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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31958 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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Lawful evil is pragmatic

Pragmatism can be applied to different goals. For example, it would be quite pragmatic to backstab all your rivals and send the region into a downward spiral if you decided that what you want is to rule the ashes in a perfectly orderly manner.

But would it be lawful? Generally no.

It would be lawful if it's my rules.

Why you think so?

German Third Reich was very lawful evil. Technically they ended with vertical firing squad rather than circular firing squads, but problems in the end were very similar.

(maybe there could be treated as pragmatic with "Jews are evil" axiom, still society they created was far from flourishing due to their own actions)

And yet in that very time USA were also lawfully evil and they built the greatest superpower the world has ever seen in the aftermath.

If you insist on dumb binary ethical categorizations (which are dump) then USA at that time was closer to lawfully good than lawfully evil.

(not claiming that it was ideal but on evil to not evil range populated by governments in human history it was quite far on "not evil" side)

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