Satisfying a sadistic urge will generally have a bad outcome (unless your target as a masochist), but as a reason, it is actually better than tradition.
If murdering people and rearranging their body parts was just “tradition”, it would be infinitely worse than someone doing it out of self satisfaction.
Traditions do often serve purpose, take for instance the birthday song. We say we do it for “tradition”, but the real reason is because it’s a familiar song everyone can participate in singing, to direct cheer at the birthday-twat. It’s generally fun.
You’ve disconnected reason from the action and outcome. Killing someone will have bad outcome regardless of reason, but if your reason for the murder was some sort of tradition, it would imply that it’s justified in your eyes and you’d do it again, and also teach your children and community to do it, and normalise it, fight against legislation that would stop it etc. I believe it would be difficult, though probably not impossible, to formulate a reason worse than tradition without referencing tradition or custom in some way. And then there is also the frequency of how often traditions are used as reason or excuse to achieve a cruel outcome to consider. If baby pandas were no. 1 reason for human death in the world by few orders of magnitude, we would probably consider them “the worst” in some way.
Tradition is always the worst reason to do something.
If you had any other reason to do something, you would use that as an excuse.
I can come up with worse reasons than tradition.
Like, to satisfy a sadistic urge or to cause suffering.
Traditions can and often do serve some purpose even if we don’t see them in such a light.
Just as evolutionary traits, only beneficial ones tend to survive the test of time. (Not necessarily beneficial to the individual, but the group)
Satisfying a sadistic urge will generally have a bad outcome (unless your target as a masochist), but as a reason, it is actually better than tradition.
If murdering people and rearranging their body parts was just “tradition”, it would be infinitely worse than someone doing it out of self satisfaction.
Traditions do often serve purpose, take for instance the birthday song. We say we do it for “tradition”, but the real reason is because it’s a familiar song everyone can participate in singing, to direct cheer at the birthday-twat. It’s generally fun.
The effect of a tradition is usually not apparent. They aren’t created consiously or in a goal oriented way.
They usually emerge naturally as a social behavior.
There are also a lot of vestigial traditions that once served an important purpose. (Eg dowry)
You’ve disconnected reason from the action and outcome. Killing someone will have bad outcome regardless of reason, but if your reason for the murder was some sort of tradition, it would imply that it’s justified in your eyes and you’d do it again, and also teach your children and community to do it, and normalise it, fight against legislation that would stop it etc. I believe it would be difficult, though probably not impossible, to formulate a reason worse than tradition without referencing tradition or custom in some way. And then there is also the frequency of how often traditions are used as reason or excuse to achieve a cruel outcome to consider. If baby pandas were no. 1 reason for human death in the world by few orders of magnitude, we would probably consider them “the worst” in some way.
What tradition are you talking about?
For example funeral rites help prevent disease from corpses. Without knowing anything about germs.
Or the taboo of incest can avoid genetic defects, without knowing anything about genes.
Traditions formed for a reason. And that reason is way more ancient and more natural than modern logic. It is simply survival.
The people with traditions that helped them survived more often.