I am aware that ideas of good and evil are connected to socially constructs of moral values. Also, it is often bound with ideas about cosmic forces or battles. In Christianity, there was the question of evil as the absence of good. This was to be compared with the idea of good and evil as opposites. To what extent are they equal?
So much comes down to framing of opposites and divisions, ranging from ideas of cosmic battles between good and evil, and systems like Taoism, in understanding perspectives of duality. Are opposites to be regarded as metaphysical forces, or qualia, or aspects of human thinking? How may the human aspect of thinking of opposites and duality be understood?
To what extent are good and evil opposites completely or dual aspects of nature? Is ‘evil’ a necessity for understanding ‘goodness’? To what extent does religious thinking enhance or complicate the understanding of the duality of good and evil, as principles and as aspects of values, especially moral values?
It’s worth knowing that Augustine —probably the most influential Christian behind Jesus himself and the Apostle Paul — was originally a Manichee. This was a cult around the Persian prophet Mani, who taught a radical dualism and just such a ‘cosmic battle between good and evil’. But when Augustine converted to Christianity, he completely changed his view. He adopted the principle of ‘evil as the privation of the Good’. In this understanding, evil has no real, positive existence, but is a lack or deficiency. It can be compared to a shadow, which is the absence of light, or a hole, which is the absence of matter. But these are the kinds of things which can’t exist in their own right (causa sui).
To modern ears, it sounds a harsh idea, as there are so many obvious evils in the world (although in my view, those that are the work of humans are the worst). But still, there are natural calamities, epidemics and catastrophes, which cause untold suffering and death, and not only for humans but for all living creatures. So rationalising this in terms of ‘the absence of good’ is challenging, or downright impossible if we accept that the natural world is all that there is. But this gets into the whole issue of ‘the problem of evil’ and theodicy, if you view it in religious terms. If not, then evil and good are viewed as human constructs or social standards, and the task becomes trying to ameliorate or prevent evil and foster as much good as possible through any means at our disposal.
The argument that evil is the privation of good was questioned by Jung. It does go back to Augustine but Jung was in dialogue about it with the theologian Victor White, and his idea of the shadow is important. It draws upon Eastern thinking and is neither completely theist or atheist. The Jungian concept of the God-image is that it has a dark side, often projected onto Satan.
In Christian thinking there is evil in the form of battle between God and the Devil, as Satan with a view that evil will be overcome eventually, and evil will be destroyed completely. However,it there is also the idea of Lucifer as the lord of light who fell, taking angels falling and humans too. The Lucifer myth is one in which light, or goodness, is seen as a degeneration into evil. But if evil had not entered the course of history would never have come about.
As far as ideas of outside of religious perspectives it is still possible to believe that good and evil are not mere constructs. This is on the basis of intuition about certain sources of evil, like earthquakes as well as moral evil. I am sure that many atheists would regard acts of rape, and most acts of murder as a form of evil.
Similarly, many people who believe in the Abrahamic God admit to a certain amount of moral relativism,rather seeing all aspects of life in a clear black and white way.
It is also possible to hold onto contradictory notions about good evil, as to which is most powerful, for both theists and atheists, and inbetweenies. That is because people often hold philosophical assumptions which are entrenched beliefs, often through socialisation, rather than on the basis of clear philosophical premises. In particular, conscience is often feeling toned or based on intuition.
I don’t see them as opposites. I think morality is subjective, so even if we could categorize all actions on a number line of morality, we would disagree where 0 is.
The reason that we often feel like there are these competing forces is because of where our species sits, socially. We’re not perfectly social like an ant colony. We’re not solitary, like tigers, say.
We lie somewhere in the middle and so in many situations have competing instincts of selfishness versus group cooperation.
Finally, I also think ideas of evil being necessary for good to exist fail. I don’t need an “anti-chair” for the concept of a chair to make sense. We can compare chairs to the absence of a chair.
And likewise a world without evil acts is perfectly fine, logically, we can compare various virtuous acts to neutral acts. And of course, to most theists, they have to hold the belief that a perfect world without evil is possible. Either before we brought sin into the world, or in the afterlife.
Also your ethic/aesthetic is going to be informed by your metaphysical primary, whether you’re choosing what that is/defaulting to assumptions about the nature of reality, etc.
Like some others, I don’t generally think in terms of good and evil, and I find dualism a bit too close to the fallacy of binary thinking.
I think of events and actions more in terms of useful, helpful, unhelpful, dangerous and harmful rather than good and evil. But the problem with words is that we use them imprecisely. So I might say something is good without really connecting this to good as a virtue.
I’ve worked with a number of dangerous men who have spent time in jail and done some horrible things, but I don’t think I’ve ever met an evil person. I tend to think of such people as having high-risk adaptive behaviours. I find evil as a concept a bit cartoony and lacking in texture. But perhaps I haven’t met the right person…
I’m familiar with the work of a prison psychologist who says the same. Some people are misguided. Others just trying to survive. “Evil” should be reserved for only the most horrific, inexplicable occurrences.
I know a little about the Jesus’ view of evil. For Jesus there’s the apocalypse that’s coming down the pike. Apocalyptic thought has the good-evil duality, a final confrontation between the 2, eventual triumph of good over evil, and the formation of the kingdom of God.
As you can see it didn’t work out so well for apocalyptisists. No cosmic judge descended from the clouds, no battle, no victory. Eventually they had to posit a heaven for good folk and a hell for bad folk and of course a soul that would go to these places in the afterlife.
The evil in me was foul. I loved my own faults, my oen perdition, not the things for which I sinned but the sin itself ~ St. Augustine
Zoroastrianism has Ahura Mazda (good deity) and Angra Mainyu (bad deity) and there’s speculation that this might have influenced Jewish sects like the Essenes, contemporenous with Jesus.
Jesus’ wandering in the wilderness is when Ha Satan tempts him, offering the kingdoms of the world if Jesus switches allegiance.
Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism have different conceptions of evil. Someone more knowledgeable may be able to shed some light on the matter.
P. S. I have a thread on failures of generic arguments against God. If anyone’s interested we’re here, currently discussing objective morality and God.
To what extent can good and evil be viewed as opposites, makes explicit they must be viewed in themselves, as opposed to this or that being subjectively qualified as relatively good or evil.
In themselves, good and evil merely represent consistency in the latent function of human intelligence, re: logic, in which the primary principle is, the negation of any given conception is also given.
To what extend, then, can one be viewed as the opposite of the other, is, completely. Without exception. Which, of course, cannot at all be said of this or that, that may or may not be determined as degrees of one or the other, and, depending on circumstance, degrees of both simultaneously.
“Evil” suffers too much from its melodramatic religious baggage, at least in popular culture. One imagines a preacher on the pulpit threatening hell and damnation for a few penny sins. The severity invoked by the word “evil” by tribal dogmatists is so extreme the word might contain a bit of evil itself.
To use the word evil, in an accusatory manner, is a little bit evil. Its connotations can be somewhat inflammatory and not so helpful.
The usage of the word evil in everyday life is that. It is cartoony and dramatic. Yes.
But in biblical terms, evil is not just people. They’re talking about the world and existence where there is famine, deadly diseases, horror, and insanity. Authors of horrors are fond of using the sanitarium as a place of evil because when people are trapped in their own minds that contain nothing but suffering, there is no shelter, nor paradise where one can run to and be at peace.
Insanity aside, psychologists have come up with the idea of mental compartmentalization. A person can develop mental compartmentalization as a coping mechanism, so committing a horrific act doesn’t make them panic or sweat or get their heart racing but they would be fully aware of what they’ve done.
I defined Good and Evil to find solid ground for a fundamental of Reason.
Yes, it changes from culture to culture, but in our society, my definition fits well.
Good is to aid someone in their health, wealth, or liberty, while Evil is to harm their health, wealth, or liberty. This is easy to see when one considers what they do not like from another person. So my answer is yes; Good and Evil are opposites.
Yes. But I don’t care for the Bible and we’ve moved on.
Some psychologists have. There is no such thing as “psychology” there are a large and sometimes antithetical range of schools, approaches and personalities.
The general view is that if you do fucked-up things, it’s because you were fucked up in early life. Of course, the way they might put it, depending on the school, is that destructive and antisocial behaviour can be understood as the product of developmental experiences, including disrupted attachment, adversity, trauma, parenting and social learning, which shape emotional regulation, interpersonal expectations and coping strategies over time, sometimes turning initially adaptive responses into entrenched patterns of behaviour.
They are opposites if you hold to certain axioms that not everyone accepts. For the Thomists, the Aristotelians, and many Muslims and Christians, for instance, this model makes sense. And even from a common-sense, encultured perspective, the dominant culture teaches that tending to wellbeing is better than planning destruction. This holds across Hindu, Islamic, Sikh and Christian cultures. Personally, I don’t find good and evil helpful concepts; they are limited by their dualistic character when life is much more complex. This is something the entertaining Father Richard Rohr often points out.
Interesting that you say most of the world holds to this ideal, yet you have a way of understanding that denies it. Could you share what that is with us?
I don’t know where you’ve been, but argumentum ad populum is not really kosher in philosophy circles.
And you’ll no doubt be aware that, running alongside religious indoctrination and the concomitant cultural worldviews (that have dominated most countries and thinking for millennia), there are more recent secular orientations that don’t accept or follow those models, and I, like millions of others, am closer to these.
If they’re not opposites then what are they? Dualistic theology flowered in Persia, viz. Angra Mainyu (bad) vs. Ahura Mazda (good). There are speculations that Christian apocalyptic thought borrowed this dualistic framing from Zoroastrianism - the kingdom of God would follow after a final battle between the forces of good and those of bad.
I have to admit that I don’t fully grok dualism. After all Al-Ahad (The One), To Hen (ditto).
