The terms are used by many and I would like to look into their relevance.
Here is the question: Are good and evil of any importance in the universe or only to man?
Are there any events that are inherently good or conversely evil? Or are they simply concepts created by man to serve his purpose and justify leading a certain type of life?
-matt
Evil exists. Anyone who doubts it hasn’t been paying attention the last century. I don’t believe there is anything supernatural about it, however, unlike some people who see some sort of demonic or anti-religious conspiracy in everything. It is a very natural human behavior.
Evil is that which destroys, demolishes and diminishes other people, their lives, their accomplishments, ect; either as a sole aim (various types of nihilism), or as a necessary parasitism for some “greater good”. (Think slavery, communism, eliminating of “unworthy” religions and cultures, ect). We react to it instinctually, because allowing evil behavior to continue and reinforce evil behavior unchecked would lead to death, destruction, and misery for mankind.
I think that ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are terms that relate to intent; to motivation. Without awareness and intent, ‘good’ and ‘evil’ don’t apply, so they really only deal with people. ‘Order’ and ‘chaos’ might be similar to them in many ways, but can apply to mindless reactions and humans alike. I don’t think some action or type of person can really be inherently good/evil either, it can only be good or evil from within a point of view.
Alright, but everything you have mentioned is in relation to man. Suppose we take man out of the equation, does evil continue to exist?
Also Alun I tend to agree, i think that they are terms relating to humans and nothing else. We see this the way we use the terms as well ascribing them only to things that act of a conscious volition.
Good is what you like
Evil is what you don’t like
The rest is naught but elastic exegesis.
Good and Evil are just points of view, unless you have a standard to measure them against. Currently there is no proven god, or religion, so we have no “yardstick of life” to measure how good somthing is or how evil somthing is. You have to have somthing to compare things to, somthing static and finite.
I belive it exists only to man.
Good and Evil do not exist independent of each other, nor can they be measured without some system of universal morality (which as far as I have discovered, does not exist.) There are advances in this field though, notably Kant’s transcendental morality, but even this has holes in it.
Of course, I prefer the Baha’i model in terms of this question. Where there is no such thing as evil. Evil is simply the absence of Good (To compare: it’s the same system in science when it is said that Cold is simply the absence of Heat.) Under this reasoning, Evil does not exist, but Good is not always present.
I’d say plenty exist, although none are universally accepted 
I have to wonder about the Baha’i model that you’ve mentioned; does it only apply to humans? or are things that aren’t good from many perspectives evil in the same sense that a person who decides he should destroy things for his benefit is evil? If that model describes patterns related ideas of evil, rather than it’s own idea of evil, what about definitions of evil in which evil is active destruction, rather than just the absence of creation?
Sure enough you are right in saying that good and evil are non-existant (as we have come to understand the terms) without the other. But I disagree entirely that they are imcumbant on morality, I believe it to be reversed. Morality, and what it entails has been debated upon heavily for thousands of years (I always look back foundly on the beginning of Plato’s Republic), but the basis for it is relative to what “good” is (as it appears to me at least).
I don’t want to hastily attack this standpoint as maybe it needs further explanation. It seems to me to be a play on words, it’s not evil, it’s just not good? (using the terms as extremes). Couldn’t you therefore say the opposite, good is only the absense of evil?..I’ve possibly screwed up here, so anyone that can explain this, please do.
It’s like “empty.” Something can’t have “empty” in it, it can only have a lack of something in it. By his thinking, evil is the default, and we basically add good to it. But I disagree, because many definitions of evil (which aren’t limited to people) wouldn’t apply to, let’s say, sand. But sand isn’t really good in any active sense either. Because good and evil are really things that can only apply to something that is aware, they’re both values that require action–neither is static.
Order and chaos, on the other hand…chaos is just the lack of order–it has no order to define it’s action by. Evil, while it sometimes is defined as pushing an ordered system towards chaos, isn’t chaos; it is an ordered action that isn’t just an absence of it’s opposite. But we wouldn’t call it “evil” if we didn’t have any idea of “good.”
To measure good and evil one has to, in part, analyze intent. Because only humans (and possibly some lesser social animals) can truly have intent, than only human’s could be judged as good and evil. A tsunami may be a catastrophe and kill many, but it did not mean to do so, and thus, it cannot be evil.
Nietzsche gave us a few thoughts of his regarding this good and evil matter. I don’t think I can give out a complete account of those thoughts here, but I think I can briefly tell you where it all started from.
It starts with pre-civilisational society: the stone age, bronze age, ice age, pre-historicalities during which times, man was a little more than tabula rasa - morality was yet to be born.
To watch how the story goes from there, please see mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsc … l_tofc.htm
To man these concepts are invariably important, since one cannot live together with other human beings without some standard of what is good and what is bad. Nietzsche didn’t ignore this fact.
There does seem to exist some sort of behaviour which all humankind (or at least most human beings) would define as evil and abominable, while other things are invariably seen as good and acceptable.
For instance, if you asked a thousand people from different cultures and different lands what they think about racist holocaust, the dignity of work and the immorality of rape and killing, most of them would offer you similar answers.
Actually, this one’s a little shaky. Ask the Palistinians or the Iranians. Or for that matter ask someone in a tribal society about the tribe next door.
Ditto. Tribal societies glorify over the top outward agression. They make poetry and songs about raping and killing, and exterminating their vanquished enemies. Humans are not naturally, instinctively, civilized or good. IMO civlilization is something we’ve had to construct ourselves and fight to defend.
I don’t know… You might get a different answer from a metro-aristocrat, or an “entitled” government dependent. It is true that working for what you own is dignified, but there is a mode of human behavior, and an easy one to fall into in the right circumstances, that will attempt to take things without working for them.
This is a good question. Suppose we have only inanimate matter. I don’t think anything can be termed evil with respect to it. There’s no particular state of inanimate matter that is more destroyed than any other, in a significant moral sense. When you look at life in general, yes, there are events that can destroy and degrade that life. These things, the creatures with the ability to, tend to want to avoid. But they can’t do anything about their natures to any significant extent. They will continue to act as their instincts dictate, as they have no other teacher and can develop no other set of abilities. Hawks will continue to eat mice (good for the hawk, bad for the mouse), ect. Humans are the first organism with the ability to do something about good and evil, to create an environment, and to alter their natures, so as to bring about what is good and eliminate what is evil with respect to mankind. They are the first moral creatures because of their ability to modify their own inherited nature though self awareness.
It’s hard to say just what galactic roles good and evil might play for the billions of other beings that might exist in the universe. Or for the demi-gods and lesser gods and even for the God. However unlikely it looks to us: the universe being an intrinsicly moral place, it is not impossible that the whole universe is in fact rooted on those entities.
“Your crimes will be as great/
as your days are few.”
At much grander scales, the extemity of good and evil might be far more serious.
“This is the night of noon/
we play with blocks/
and are protected from real seriousness.”
“The suffering of gods…”
Our part in the great play of good and evil is hardly even facile.
Possible.
good or evil is a matter of opinion. do you think a human who intentially murders another “feels” good while doing it, or afterward? good and bad relate to how we feel about a particular consequence. good and evil are qualities we attribute to a persons action. good and bad come into the mind in relation to consequences. so, that said, could you say any “system” of morality is a result of social convention? or an acceptance of a "common good " as existing?
Some would say that the moment you create good, you have created evil. The concepts are co-dependent. You may not have one without the other. Their very essence depends on the other for definition.
Good and evil are man-made namings. They have no meaning outside of man. Rather, one may ask, is this benevolent or malovent? That which is nature may be beneficial or harmful in the short run, but equilibrium appears to be the over-all effect.
As suggested by others, all depends on the intent. The notion that either good or evil can stand alone is perhaps a fond wish, but it is illusion. At best, man has the capacity to give good the edge, but evil must always be a possibility for good to exist.
JT
Universally speaking, which isn’t terribly useful, good is complexity and evil is entropy. On the local level, us, things are different because we have sensibilities, also the cerebral cortex comes in handy for finding food and stuff. Of course we wouldn’t know what to do with the food and stuff if we didn’t have a built-in… yes, that’s right, you guessed it, a sense for self (as opposed to other!). What is good and evil? ask your sensibilities, they’ll tell you, but you don’t have to believe them, do you? What is self? ask your sensibilities, they’ll tell you, but you don’t have to believe them, do you?
Can you dynamically change your values at will? Sure, in some Nietzschian phantasy land, but not here on earth. On earth there is structure and if a complex structure is altered too rapidly it’ll be thrown out of balance and likely collapse, on a horse or something. The end.
how to judge a person,first you need the power of knowledge,and the stability of wisdom,here is a helpful link:
cubicao.tk/humanity/salvation.html
Yes, I should really read this one amazon.com/gp/product/067972 … e&n=283155 (Beyond Good & Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future). It is one of the books I try to buy and to read since a long time, but there is always something else to be read…
I like the way Hermann Hesse treated the question good/evil, like in “Demian” and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Faust I and II, but this leads me a bit too far from your discussion. Anyway, good writers (literature and philosophy) shall treat evil in a good and profound way, otherway it makes no sense to read their books. I think it is not only difficult to treat evil in a good way, but also good. Good and evil are not so easy to cut from each other, both influence us, like already Faust made us aware. Anyway, it is interesting to thing about good and evil, not only in religious and moral terms. I will do this…
Regards,
Old Europe