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If you dig up a skeleton, can you tell if that person was evil or charitable in his lifetime? We're all merely copies of each other and are equally capable of all the good and all the bad in the world depending on our individual circumstances and upbringings. Nothing is black and white and everything is gray. You'd be Putin too if you were in his shoes.
This says more about you than humanity as a whole.
I'll bite, what does it say about me?
If you think people will do X, that means you think you would do X.
I would do X too if I was in the same situation, with the same genes, and the same upbringing, and same circumstances, and same influences, and same traumas, and same biases.
Same genes? If your argument is that physics dictates reality, then sure whatever. But you wouldn't be you. You would be them.
My point is that, if you get to be YOU, but with all the same external stimuli, then people would choose to do different things.
That is a remarkably bad hot take
It is completely true; the only reason to punish bad behavior is to disincentivise it.
We are not born with inherent understanding of good, bad, and what ends justify the means. It's all absorbed from our surroundings.
For example, you can be an openly corrupt authoritarian leader or CEO of massive evil corporation, and see yourself as good as you learned to put your family first and that randoms are all self-interested, so you might be as well in the name of something you hold dearer.
There are many ways to corrupt a person's thinking in a way that is hard to unfuck as it gets fundamental. Harder, even, if the base idea is shared by many.
In that regard, getting cruel is, on the practical side, only really an attempt to reinstate other values, or, more commonly, implant fear in others, so they might consider the danger too high and chicken out.
Excellent point!
Polish your mirror and look deep, you are the universe as am I, as was Gandhi and as is Putin, capable of all good and all evil, all shaped by life like a rock shaped by a river. The rock has no choice but to take that shape. The rock is special but no more so than any other rock, so don't assume you'd do any different if you were in their situation.
lol, your counterpoint is hold to hold up Gandhi as the paragon of "Good?"
People are the aggregate of their choices. Behavior dictates the outward expression of inner motives. Sure, there are vast gulfs of grey within the theoretical discussion of black and white, but ultimately each person's legacy is simply a accumulation of the paths they have chosen, given the available options. To assume that everyone would make the same choices, when presented with the same opportunities, is simply not congruent to the patterns of human behavior that we see in reality, regardless of era or culture.
Correct, but you can't control your motives as much as you like. Think as much as you want about this.
Show me what patterns you've seen, but from my personal experience and reflection, this is incorrect. We can't control the opportunities, and we can't control our motives, hence we can't control our behavior. You will do what you were gonna do.
Your core argument is essentially just a rationalization of your own behavior.
So my original analysis holds true: a remarkably bad hot take.
You couldn't have changed your behavior if you tried