"Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote in message
news:4aefbee6$1@news.povray.org...
> somebody wrote:

> > Indeed, there's the epistemological issues. As a kid, many of us might
have
> > thought being forced, and sometimes tricked, into eating broccoli was
> > torture, and hence an evil act.

> I think that this is a bogus argument, basically because it's trivial to
> imagine a world where all the things that taste good are the ones that are
> good for you.

Yes but it's also trivial for a kid to imagine a world where everything is
sugar coated chocolate. He doesn't know the difference between bad food and
good for and doesn't care. If he did, he'd imagine a world where nutrional
food tastes good (like you do), instead of making chocolate only food. You
know about nutrition, so you are one level above the kid, but maybe there
are things that you (we) do not know, that make our imagination just as
naive to someone at a higher level of understanding.

> Being forced to eat broccoli seems like evil because it *is*
> evil - it's bad that healthy stuff tastes awful. Indeed, it's bad that
there
> even is such a thing as unhealthy food.
>
> This is the "it's good for you to suffer" argument, which is a subset of
the
> "it isn't really evil after all" argument that I found clearly described.

I'm not saying evil is good for you. But I don't buy the argument that
"since I could imagine a better world, there's evil in this one" argument.
First, imagining is not the same as realizing (incidentally, that's where
Anselm's ontological argument fails, but that's a different matter). Second,
"better" for who? I can imagine a universe where I'm god and everyone
worships me. Certainly, it's better for me than the present one. You are
inherently making a selfish claim if you say the world you can imagine,
however good and fair you believe it to be, is better than the real one or
one that somebody else imagines. By thinking that elimination of pain is a
universally good thing, for instance, are we not saying that maschists do
not count?

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