be critical and careful with those we entrust with great power. But it seems a horrible mistake to conclude that the moral empathetic people are as bad as the straightforwardly evil people on these grounds. It really matters that if we entrusted other groups with the power that the progressives are entrusted with that things would be much worse and they should get some reasonable credit for that. Not absolution, not a free pass, but they're not nazis.
What are you talking about? You seemed to have missed the part "of course, we don't think humans qualify as vermin".
You and Nazis both think you should exterminate vermin. You don't think humans are vermin and Nazis do. So the Nazis have a distorted version of the same values as you.
I understand "can humans be vermin" sounds like it could be on the 'IS' side of the Is/ought distinction but I think it's actually on the 'ought' side. I don't think "is there such a thing as an internal gender experience such that it can be out of alignment with a person's sex" is on the is side. I believe this because I think there is some amount of proof that could sway me into believing that gender as an innate felt experience is real while there is no proof that would cause me to believe that some humans are vermin.
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Yeah, I've been hearing that argument for years, with Nazis vs. Commies. I never quite bought it, but nowadays I'm buying it even less.
Take another example: should Christians take the excesses of the Crusades, the Inquisition, and witch trials as cautionary tales about what can happen with too much religious zeal, or just go "haha, I guess things got out of hand, but at least their heart was in the right place"?.
WPATH people didn't "tragically end up" causing harm, it was an inevetible consequence of their progressive zeal. They were literally warned about it, and they rejected those warnings over and over.
I suppose my entire point is that trying to alleviate suffering too much can be just as bad as being a hateful bigot, and progressives have a really hard time reckoning with that.
Well thats because most people are not hard consequentialists. So doing a bad thing for good reasons and doing a bad thing for bad reasons are seen as different.
If instead of trying to murder Jews, the Nazis were trying to save them from a disease and ended up killing them by mistake, then most people would see those Nazis as morally better than our actual historical Nazis. Even if they were warned it was a risk.
So most people would not see it as being just as bad. They just fundamentally disagree with you there. Someone honestly trying to alleviate suffering is simply better than someone trying to cause suffering, even if in the end they both end up causing it. Motivations are an important part of judging moral behaviour.
And if you think about that makes sense. If i just want to honestly help Jews then there is some set of information that can persuade me I am not helping. If i mean to kill the Jews then that avenue is closed. You would have to persuade me first not to want to harm them, and then persuade me to want to help them and then try and come up with a solution that works. You are many further steps away from a positive outcome for Jewish people (assuming for the moment that is your aim).
The major issue here is that people aren't doing things to "help", they're doing it out of a narcissistic desire to defend their mental world view. That is what they really care about, material reality be damned.
They intentionally look away when their "efforts to help" produce the opposite of the their stated intentions and use all their mental prowess to justify their atrocities.
It's almost never that the bad effects couldn't have been reasonably predicted, it's that people actively avoided doing so because it threatened their self conception and world view.
I'd go as far as to say that this is one of the foundational building blocks of evil.
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Neither am I. None of my reasoning is based on consequences. At most, they're a signal that should have told you that you're going too far.
Neither of those things is true. Plenty of "well-intentioned" people axiomatically reject the possibility of being wrong. They view everything through the lens of their ideology, and nothing you say to them will make them reconsider. OTOH there are people motivated by hate, who are open to changing their mind (see: that dude befriending KKK members).
I'm just talking number of steps here. If i want to help and am not, the only thing you need to convince me of is that my action are harming and convince me of a way to help that actually helps.
If i want to harm then first you have to convince me not to want to harm, then convince me to want to help, then convince me of a way to help that actually helps. You have much more to do.
Assuming the same level of ideological commitment in both then one of those will be easier than the other. Yes how easy individuals will be to convince will of course vary but one is clearly closer on an idea space than the other.
And I guess what I'm saying is that this is a flawed way of looking at it. People don't get convinced in steps, and no one makes this sort of calculus when reacting to someone's views.
This has not been true either in my direct experience, or from observing others.
They don't do calculus, but they clearly do judge differently intuitively in my experience. People are much more likely to forgive someone with motivations they judge to be good. Accidental harm and deliberate harm are treated differently through most of our legal systems as a reflection of that.
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If the goal is to stop the harm, then for a person who is harming people because they want to cause harm, you only need to convince him to not want to harm the people anymore. With no desire the harm the people any more, naturally he will stop (except, I suppose, out of habit).
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