“Belief in an omnipotent omniscient creator of the world does not in itself have any moral implications — it’s still up to you to decide whether it is right to obey His commands. … The young men who flew airplanes into buildings in the US … were not just stupid in imagining that these were God’s commands; even thinking that there were His commands, they were evil in obeying them.” –Steven Weinberg in New York Review of Books, September 25, 2008, p.76

Weinberg’s is a curious argument. On what basis, in accordance with what ethical theory, are people ‘evil’? No, I don’t have an answer to that question; I don’t believe there is a coherent answer. Ascriptions of evil, at bottom, may be no more than gut feelings, or the teachings of power, or ‘what everybody knows’, or the wish to avoid pain or death, or based on some value system that is itself arbitrary, such as the absolutely supreme value of every human (and only human) life.

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