Thread:Forum:The most righteous people and government to support/Relativism/reply (3)

The "most benevolent regime period" is practically synonymous with "the most benevolent regime possible" - the key is in the "most" part, implying that we can only get so far in either case.

Regardless, you would still have to define not only benevolence and righteousness by subjective criteria but also how you're going to measure it. Even saying "the regime that most people think is most benevolent" still isn't objectively the best criteria to judge it by. Certainly that minority who didn't agree about the level of benevolence would complain about using a majority vote as a measure. Take the UK election system. The Liberal Democrats want to change to a proportional system because if you define it like this it's the best. Tories want to keep it as is, because if you define it like that it's the best. Even merely saying "compromise" can be tricky, because you run the risk of diluting the ideas down so far that they can't be properly executed and are ineffective. Such a compromise idea between all opinions would lead a system that pleased no one because everything that an individual wanted would be stopped short by another persons wants and needs. We see such examples all the time where proposed laws are compromised on and weakened, and we end up with final drafts that no one particularly wants. The law doesn't go far enough for its supporters and goes too far for its opponents - despite shining public faces of "well, we made a good compromise so it's all great" everyone, deep down, is actually unhappy about it.

I you imagine "most" as the maximum on a curve, then it's easy to find where you want to be for any particular system, regime or otherwise. However, because of choosing your definitions by subjective criteria, and these change between people, there isn't just one curve but several, and their maxima are found in different locations. A compromise situation would end up with a curve with no maxima, but a mere straight and flat line, probably very low down.

And that's without getting into specifics about defining a benevolent act. In one particular model, if you want to define "most benevolent" as just reducing harmful acts to an absolute minimum, then the "most benevolent regime" would, in fact, be no regime at all - as something that can't exist cannot be malevolent in any way.