Good and Evil

Last blog post, I touched on right and wrong. This time, I want to move past that to what is good and what is evil. Good is easy enough to understand, and we all have an idea of what evil is. But what about the dividing point, if such exists? One thing that is for certain, though, is that -much like right and wrong- it is entirely situational. Each situation must be taken into consideration and analyzed. There are no blanket statements.

Let's start with good, since we can easily grasp that concept. Good things are... well... good. Hmm, maybe we can't explain that quite as easily as we'd all like to think. We could say that good is that which betters the lives of others. On that note though, high industry is good. It provides jobs and material possessions which make life more pleasant. On the other hand, it provides pollution, has an adverse affect on the areas around it, and the products can lead to social side effects which we shall not go into at this time. So, simply saying that it is something which betters the lives of others is not what "good" is. How about things that promote life? This sounds better, but the first thing that comes to my mind is that, as condoms prevent the conception of new life, they must not be good, despite their health benefits. Without them, disease would spread, which, while not often life threatening, are not a good thing to spread. So that definition is out as well. Looks like this is all a bit more challenging than would be expected. Religious values are out at the starting point, based on the various religions various view points. But if we take the general points on which religions agree, that could be a decent place to begin building a definition. Things such as murder, stealing (based on the culture's concept of property of course), and similar things. War is often included, but sometimes it is considered good, and even when it isn't it's often ignored. So scratch war. Based on that, we can take out the concept of "not harming others" as a definition for good.

Well, we seem to be striking out everywhere we turn. Let's take a look at evil instead.

We've already taken care of "that which harms" by taking out the opposite for the definition of good. A malevolent force is a good term for it, but that is completely subjective. Selfishness, while usually not the right thing, is not nearly extreme enough to consider evil. Hitler and his actions are widely considered to be evil, and there are very few who would disagree with that label. So genocide is evil. But surely there is a line somewhere closer than the slaughter of millions of people for what is evil. To kill one person may or may not be evil, depending on the nature of it. War heros are considered far from evil, yet they may have killed more people than some serial killers. So numerical values have nothing to do with it. So we go to intent. Intent to harm? That by itself is not evil. To sin? Well, according to Leviticus it's a sin to cut the hair on the sides of your head. I refuse to believe that my haircut is a sin. So sinning is out.

If you can't tell, I could go on for a while about various concepts about what is good and what is evil, and why they aren't. We understand the extremes. Mother Teresa: Good. Hitler: Evil. But everything else? Not so clear. Perhaps, good and evil aren't so much forces or even a scale, so much as terms which are used and often abused. We could consider good (there should be a better word for extreme goodness, such as there is for extreme badness, and saintly just does not seem appropriate) we could consider good to be the extreme end of what is right, and evil the extreme end of what is wrong. But almost everything falls somewhere in the middle. There is also an entire spectrum of things which simply do not fit on the scale. They have no place in the concept of what is right, what is wrong, what is good, and what is evil. Not just sell-out answers like "a rock" or "a tree" but real things. Such as a mother giving birth to a still-born baby. That is not good, no. It is not evil, or even wrong. It simply is. It's sad, it's depressing, it's devastating even. But it is not evil, and nobody did anything wrong (unless of course they did, such as drinking/smoking/drug use during pregnancy, in which case the mother is very wrong for it, or if she was pushed down stairs or some such, in which case the culprit is very wrong for it).

The entire point is that while we may think we know what good and evil are, we really don't. Few people can discuss it without bringing religion into it, which would imply that anyone who does not share those beliefs is misguided at best or evil at worst. I do not believe that because one group says that one way of thinking is right and everything else is evil that this is so. I believe in a higher power, choose what name you will. But the being I believe in (if being is even the correct term) would not consider one religion right and all the varied others to be evil or even wrong.

Now THAT would be a topic for another blog post, but don't hold your breath. Religion is one of those topics which I rarely stray into, and I've said more than I care to already.