Stoid – just what I said about Hell, on another thread.
I once tried advocating here that “good” exists absolutely, but “evil” only relatively, performing an analogy with heat and cold. You can define heat in terms of molecular, atomic, or nuclear particle motion. Cold can only be defined as the (relative) absence of heat. For “good” to be meaningful, “evil” must exist. But only as the (relative) absence of good.
Gaudere didn’t like it. But I don’t remember why.
Ahhh, grasshopper.
So hard to say anything in post form about this stuff. It is better done in poetry, or song.
The application of logic to spiritual reality results in profoundly serious studies, i.e., theology. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Why would an angel want to dance on the head of a pin?
The rational mind is the ultimate tool, and it is undeniable. We can harness forces we cannot begin to comprehend, energy beyond imagination. Beyond responsibility. Perhaps, just perhaps, the monkey boys will sail the stars like they once sailed the seas. Only that tool could make it possible. That tool keeps billions of us fed, housed, informed.
But it has its limitations. The spirit senses things that are not things, waves that will not displace the merest physical object. The rational mind is relentlessly definite, certainty is its Holy Grail. The rational mind, attempting to impose certainty, is chasing butterflies with a hammer. You might succeed, why would you want to?
One walks into a holy place, a monastery, a church, a mosque, some place where people have gathered to pray. It is similar to being in a theatre when everyone is gone. There is a sense of being there, it feels an appropriate place for meditation, contemplation, perhaps even prayer. Like an echo that you can’t exactly hear, but you know is there.
Perhaps it is sometimes necessary , sometimes appropriate, to stop thinking itself! The Zen actively promote that approach, hustling koans, devices intended to distract the rational mind with an “endless loop”. Similar to providing a toy for a child while you talk to the grownups.
When the rational mind interferes, it attempts to define prayer/contemplation as a dialogue, a memo to God. By its nature, it attempts to cut fog into cubes.
If there is no God, does that necessarily mean you have no soul? Of course not, it is not given, like a franchise from an Authority, but a fact of existence. It is innocent of certainty, beyond experiment and argumentation.
Evil is when your soul cringes.
And I should shut up about it.
You should never shut up about anything… you are far too wonderfully entertaining.
Hi, Polycarp. I can’t speak for Gaudere, but I don’t like it. Evil doesn’t just exist as a cosmic force or absence thereof. It exists only in actions. In decisions. You can’t just say “There is a big pile of good. That blank space over there is a big void of evil.” Evil exists in human actions (or inaction). I could see the more religious folks arguing that if people who do evil things were filled with goodness (God’s Love), they would stop being evil, and evil would disappear. Got a pitcher and a funnel?
I say evil exists even if you remove the metaphysics.
I have trouble viewing Hitler as the absence of something. The hell on Earth experienced in the early '40s was the direct result of ACTION. It was planned. It had a purpose.
I will allow that the metaphor did sound pretty apealling at first though.
(besides, I thought it was Hell that was full of the heat???)
Perhaps then, it shouldn’t be “Does evil exist?” but “Does evil matter?”
Depends on where I’m coming from at a given moment. If I’m feeling very wedded to an earthly existence, (which I am the majority of the time, but I am ever striving to be less so) then certainly such suffering is the product of evil acts by evil men. (Rarely women, by the way. Can’t think of any offhand, at least not in this century. ) As for “meaning”… hmmm, in this world I would say they have no meaning at all. It is only when you observe them from a less invested and emotional place that you can see that yes, there might actually be meaning to their “suffering” or what we perceive to be suffering.
Luck has nothing to do with it…that is the rest of the story: choice. Not by the conscious self, generally, but by the soul. If evil is only a construct, it isn’t random. It is chosen, as is victimhood. Just like a play…one person plays the villain, another the victim. As with actors, neither part is necessarily “better”, inherently. They are merely parts to be played, and somebody has to play each role or there is no story.
So whatever the conditions of your life may be… you chose them. 
**
How would I categorize which people? Mentally ill people? I’d categorize them as mentally ill… 
Aha! It doesn’t fail to take it into account at all! In fact, it is precisely about exactly that! An act, any act, has no intrinsic value of evil or good…it is entirely our perception that assigns evil or good.
Whoa…
Somehow I just have trouble imagining 6 million souls lining up in some etheral plane volunteering to become Jewish victims of the holocaust.
::jumping up in down with his hand in the air::
Gas me!! Gas me!!!
Somehow I think that a neccesary part of evil is involuntary force.
**
I think it mattered to the parents of some poor kid who won’t ever come home because someone kidnapped her.
Luck has nothing to do with it…that is the rest of the story: choice. Not by the conscious self, generally, but by the soul. If evil is only a construct, it isn’t random. It is chosen, as is victimhood. Just like a play…one person plays the villain, another the victim. As with actors, neither part is necessarily “better”, inherently. They are merely parts to be played, and somebody has to play each role or there is no story.
So whatever the conditions of your life may be… you chose them.
[/quote]
**
Blame the victim? Heh heh…so if a woman is walking down the street wearing a miniskirt she’s asking to be raped. Got’cha.
You’ve actually got a good point this time. I don’t know why you had to bring in all that mystic soul searching stuff before you got to this. When it comes to actions context is everything when determining right from wrong.
Marc
Nope, it’s a simple one. 
Webster’s New World (1980), evil, the noun:
I don’t think that you would assert that nothing is morally bad or wrong, (although some may question whether the construct of sin is the best way to think about the issue).
Ergo, evil (things that are morally bad or wrong) exists. We don’t even have to consider extreme cases.
Now at this stage, someone could argue for moral relativism. But since that doesn’t seem to be the direction of the thread, I’ll turn to the following:
Does evil matter?
Does it matter whether somebody, say, advances egregious suffering? Well, yes, at least according to a Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, what have you.
And I’m not convinced that if everyone made appropriate moral choices, that everything would necessarily be dull or even overly groovy for that matter. (There’s always random misfortune to keep things lively.)
Hm. I’m not convinced that morally inappropriate behavior such as deception or fraud is essentially physical in nature (except to the extent that our lives are essentially physical in nature). To put it another way, morality covers a wider area than physical violence.
Finally:
Buddhists sometimes argue that suffering is illusory: that its existence depends on a fundamental spiritual misunderstanding. That may be the case. But they go into great detail about the causes of suffering. In this sense, they do not deny its existence; indeed, their whole doctrine is devoted to combating it.
I’d say that a framework that simply denies the existence of evil or immorality (as opposed to re-analyzing it) lacks a certain level of compassion.
(But, hey, constructing a religion is more difficult than it looks. 
)
Polycarp:
I remember this discussion. It’s just like Magdalene said in her response to you, Poly.
I will add that, when I hear people making this analogy, I never understand why they always compare ‘good’ to ‘heat’ and ‘evil’ to ‘cold’, except for the fact that it sounds better. What is the difference between that and comparing ‘good’ to ‘cold’? Maybe evil exists absolutely, and good is merely the absence of evil. It works just as well either way.
Evil “exists” (or maybe “occurs”) whenever a person commits an act that another person perceives as being evil. Evil also exists when nonhuman actions or events are perceived as being evil (disease, grizzly bear attacks, earthquakes, etc.). Bubonic plague is not inherently evil; the bacteria are simply reproducing in their mindless way. Plague is considered evil only when it adversely affects us. At the same time, plague is good for the plague germs themselves, if they could think about it.
I propose that neither good nor evil exist in any absolute sense, but are only perceptions of actions or events. Nevertheless, it’s sometimes useful to act as though good and evil are actual entities, especially when defining what sort of behavior our society will and will not tolerate.
Evil, like everything in this world can be summed up in one word…
Perspective.
That person who has been tormented, beaten, outcast from every niche in society he tries to fit into, whom goes into a rage of insanity after his last straw and kills 100 people at the McDonalds can be viewed as evil. Ignore perhaps that all his life he was a peaceful man that only wanted to fit in somewhere, who wanted to have friends, a good job, get married and have a family and perhaps even attend church 3 times a week. Forget that the “good guys” picked on him at school, People didnt like him because he was too quiet…wasnt like them at all, he was a freak…after all, quiet people are freaks right. Then when the Pariah looses it, he is branded Evil, demented…ect.
This can be compared with the title “asshole” or “Jerk” as well (just a form of evil that is more common i suppose). The people that know Ol Joe at the hardware store on Main street, Know he is a great guy, funny, charming, great with the ladies, and plays a mean game of football. Nobody knows or would believe that Joe likes to go out of town to the bars and pick fights, Some guy cut him off so he pushed the offender off the road and into a road sign. That man spent 6 months in the hospital and still hasnt recovered completely. All through high school him and the rest of the team would go to libary and torment the “geeks”, in elementry school… the list could go on. This seemingly “good member of society” has a list of evils longer than the first guy.
It seems that the roles of good guys is to make the bad guys. By doing bad things to the original good guys. Would they do the same thing if the roles were suddenly reversed? Certainly. Human nature is corrupt and self serving in its base form. Growth rarely happens (which is why those wise few are so revered, a sort of envy perhaps, we wish we could conquer our own primal instincts of…well for better words…alpha male, tho females have something similar ive noticed) Evil is just a name we place on something that disrupts our normal life, something to placate our guilt. After tormenting somebody, wishing somebody was dead, ect. we need to invent something to be alot worse to us to make our own bad deeds seem trival in nature…so hence we invented Evil.
Of course this has been a debate for centuries by thousands of people and they have…guess what…thier own perspective on it…so none of my explinations really mean anything…
Does Satan exist? It would be a contradiction for him to exist as evil personified fully employed by God, serving God’s purpose. If he exists in a realm not controlled by God, then we have no basis to claim the assumed God is God, or vice versa. Did God make evil? Another contradiction, which would also propose a game theory to existence, making humans like mice fighting over who the God-cat playing with both of them likes best (status quo). If evil does not exist as a divine personification, does it exist as a primal essence? No, which is why it is personified in the first place, and for many complications that arise in assuming a bifurcated modality (there is no necessity of evil, or even God, in modal logic). Evil only exists through idea or imagination which is why it can’t be created or destroyed, merely allowed or named.
What is evil? Evil is typically that which we cannot control: disease, crime, war, etc. Which begs the question of control, which as a function of will (rather than event or thing), then becomes a source of evil as opposed to harmony with natural events (human control over human nature is a contradiction in terms or problematical). Control (primary) can be termed as the effort to control evil. But, this control is also evil prone by virtue of its willed opposition to nature (or by perceiving opposition as natural), which is then uncontrollable. Opposition is then evil, not the good. So, the cosmic terminology to best avoid control-as-evil, or evil of uncontrolled human controls, could be phrased as “Evil versus Good.” This then places the word “versus” upon evil, where it best serves, and although it is still against good (nature), good is not defined as opposition. In other words, evil still does not exist, it merely becomes benign or unwilled by not easily masquerading as good or nature. The root of the stated problem is that it is ultimately contradictory to assign evil to humans (something to opppose) by humans themselves. So, evil is that which demonizes, or that which wills evil to exist. Excellent question.
Ugh, Jodi. And there I was arguing over stereotypes and saying that they, in themselves, were not bad. To think I’d find you arguing this position
I’d say evil does exist, just as good does exist. My comments in the thread, “Do opposites exist?”, would apply here, however longwinded those were.
Polycarp, I would almost agree with you, but I think that good may be defined in re to evil, as well. I’m not sure I would use “absence of” as the qualifier, but still. That is, if we say that anything is good we can then define evil in terms of it. If we say anything is evil we can define good in terms of it. The question is, is there good and evil without a consciousness to judge? Nah, prolly not(IMO), though I’d be interested to hear anyone who thought so.
Brian
I didn’t quote the rest of that paragraph because I wasn’t sure if you were promoting some form of hedonism, or what. Care to rephrase?
I don’t agree that evil is something we cannot control.
The first paragraph is a little jumpy, too. Evil does not exist in modal logic; evil only exists is imagination or idea. To which I wonder: modal logic isn’t an idea-about-logic?
Without a god/dess/s/es of some sort I would doubt there is evil or good outside of mankind (assuming we’re alone in the universe, of course, to make an easier conversation).
But so long as there are people with opinions there is evil. No doubt in my mind.
ARL,
I was speaking of modal necessity, as opposed to modal possibility, ie, there is no modal necessity for evil to exist. Sure, it exists in the mind, as idea defined as something contra good. Okay, let’s then assume that evil is necessary, but is avoidable. There is the rub. Under this rubric of necessary evil, the human role shows itself as confusion, enforcing evil again. In this way, humans are assigned to evil, but can usually avoid evil (through ritual), and can choose good or do good, and thereby will good, but need not will evil, since that is a default state under necessity. There is some leeway here as per common dogmas, but never to the point of humans being pure through and having to will evil to be evil, because there is some contradiciton in an idea to do with being first good and choosing to be evil. However, my assertion that to will evil to exist is evil goes back to monotheism, which atomizes and isolates the self as good (for political control purposes), and promotes a state of evil where self-will can achieve only inner good via unearned reward and fear of punishment (permanently lowering social expectations). The result is pure self-interest (from part-learning) disguised as personified religion which features purified self-will pitted against nature/evil, and that’s why they call them disciples.
According to Nietszche in Birth of Tragedy, the ancient Greeks, where nature was not oppsosed to civilization, saw in life a “right versus right” scenario, expressed through tragedy. As everyone now may not know, drama has yielded itself to a thoroughly rotten state of moralizing through right versus wrong, to go along with its predominant religious expression opposed to pantheism and naturalism. Which takes us back to Zoroastrian ditheism, which featured the original creation of the sons of light and dark, good and evil spirits, temptation, millenarianism, destruction. However, Zoroastrian clerics knew something that later religions who borrowed and inherited from Zoroastrianism did not. In the cosmic dualism, where time was an integral factor for reasons of comprehension of beginning and end (temporality begets dualism I think), a single supreme being is a major dilemma: either the diety is impotent for allowing evil, or unjust for punishing those for the wickedness he allows.
Your other question to do with control and evil. I agree that evils can be avoided, prevented, forseen, (hence not necessary to exist as primal force) but I would not deem that to be primary control per se. To use an example from ethics, if we save a brain dead shooting victim, we have willed good on a victim of evil crime, but we then have inherited a liability, a greater evil perhaps, where we must choose to will someone to die again. So, by willing good we have complicated something, perhaps. But, if we dogmatically say, as Ghandi reputedly said, screw hospitals and let the diseased die, they suffer from sin, then we have inherited another greater liability offered through willing to unwill (which is made easier by conveniently renouncing the world first). I still think Kant’s categorical imperative solved most of this puzzle, a type of golden rule which obviates the dogma of good and evil as a factor to understand rights and responsibilties. It was always in our heads, as natural common sense. Nature’s only mistake was allowing too many to get addicted to the brain chemicals of sorrow. Thanks.
Just to add a point that has already been made to some extent by others: I tend to think of evil as some abstract concept that we apply in trying to understand the world. The problem that comes in, however, is that the human mind has trouble with abstract concepts and tends to confuse levels of abstraction. Hence, we end up with “evil” as an entity on a much less abstract level. (IN fact, some might claim that this is how we end up with religion in general!)
A very good book on confusing levels of abstraction, and the more general issue of “semantic abuse” was written by Alfred Korzybski (“Science and Sanity”) in 1941. This book, and the issues raised by it, were a favorite topic of my 12th grade English teacher. One can find these issues of semantic abuse dealt with in literature too. For example, I wrote a paper in that class about how semantic abuse during Naziism as explored in books by various German authors from the post-war period, such as Gunter Grass (“The Tin Drum” and even moreso in “Dog Years”).
The moral of the story is that once one starts engaging in semantic abuse, such as confusion levels of abstraction, one can really drive whole groups of people to engage in some very heinous acts. So, while one might want to believe that evil exists in some very abstract sense, try not to get too carried away with it, okay!
On a lighter note, a high school friend and I were on the debate team in 12th grade but seemed to have, shall we say, a certain lack of commitment to it, especially relative to some of the people we went up against. We once decided that if we were ever in really bad shape in a debate, we would get up, point to our opponents and start yelling “There’s Evil in that corner!!!” or something like that. I’m afraid we never had the nerve to put this plan into action (although we probably did have the opportunity)!
Well, since my name has bneen invoked, I suppose I shall join in (and thank you, Holly and magdalene, for your help)…
As Holly has noted, there is no logical reason to identify “evil” with “cold” and “good” with “heat”. You may with equal ease claim that good is the absence of evil as you may claim evil is the absence of good. Therefore, your metaphor, while perhaps useful to explain how you believe the world is ordered, is purely illustrative rather than rigorously logical.
The second point is that it does not seem sensible to me to claim that evil is solely the absence of good. The absence of good is indifference, or neutrality, not evil, IMSNHO. Look at our stereotypical evil guy, Hitler–was he evil because he did not love the Jews? No–if he had simply not loved the Jews, he might have killed them if they got in his way, but he would not make a concerted effort to destroy them. He didn’t simply not love them–he hated them. (So far as we can tell, of course; it is possible his decision to kill the Jews was motivated solely by ambition, not hatred–but I doubt it) It was an active hate, not simply an absence of love. If you look at those people we consider truly evil, I think you will see that they do not always simply “not love”–they often actively hate. For “hate” to be exactly the same as “not-love”, you would have to believe the neutral state is the most vicious and vile hatred any man has ever conceived, and only “good” of varying degrees keeps us from hating all the time. And I doubt you believe this, nor does it seem sensible that active hatred of the very worst sort is a neutral state.
So, I object to your metaphor on two grounds: the identification of “good” with “heat” seems entirely arbitrary, and more seriously, I believe the metaphor is flawed at its base since the premise that evil is simply the absence of good (or that good is the absence of evil, for that matter) does not accord with our perceptions. Evil can be (and often is) active evil; good can be (and often is) active good. Neither is simply the lack of the other.
Thanks, Gaudere. I suspect that you, Magdalene, and Holly are correct – it does depend on a metaphysic in which “good” and “evil” have some absolute referent, in my case the will of God (though I suspect one might be able to invent a nontheist metaphysic with such absolute values).
The metaphor works by analogy – I defined “good” as an absolute with “evil” as its absence to parallel heat (which does have a quantizable value) vs. cold (only definable as the absence of heat). The structural synthesis I was going for is that no description of an act is specifically definable as “evil” on a universal definition – that its “evilness” lies in its not conducing to good as that is understood to mean something within the universe of discourse we’ve agreed on. (Which, as it turns out, we haven’t.)
However, Diane commented:
[quote]
I don’t believe in evil in the sense that it is caused by Satan.
[quote]
Well, how about the LDMB invasion?
She did? I missed that. There is a constructable reason to make that identity. Since evil and good are abstract terms then we may associate them with any other form of oppositeness, no? That is, if we hold good to be “promotes human life” and evil to be “destroys human life” then surely there is no way to make this map. But, if we use degrees of heat and cold such a map can be made. No?
Good luck inventing absolute evil and absolute good. Even different christians seem to differ on that point, no? Because it is a largely personal matter, I think that “absolutely” defining it is largely impossible for all contexts simultaneously.
Murder is bad. God murdered people. God did a bad thing.
Ugh. Hardly a syllogism I’d want to confront christians with.
I would say the key does indeed lie in the metaphysics, though, which either allows or disallows us to create contexts, change semantic meaning based on situations, etc etc.
In any case, there are often situations where, when one ponders the “goodness” of it, one draws a blank. The option clearly deals with morality, but it is not clear whether or not the actual event+result was immoral or not.
If we stick with gaudere’s strict logical interpretation, it would seem to me that most people would axiomatically state that
G+E!=G (or that a good deed and an evil deed does not make, as a holistic result, a good deed) is a logical truth. However, it would seem that most people, again, would see killing a person about to kill a child as a holistic good deed. That is,
(save innocent)+(kill person)=(a good thing) in that case. It seems to me that one can map evil onto cold as easily as one maps evil onto murder.
:shrug:
But that’s me.
Eh, I don’t know, Poly. “Not conducing to good” does not seem to be all evil is. For example, say someone’s being killed in front of you. You can do nothing. That is not conducive to good, therefore it is evil. Or you can join in the murder and torture the person to death. This also is not conducive to good, but it’s more than that, too–it’s active evil, unlike the first. The difference between the two actions is not that the second is lacking good “more” than the first; neither appear to have a whit of goodness in them. The difference is that the second one, in addition to lacking “good”, also includes active “evil”. (As I noted, you can define evil wholly as the absence of good if you make the baseline state of a not-good action to be the vilest evil. But that is counter to our customary definitions of “good” and “evil.”)
I agree with part of what I think you are saying–that good and evil are defined in terms of each other. However, an evil act is not simply “not-good” and a good act is not simply “not-evil”. Therefore I think your analogy obscures the issue rather than illuminates it. Besides, I see that analogy too damn often and I have always objected to it for the reasons given above; it’s pretty but weak, and I hate pretty but weak.
Right; if we want to construct an analogy we may associate good and evil with hot and cold or black and white, etc. and then see if the comparison is parallel enough that the analogy is successful. (Although I think the heat and cold analogy does not work for the reasons I gave above; evil as being solely the absence of good is contrary to how we usually consider evil.) But why is evil “cold”, and good “heat”? Why not make evil “heat” and good “cold”? Choosing evil as “cold” in the analogy is the decision that lacked a “logical reason”, IMO; there is no reason why we cannot define good as the absence of evil rather than defining evil as the absence of good.
I don’t follow your argument here.