: How is the Dark's (and for that matter, the Light's)
: justification faulty? Because they don't know
: "the complete truth"? Are you implying that
: for justification to be sound, you have to know
: "the complete truth"? Nobody could ever be
: justified if that were the case. We finite mortals
: cannot know the complete truth, yet we can be good or
: evil depending on our actions and intentions. Somehow
: whatever theory we go with can't stray far from that.
: Surely acting without justification is one way of being
: evil. But not the only way.
: I think this excludes the possibility that they could be
: evil, but still have reasons for their actions (not
: "just because"). I'm trying to think of more
: examples of characters that are evil and yet acted for
: reasons, under some kind of justification: the Sheriff
: of Nottingham? Lady Macbeth? What made these
: characters evil was not that they lacked
: justification.
I'm not using "justification" to mean simply "reason", I'm using it to mean "just reason", where just is something which is not overall harmful to the known whole. That's a key thing in my definition there, "known whole": both the Light and the Dark are acting in the best interest of what they know to be the whole - the Light doesn't recognise any beings worthy of consideration amongst the Dark, and the Dark sees the Light as a force which is harmful to the rest of them.
: Here's another consideration: just because a wrong has
: been done to you, that does not mean that you are
: justified in righting the wrong. It may be that
: whoever wronged you deserves to be punished, yet it is
: not YOU that has the right to punish them.
Punishment is not righting a wrong, it's trying to prevent further wrongs.
: An example?
: The fact that we don't consider vigilante justice
: appropriate in this society. Someone that mugs you
: deserves to be punished, yet it's not you that has the
: right to punish them, but the state.
But you would have the right, if you had the capability, to take back what they took from you if you could chase them down and grab it. You have the right to undo the harm, but not to exact punative damages.
