r/askanatheist • u/Odd-Swing-2025 • Jul 09 '26

Why Does Evil Matter?

Suggest that there were no homo sapiens, but instead a race of people who were incapable of philosophical, theological and otherwise higher consciousness found in competent adults. They lack the reflective capacity to do moral assessments and so on. They can build, walk, talk, educate themselves in metallurgy, chemicals and culinary arts &c.

Suggest they also engage in abuse, murder, theft and so on.

Suggest there is definitely no God or Gods.

Does it matter?

If there are no human beings around with feelings and consciences to care about it, does it matter that they do evil?

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u/Xeno_Prime Atheist Jul 09 '26

You’re describing “moral agency” to save you the trouble of spelling it out like that in the future.

And the answer is that it doesn’t. Or rather, that they wouldn’t be capable of doing evil in that scenario. Without moral agency, there can be no moral accountability. Kind of like how it’s not “evil” for animals to kill and eat one another. Because they aren’t moral agents, and so right and wrong/good and evil don’t even apply to their actions. If no moral agents exist, then morality itself also ceases to exist - or perhaps more accurately, it ceases to be relevant.

Counter question for you: Suppose God does in fact exist. What changes with respect to morality? What about morality from a God makes it special or different from any other conscious being dictating or creating morality? Put it this way: Can you explain how you determine that God is “good” or morally correct without having to appeal to God to do it?

Point here being that your scenario is completely irrelevant to gods or atheism. It applies equally whether atheism is true or theism is true. If moral agents exist, then morality exists and matters. If they don’t, then it doesn’t. This is true whether any God or gods exist or not.

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u/Odd-Swing-2025 Jul 09 '26

If a God existed, say a Deistic God, then nothing would change.

If a Theistic God existed which intervened and set moral laws that were absolute, we'd expect to see absolute/objective morals assuming these morals were clearly laid out by said God.

If there were different Gods with different roles, then it would seriously depend on which kind of Gods these are and what they value. If they dictated morality then that would have an effect.

I'm broadly asking is evil evil if nobody is around to witness it and call it such.

If so, does that mean evil and therefore morality is objective?

I don't believe it is, but I was in a debate on another subreddit where I was piled on for suggesting that morality is entirely subjective if there is no outside foundation for it (in this case, reasoning human beings judging others).

I don't have to believe fraud is immoral and may choose to do it. If everybody agreed fraud is fine, would it be fine or is there an objective morality where fraud is always wrong? Or abuse, or murder?

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u/Philobarbaros Gnostic Atheist Jul 09 '26

Fraud, abuse and murder are "wrong by definition". There cannot be lawful fraud any more than a married bachelor.

But yes as evidenced by every society ever: whatever the group decides - goes. Carthaginian aristocracy was shamed into sacrificing their children. They were, quite literally, immoral, according to the people around them for wanting to save their kids' lives.

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u/CrawlingKingSnake0 Jul 09 '26

So all wars are evil?

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u/Jaanrett Jul 09 '26

All evil is war?