Good and Evil are ideas that help perpetuate the idea of Society. Good can be considered as “anything that helps my people” and Evil as “anything that hurts my people”.
I would argue that they are some of the earliest memes, in the original sense of the word - they are ideas that spread through imitation and story that helped early people (likely at least as far back as protohumans) maintain themselves as coherent groups.
Manichean. The problem is that evil has a tendency to grab power by the throat and never let go, which gives it the leverage to dominate good.
This feels reductive and semantically confused. 🤷
good and evil are just ideas. id say this image has negative value.
Neither.
The universe itself is neutral as fuck.
Good and evil are man-made distinctions that constantly change depending on who happens to define them.
“Nature does not make mistakes. Right and wrong are human constructs.” –Frank Herbert
Just because they’re man-made distinctions doesn’t mean that they cannot be discussed or don’t have beginnings.
Sure.
But the beginning is a hen/egg discussion per definition.
And for the distinctions… There are currently about 8 billion different ones.
Discussing those as if there was an absolute answer doesn’t make sense.
I think there are some general basic principles that can be derived from how the universe works, though.
Most notably, that every living organism avoids pain and hurt unless strictly necessary for survival. Therefore, we can IMHO conclude that inflicting pain on other living things is a negative/bad/evil act. It is one that is necessary for us to do in order to survive, but should be minimized.
(Edit: just reread this and realized this first sentence comes off much harsher than I intended it, sorry. I legitimately meant it’s a fun fact you might not be aware of and I just thought “fun fact, you’re wrong” was a humorous way to start an explanation.)
Fun fact, you’re wrong. Many living things don’t experience pain and act entirely like robots responding to their environment reflexively whether by their chemical or even neurological structure.
While microbes are the common example, Jellyfish are a better one since they are complex organisms. They respond to their environment because changes in their environment directly cause reflexive actions. There’s no thought or awareness of pain, just chemical switches going off when the right inputs occur.
They’re just machines that avoid destruction because the ones that didn’t got destroyed. If responding to one’s environment is all that matters, then computers are just as “living” as jellyfish but don’t inherently act towards self preservation or feel pain, so you’re wrong, plenty of things that can respond to their environment don’t give a shit about it or act towards self preservation.
If you try to qualify “only reproducing things count” or “organic life” you’re the one drawing those arbitrary boundaries so this isn’t an objective basis for morality.
And, even if pain were a solid basis, we run into problems with which pain matters more? Would you walk away from Omelas? Would you kill an innocent man yourself to save five others?
And what about cancer or viruses? Something tells me you think a person who feels pain is more important than the millions of viruses or bacteria giving them an infection/disease, but that’s not objective. Why does the life of one outweigh the life of many in this circumstance?
And if you really don’t want anything to feel pain, the guaranteed solution to this problem is to kill every living thing. No more living things will feel pain ever again. Something tells me you wouldn’t think that good though…
Morality (and any justification for it) is always subjective
Fun fact, you’re wrong. Many living things don’t experience pain and act entirely like robots responding to their environment reflexively whether by their chemical or even neurological structure.
That’s the same way we experience pain (or our environment in general). There is a stimulus, such as you cutting yourself, which triggers nerves that transmit an electric signal to your brain, which then interprets this input. Cells of the immune system respond via chemical signaling, etc. etc. Just because our reaction is more complex doesn’t take away from the fact that other organisms respond in a similar basic way. Whether I cut you, a tree or a microorganism, there are reactions averse to the stimulus. Our complex response “pain” is only possible through those basic ones, unless you assume some ethereal concept of the soul or such to be true.
I’ll borrow your theme of computers: Running a modern OS is only possible on top of more basic software and in the end the hardware. A GUI displaying an error is just a complex representation of the fact that the underlying system has entered a state in which it can no longer function.
If responding to one’s environment is all that matters, then computers are just as “living” as jellyfish but don’t inherently act towards self preservation or feel pain, so you’re wrong, plenty of things that can respond to their environment don’t give a shit about it or act towards self preservation. If you try to qualify “only reproducing things count” or “organic life” you’re the one drawing those arbitrary boundaries so this isn’t an objective basis for morality.
I am not sure why you think I’d count a computer as a living thing by default, given my reply and the fact a computer or machine is whatever we give it the capability to. I’ll entertain the thought, though: We can further break down the premise to “Acting destructive is a bad thing”. Coming to think of it, that is even closer to what I’m trying to convey than “Hurting is bad”.
Everything that has the ability to do so strives towards procreating one way or the other. Simply destroying something without furthering this goal can be seen as a negative action. And this premise can be expanded to include all things. So yes, destroying a computer for no good reason can therefore be considered bad.
And, even if pain were a solid basis, we run into problems with which pain matters more? Would you walk away from Omelas? Would you kill an innocent man yourself to save five others?
I had to look up what “Omelas” is. I recently finished The Dispossessed and Always coming home by Le Guin, and I guess I have my next book cut out for me.
And as for the trolley problem: That is the point where IMO we actually enter subjective territory. How much evil is tolerable in the name of survival. It’s a fact that in order to survive, we have to destroy.
And what about cancer or viruses? Something tells me you think a person who feels pain is more important than the millions of viruses or bacteria giving them an infection/disease, but that’s not objective. Why does the life of one outweigh the life of many in this circumstance?
You and I are more than one singular entity, and that’s before we start to consider weird phenomena such as split brains. We consist of an unimaginable amount of cells and symbiotic organisms. So the question is not “one vs millions” but “millions vs billions”. And therefore destroying millions of viruses/bacteria to keep an organism of billions of cells alive is the lesser evil.
Can this be extended to mean that it is ethical to kill 8 billion humans in order to save the ecosphere from being destroyed by our actions? Hell yes, it can. Is this an inherently bad thing? I don’t think so. Would I do it? Hell no, because I believe that humanity can better itself, therefore this magnitude of destruction is not necessary for survival.
And if you really don’t want anything to feel pain, the guaranteed solution to this problem is to kill every living thing. No more living things will feel pain ever again. Something tells me you wouldn’t think that good though…
That is, if you believe that avoidance of pain is the end goal of all existence. That’s subjective.
Fun fact: Do you know the game Stellaris? One of the endgame crisis the player can encounter is a megalomaniacal synthetic being that wants to end all pain by removing all higher brain functions
(Edit: just reread this and realized this first sentence comes off much harsher than I intended it, sorry. I legitimately meant it’s a fun fact you might not be aware of and I just thought “fun fact, you’re wrong” was a humorous way to start an explanation.)
Yeah, that definitely didn’t come across, and with some more expletives in your reply gave not a good expression. I reversed my downvote.
I am not sure why you think I’d count a computer as a living thing by default, given my reply and the fact a computer or machine is whatever we give it the capability to.
Why does it matter that we “give” them their capabilities and functions? Living things act the way they do because the universe shaped them that way, and since humans are part of the universe, the same is true of computers. To give life priority because it wasn’t “made” is an arbitrary subjective choice.
As for the reason they are comparable to living things, they can respond to stimuli, which is the main necessity of your definition of pain. If you try to define life in another way, you’ll be biasing data by only including things which fit the pattern you’re describing.
The scientific definitions of “living” usually require growth, reproduction, and the ability to sustain itself, which means your statement that all living things seek to sustain themselves is vacuously true.
By saying all living things seek to avoid pain and hurt, you’re saying all things that seek to sustain themselves seek to sustain themselves. You drew a line around things that had a quality and then said that because all these which have this quality have this quality, somehow it means that quality is objectively important.
That’s the point I was trying to make.
Using universal patterns as a basis for morality is also problematic because entropy is far more common and far more universal than living/self-preservation. All things decay. Everything “wants” to be in the lowest energy state. Order always tends to disorder.
So if prevalence of a thing/pattern is basis for morality, accelerating entropy (destruction, disorder, chaos, etc.) is the most moral action.
You might actually have a better chance at justifying that the preservation of life is important by using scarcity since, as far as we currently know, we’re the only planet with life in the entire universe.
So the question is not “one vs millions” but “millions vs billions”. And therefore destroying millions of viruses/bacteria to keep an organism of billions of cells alive is the lesser evil.
Fair point.
Do you know the game Stellaris?
I’ve heard of it but haven’t played, but that does sound interesting, so maybe I will.
Anyway, I would like to note that for what it’s worth I do agree with you on the idea that pain is probably a good basis for ethics. I just don’t think one can claim that it is objectively/universally right.
Neither, “Good” and “Evil” can’t exist absolutely and the universe doesn’t care one whit about any of us. Our morality was shaped by what was evolutionarily adaptive, and we developed post-hoc reasoning for it with the nice big brains we evolved.
What is good for the bird is evil for the worm
Do they have concepts of good and evil?
Maaaybee the bird, at least some birds are pretty high on the self-awareness scale.So in this case the bird-worm-relationship consists only of pure evil-free good.
Who’s asking the bird and the worm? We’re humans discussing this here, maybe a few bots in the mix.
Good and evil are subjective interpretive constructs, they exist only conceptually, there is no “truth” to good and evil, or binary dichotomies of existence, ethics, and morality in general.
It’s all just wishy-washy childish nonsense.
“Good” and “Evil” are human concepts. They’re the product of higher cognitive ability and intelligence making judgments on things based, usually and generally, on how those things affect survival and the ability to pass on one’s own genes.
Our definition and understanding of those concepts varies from person to person, and society to society.
Neither of these models are capable of accurately representing either concept for these reasons.
Whichever makes the story more interesting
Neither. The world started out all evil and is slowly transitioning to good.
Things we see as evil acts today were completely normal and accepted in history.
That’s progress. And it’s ongoing.The universe started out good, and then it took billions of years for large enough stars to form that their collapse could create supernovae capable of reaching the energies needed to synthesize evil particles.
I’d call good and evil human concepts, along with the moral or ethical codes and ideas that define them. They aren’t going to exist in a vacuum: what is called good and what is called evil depends on the social norms of a time and place.
Is charging interest to lend money evil? Is homosexuality evil? Is not taking on your brother’s widow as a second wife and impregnating her evil? Those are all things that would have been considered wrong by different cultures.
So I’d say that any question about “good” or “evil” kind of requires asking “good in the eyes of whom” or “evil in the eyes of whom”.
If you want to ask “did evil exist in the universe 4 billion years ago”, I’d probably say “we don’t have evidence that life existed in the universe 4 billion years ago, and I think that most conventional meanings of good or evil entail some kind of beings with a thought process being involved.”
If you want to ask “were the first humans good and then become evil”, I’d probably say that depends a great deal on your moral code, but I imagine that early humans probably violated present-day social norms very substantially.
If what you’re really working towards is something like the problem of evil:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil
The problem of evil, also known as the problem of suffering, is the philosophical question of how to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering with an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient God.[1][2][3][4]
The problem of evil possibly originates from the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BCE).[38] Hume summarizes Epicurus’s version of the problem as follows:
“Is [god] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?”[39][40]
So if what you’re asking is “how could good give birth to evil”, I think that I’d probably say that I probably wouldn’t call humans or the universe at large “purely good” for any extended period of time in any conventional sense of the word. Maybe in some sort of very limited, narrow, technical sense, if you decide that only humans or something capable of that level of thought that can engage in actions that we’d call good and evil and the first point in time that there was a being that qualified as human the first second of their activity happened to be something that we’d call “good”, okay, but I assume that that’s not what you’re thinking of.
I think that you had pre-existing behavior by humans at one point in the past and ethical systems that later developed which might be used to classify that behavior, and not in some consistent way.
Evil is knowingly causing harm in order to derive pleasure (or profit, but what is profit if not deferred pleasure?). How evil it is depends on how serious and lasting the harm.
Evil came into being when the first animal that was smart enough to know what it was doing did something harmful that it didn’t need to in order to derive that pleasure.
Humans happened long after that. (Or around the same time if you prefer your religion’s creation story.)
If you’ve taken antibiotics, you chose to cause harm to millions of living things for the pleasure of not feeling sick, maybe as simple a pleasure as just not coughing or not having itchy feet, who knows.
Point is, the living things you killed will never be revived. You caused extraordinary amounts of serious and lasting harm all for your personal pleasure.
You must be absolutely wracked with guilt over this massive evil you and so many others have and are still committing
I didn’t mention necessary evils in my main comment. With necessary evils, the pleasure is more of a secondary effect to relief of some kind. The fact we even have the phrase in our language for the concept and that it contains the word “evil” would seem to serve my point.
Also, consider that the harm is minimised by the fact that those bacteria cannot suffer in any meaningful way.
For where the harm is greater, tens of thousands of pages of law have been written about where the line between pleasure and relief falls. How evil an act is deemed to be is ultimately indicated by the severity of the enforced consequences (prison sentence, etc.). Or at least that’s the idea.
Maybe it was a man-on-man killing by someone in danger with no other apparent reasonable options. Maybe they just felt like it and are only saying that. Maybe they were clumsy or incompetent. Was that with malice? etc. etc.
And then there’s those enforced consequences. They’re also a necessary evil.
But these are all evils.
Was the first carnivore evil? Sating hunger is pleasurable. Was it knowingly doing harm? How many brain cells did it need to know that?
Eating flesh to survive is a necessary evil for those that are smart enough to understand they’re killing another animal, and it’s not evil for those that aren’t. It’s probably not an either-or, either. There might well be another sliding scale there.
It’s what they evolved to eat and they have no means of creating an alternative. Carnivory almost certainly evolved in parallel with brains increasing in size, which is a curious consequence. You eat flesh, so your brain gets big enough to try to tell you to stop eating flesh.
There have been instances of predator animals temporarily adopting the offspring of the adult prey animal they ate. I think it would be wrong to call that a guilty conscience in a non-sapient creature, but whatever the ‘merely’ sentient equivalent is, I bet in some cases, it’s that. In others it might well just be a snack for later, but it’s curious how they treat that child with care and respect before they do.
FWIW, I’m no saint here. I eat meat even though I could probably get away with not doing that.
Torah teaches that God created human beings with both good and evil impulses. Human beings uniquely have knowledge of our drives and impulses and can learn to master them. The same needs that drive us to consume can lead us to overconsume or do so unethically. Our animal drive for safety and security can also lead us to attack perceived threats.
According to this philosophy, evil comes from people misdirecting divinely given attributes.
The idea of good and evil as absolute “powers” independent of human choices is foreign to many philosophies and theologies.
