Definitions:
Hope is Good.
Fear is Evil.
Do you agree?
Hope is Evil.
Fear is Good.
Thoughts?
Hope is only “good” if it is a hope that leads to a good.
Fear is almost always a bad, but only if it leads to a bad.
Nice adages James … or axioms. And yer OP is?
What good is false hope and irrational fear?
Some people I meet are very pessimistic, and these types tend to be cynical and skeptical philosophers. They are negative negative negative, and don’t seem to tolerate other people feeling “hopeful”. In fact, cynics tend to see hope as “evil”, and furthermore, hate religious and spiritual people, for the sake of defining hope as something bad, or worse, as something evil.
There is a case to be made about the evilness of hope, in the same way we can define fear as good.
Think about how careless people would be, without the usefulness of fear pulling us back from the edge. How many people would throw their lives away, without the protection, safety, and Goodness of fear?
I don’t define “fear” quite that way.
Fear is an immediately reaction without forethought.
That is different than merely sensing threat and handling it.
ALL life is guided by PHT, Perception of Hope and Threat.
The perception might be misguided, but they still respond to it as if it weren’t.
And this is true of even the smallest of life forms (with or without consciousness).
So the only purpose for fear is to cause more random reactions despite forethought or actual threat.
Using that is called “terrorism”, and is being practiced by most Western governments today.
The proposed good (which btw cannot be logically sound until it is defined) is that by using terrorism, we, the government, can control society into what we know is a better state for future generations.
Now supposing that such a scheme were actually good (again, not at all valid until “good” is defined), there would be good in creating fear.
Of course, once fear is created in a society, it doesn’t play nice and restrict its random reactions. That causes more justified fear in others. The effect grows exponentially. Eventually the government has to “crush the fear” by crushing the populous and forcing terror to the point of stunned and stifled rather than random behavior. At that point, the fear has been contained by extortion of the rest and might be able to be gradually rectified, but not without facing that so many were crushed by those trying to now calm everyone down through extortion. But it isn’t impossible.
Of course random false hopes can be used in a similar way, but doesn’t require the drastic solutions in order to rectify. It merely takes time.
Obviously the best solution is to use only true hopes and true threats with accurate perception. But that requires a government that isn’t interested in attempting to be God and control all things at its whim regardless of reality (aka “without the real God/Reality”).
Depends. Fear can obviously be good, since it might make me leap out of the way of a bus. Me like my life. Me not want hospital, tubes, pain, people shaving my genital region and so on. Nor death. In general fear alone is likely a neutral to good thing. It may be that certain cognitive patterns - by this I mean thoughts and judgments are triggering fear in ways that are not so healthy. But this is like me blaming my fist for hitting someone if I blame my fear.
Hope can be good. I mean, it might get you through a survival situation. Hope needs to be distinguished from other ‘things’, like expectation, just in case striving and so on.
Hope could be bad I suppose - not evil. I mean, I can’t see hope plotting to torture a child, if you see what I mean.
So you guys are stating that hope and fear are neither good nor evil, but instead, morally neutral?
I think that our culture generally typifies hope as goodness, and fear as evil. But I think this inclination is wrongly biased and even damaging. I see the good in fear, and the evil in hope. The goodness of fear, is that fear can protect you and secure you, if properly rational. For example, you’re too scared to go to work today, because your work is in a war zone. And so you stay home and stay indoors. It turns out, that you were right, because a bomb landed on the building you worked at, and killed lots of people. But, since you stayed home, due to fear, your life was spared. This is an example of fear being good, because it saved your life.
Contrarily, hope can be evil, when preachers and religious figures manipulate people’s hopes, to start a religious war like the one that blew up the workplace of the aforementioned example. A holy war, jihad, was started by radical theocrats, who inspired a false hope in their followers. So they started a war against another religious group, and lots of people died as a result of hope in supernatural beliefs. Hope can be misplaced, and irrational, as fear can.
Both hope and fear can be rational or irrational, good or evil. The goodness and evilness primarily depends on the ends to which hope and fear are used, but this is an afterthought for most people. People seem to act first, rationalize and justify last, instead of thinking first, and acting second.
Until someone defines “GOOD”, nothing being said has any validity.
And are you talking about actual hope or the perception of hope?
Fear was much more critical for the survival of humankind back when humankind was part of the food chain. But now that we’re no longer part of the food chain much of fear is left over from those days, and likely misplaced.
When would you say fear is misplaced and when would you say it is not?
When our fears today are not misplaced what makes them less critical than the fears of our past?
Might be hard to demarcate but I think the fear during a panic attack would be misplaced irrational fear … and might be a hangover from our primitive flight-or-fight-might-be-food days.
Okay, but you said much of our fears today are misplaced and I would think panic attacks only account for a small amount of the fear people have today.
Anyway, why would fear today be less critical for human survival?
Mutually Assured Destruction comes to mind, for instance, where fear of total planetary annihilation keeps one nation from using weapons of mass destruction against another who has weapons of equal mass destruction on automatic sentry.
If we can see that a series of events leads to a precarious situation for all mankind, or merely for a small group of people, why wouldn’t fear be as critical now as it ever has been in the presence of perceived dangers?
Necessity is the mother of invention, where necessity in a sense the alludes potently to fear.
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. 
Both
I’m inclined to agree that regardless of whether a fear is rational or irrational, it is still morally neutral either way. It’s not until fear, or hope, are used as a means to an end, that either becomes good or evil.
Define “good” and you might be able to get somewhere with this.
I’ll just say a few words off the top of my head.
Good: a descriptive, religious, spiritual, and moral foundation, predominantly used to positively justify human behavior post hoc.
Evil: a descriptive, religious, spiritual, and moral foundation, predominantly used to negatively justify human behavior post hoc.
That is called “word substitution” and doesn’t qualify as a definition.
A definition must relay an unambiguous description.
Simply replacing one word for another doesn’t cut it, even if accurate.
You’re too focused on the core meaning, and not the context of good and evil.
Not all positive descriptions are good. Not all negative descriptions are evil. Positive and negative are merely the objective “matter” of good and evil, the realism underneath the descriptors. In other words, good and evil are extensions of a biological thought process. They are post hoc justifications and judgments of events.
I’ve almost never crossed the paths with people or persons who justify behavior before the fact, demonstrating the rarity of people who think seriously and adeptly about these moral conceptions. In fact, I may never have crossed the path of such a person.
I’m sorry, what did you say?