Good and evil

• 1. Introduction

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  Good and evil is a dichotomy that runs through philosophy, religion, and psychology, and almost nobody agrees on what it means. In religions shaped by Manichaean and Abrahamic thought, evil is the antagonistic opposite of good, a force that should be defeated. Yet other traditions deny that evil even exists. The Baha'i Faith treats it as a lack of good, the way cold is the absence of heat. Pyrrhonism insists good and evil have no nature of their own at all. So a single word stretches from a malignant supernatural spirit to a mere mistaken concept of good. Every language carries a word for the desirable quality and a word for the undesirable one, and a sense of right and wrong appears to be a cultural universal. Why, then, do thinkers from Zoroaster to Spinoza to a 20th-century prison researcher reach such different conclusions? What turns ordinary people toward cruelty, and can goodness be measured at all? Those questions sit at the center of ethics, the principal study of morality, and they have no settled answers.

• 2. The First Dividing Lines

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  Zoroaster, the Persian philosopher, took the crowded pantheon of early Iranian gods and reduced it to two opposing forces locked in conflict. He named them Ahura Mazda, Illuminating Wisdom, and Angra Mainyu, Destructive Spirit. From that simplification grew a religion that splintered into many sects, some embracing an extreme dualism that the material world should be shunned and the spiritual world embraced. Gnostic ideas carried this further, teaching that gnosis, interpreted as enlightenment, salvation, or oneness with God, could be reached through philanthropy to the point of personal poverty, sexual abstinence, and a diligent search for wisdom by helping others. Ancient Egypt drew a similar boundary without two warring gods. Ma'at stood for justice, order, and cohesion, the principles society sought to embody. Isfet stood for chaos, disorder, and decay, the force that undermined society from within. The same pattern surfaces again in ancient Mesopotamian religion, in the conflict between Marduk and Tiamat. Greek thought arrived at the absolute sense of morality more slowly. The words kakos and agathos first meant bad or cowardly and good or brave or capable. Their absolute meanings emerged only around 400 BC, in pre-Socratic philosophy and especially in Democritus, before solidifying in the dialogues of Plato.

• 3. Roots Of A Word

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  Old English yfel sits behind the modern English word evil, and its cousins reach across the Germanic languages. The German Ubel and the Dutch euvel share the same ancestor, a reconstructed Proto-Germanic form ubilaz, comparable to the Hittite huwapp and tracing ultimately to the Proto-Indo-European root wap. Middle English alone preserved several spellings, evel, ifel, and ufel, alongside Old Frisian evel, Old Saxon ubil, Old High German ubil, and Gothic ubils. The words for moral judgment themselves grew out of ordinary custom. Both ethics and morality descend from terms for regional custom, the Greek ethos and the Latin mores, the same habitual root that lies behind the Old Norse sidr. Augustine of Hippo gave the medieval West a tighter definition of wrongdoing. Sin, he wrote, is a word, deed, or desire in opposition to the eternal law of God. Medieval Christian theologians then stretched and shrank the basic concept until it carried several meanings at once, from a personal preference that might earn praise or punishment, to a religious obligation from Divine law leading to sainthood or damnation, to a cultural standard that might enhance group survival or wealth. Even statute law imposing a legal duty fell under the same heading.

• 4. Absence Or Force

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  Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican theologian, defined evil in the Summa Theologica as the absence or privation of good. That single move shaped how the Catholic Church understood the problem, and it echoes far beyond Christianity. The Baha'i Faith asserts that evil is non-existent, a concept for the lacking of good, just as darkness is the state of no light and forgetfulness the lacking of memory. Abdu'l-Baha, son of the religion's founder, pressed the point with a scorpion and a serpent. Their poison, he wrote, is evil only in relation to man, while in relation to themselves their sting is a weapon by which they defend themselves. The Ahmadiyya understanding of Islam reaches the same conclusion, holding that evil has no positive existence in itself and is merely the lack of good. Not every tradition takes this route. In the Old Testament, evil is an opposition to God, embodied in Satan, the leader of the fallen angels. The New Testament splits the idea between two Greek words, poneros for unsuitability and kakos for opposition to God in the human realm. Henri Blocher, the French-American theologian, called evil an unjustifiable reality, something that occurs in experience that ought not to be. The line 1 Timothy 6:10 names a more concrete source, that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.

• 5. The Mind Of Wrongdoing

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  Friedrich Nietzsche rejected Judeo-Christian morality across two books, Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals. He argued that the natural, functional, non-good had been socially transformed into the religious concept of evil by the slave mentality of the masses, who resented their masters, the strong. He went further, charging that many who consider themselves moral are simply cowards, wanting to do evil but afraid of the repercussions. Carl Jung located the problem closer to home. In Answer to Job he depicted evil as the dark side of the Devil and observed that people believe evil is external to them because they project their shadow onto others. He read the story of Jesus as an account of God facing his own shadow. M. Scott Peck, the American psychiatrist, described evil as militant ignorance. Most people sense their own failings, he argued, but the evil actively and militantly refuse that consciousness, projecting their sins onto specific innocent victims, often children or others in powerless positions. Peck listed the traits of such a person, consistent self-deception to maintain an image of perfection, lying incessantly to keep up respectability, abuse of political or emotional power, and a covert intolerance to criticism. He held this distinct from the apparent absence of conscience in sociopaths, and he judged certain institutions evil too, illustrated by the My Lai massacre and its attempted coverup.

• 6. When Good People Turn

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  In 2007, Philip Zimbardo proposed that people may act in evil ways as a result of a collective identity. He drew the idea from his earlier work, the Stanford prison experiment, and published it in The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. The psychologist Albert Ellis traced cruelty to a different source. In his school, Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy, he argued that the root of anger and the desire to harm someone is almost always tied to philosophical beliefs about other human beings. Strip away those covert or overt assumptions, he claimed, and the tendency toward violence becomes less likely. The broader debate over evil splits into four opposed camps. Moral absolutism holds that good and evil are fixed concepts set by a deity, nature, or common sense. Amoralism claims they are meaningless, with no moral ingredient in nature. Moral relativism treats standards of good and evil as products of local culture, custom, or prejudice. Moral universalism seeks a compromise, holding that morality is flexible only to a degree. C. S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, argued that some acts such as rape and murder are universally considered evil. Yet history complicates him. Until the mid-19th century many countries practiced slavery, and the Nazis during World War II, like the Hutu Interahamwe in the Rwandan genocide, considered their atrocities acceptable. Plato had already noticed the asymmetry, writing that there are relatively few ways to do good but countless ways to do evil.

• 7. Maps Of The Good Life

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  Benedict de Spinoza wrote in a quasi-mathematical style, defining good as that which we certainly know is useful to us and evil as that which hinders us from possessing anything good. In Part IV of his Ethics he claimed to prove further propositions from these definitions. Knowledge of good or evil, he held, is nothing but an affect of joy or sorrow of which we are conscious, and if the human mind had only adequate ideas it would form no notion of evil at all. He added that if men were born free, they would form no conception of good and evil so long as they remained free. Other thinkers tried to locate the good itself. Platonic idealism treats goodness as something real in the object, independent of perception, part of an eternal realm of forms where the good is the harmony of a just community, love, friendship, and right relation to the Divine. Aristotle took a different path called perfectionism, holding that virtue consists in realizing potentials unique to humanity, such as the use of reason, a view recently defended by Thomas Hurka. Welfarist theories tie goodness to human well-being. Hedonism, a monistic theory of value, defines goodness as the experience of pleasure, though Epicurus used pleasure broadly, valuing the mind over the body and advocating moderation. Jeremy Bentham's The Principles of Morals and Legislation weighed pleasure, pain, and consequences, a system John Stuart Mill later named Utilitarianism, built on the maxim that good is the greatest happiness for the greatest number.

• 8. Necessary And Remaining

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  Niccolo Machiavelli, the 16th-century Florentine writer, advised tyrants that it is far safer to be feared than loved. He offered treachery, deceit, the eliminating of political rivals, and the usage of fear as methods of stabilizing a prince's power, and he warned that some traits considered good will lead to ruin while certain vices achieve security. Martin Luther took the idea of necessary evil into private life, urging that one must sometimes commit a sin out of hate and contempt for the Devil, so as not to grow scrupulous over mere nothings. Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, inverted the term entirely, claiming as a materialist that what is called evil, the natural pleasures and instincts of men and women or the skepticism of an inquiring mind, is really good. A separate strand of thought asks what could possibly ground value at all, and answers with the planet itself. Radical values environmentalism holds that the only intrinsically good thing is a flourishing ecosystem, with individuals and societies merely instrumental to it. The Gaia philosophy is the most detailed expression of this view, and it strongly influenced deep ecology and the modern Green Parties. Will and Ariel Durant put the stake plainly in The Lessons of History, writing that as the sanity of the individual lies in the continuity of his memories, so the sanity of the group lies in the continuity of its traditions. Some biologists, among them Edward O. Wilson and Frans de Waal, now treat good and evil as a question for the field of biology to address.