My usage of the term evil for the purposes of this discussion may be offensive to some, but thats fine.
Anyway, I’m sure they discuss this in philosophy 101 in college.
So here is my question. To have good you have to have evil, because you need evil to defend the good.
Examples:
[ul]
[li]To have peace you have to have a military willing to deter attackers[/li]
[li]To have a polite civilization you have to have rough cops who are willing to hurt people. [/li]
[li]To have social cohesion, you need shame, ridicule and shunning to ensure that unpopular or dangerous ideas do not spread. [/li]
[li]To have technological progress, you have to accept there will be social upheaval and uenmployment as the economy changes. [/li]
[li]In game theory, to have cooperation you have to have the ability to punish cheaters. If you can’t punish cheaters, people stop cooperating.[/li][/ul]
If you assume ‘good’ is just a symptom of a fracturable constructed framework (biological, social, political, etc) within a universe prone to entropy, you have to defend that framework against entropic threats. This requires evil. You have to have a cruel military, cruel police, cruel social policies (shame, shunning, ridicule, etc). Without those things you can’t have the good things as any society unwilling to defend itself will collapse.
How do people reconcile the two? Do you just assume the evil isn’t actually evil but is good? I know we have a culture in the US that promote police and military as a very high level of good. But that doesn’t change the fact that a sizable number of deranged people who enjoy hurting others end up in these fields. They just channeled destructive urges into pro-social behaviors. Nor does it change the fact that these groups need to be willing to callously cause pain and suffering to others in order to maintain societies integrity.
I was watching a documentary about a cult that preached love and tolerance, until they felt they were threatened. Then they bought a bunch of guns and started poisoning people.
What Celtic said. We live in a fallen imperfect world. It’s impossible to achieve truly ideal outcomes via human means. The best you can do is to mitigate violence with violence, in a certain sense.
The ideal thing would be for a mosquito to not bite me or have to bite me, but it has to, and I have to slap it.
I kinda have to quibble over your definition, as I do not consider punishment for evil to be evil. At least, no inherently. Sure, there can be unfair and unjust punishments, but that doesn’t mean all punishment is evil. The ideal would be to use the minimum necessary punishment.
I do agree with others that perfect good is not achievable, but where I may differ is that I think it is still a goal worth striving for. We should always be moving in that direction, as, otherwise, we will move in the opposite one. We are not static beings, so lack of movement in one direction will mean movement in the other.
Yes, those same punishments could be evil if done for evil goals, or even if accidentally done on those who don’t deserve it. But all good tools can be used for evil. My hand can be used to help or to hurt. My hand is neither evil nor good, only what it does. Similarly, I can punch someone in order to hurt them, or I can hurt someone to defend them. The action of puniching itself cannot be said to be good or evil, only what it is used to accomplish.
That’s not to say that intent is the only thing that matters. You can have good intentions and cause a ton of harm. I still have a requirement to stop you. Hopefully, since you have good intentions, letting you know of the hurt will stop you. It would thus be wrong for me to have just assaulted you and forced you to stop, because I must use the least necessary force.
Anyways, I think that about covers it. These are not things I think about so much as somehow inherently know. I may make mistakes in my own life, but the actual moral principles seem crystal clear to me, as if I discovered them more than figured them out.
I think you’re making a lot of assumptions that people aren’t going to agree with. You have not, for instance, defined “good” or “evil”. But let’s put all that aside for minute and ask: Why would anyone need to reconcile that? Good and evil are human constructs.
When hyenas attack a pride of lions and the lions fight back, is either species being evil? What makes human actions any different? Unless you are going to invoke religion and some sort of Supreme Being passing judgment on us. If so, then logic is out the window.
He’s also conflated the notion of force, or even violence, with cruelty:
Yes, you have to have police, military, or social policies in order to maintain “good”, but there’s no reason those have to be cruel, unless you’re defining “cruel” so broadly as to be essentially worthless as a concept. There’s a reason we allow punishment, but specifically disallow “cruel and unusual” punishment.
Can we, as fallible human beings, sometimes (or even often) stray over into cruelty, despite the above? Sure, but that doesn’t mean the cruelty is essential to the process of punishment, it just shows how difficult it can be to be consistently good.
As an example - I’ve done martial arts for over 30 years now, and have in that time broken up more than one fight. But I’ve never had to actually punch or throw anyone, or even done anything that would scratch or bruise someone, because I’ve always found that softer, less-aggressive methods were sufficient. I’d be utterly gobsmacked if anyone who has seen me doing this would have described my actions as “cruel”, even when dealing with people who were themselves committing criminal acts of violence against others.
I think that you’re looking at what is pragmatic vs. what is ideal. There’s no reason you HAVE to have a military to have peace. We have just found that that is typically the case.
Christians usually reconcile this by saying we live in a fallen world. The ideal world to which we truly belong has been corrupted, so we find ourselves being forced to make non-ideal decisions and find that we have a propensity to value ourselves in our decision making over others. They appeal to an idea that at a certain point in time we will all be reconciled to God and to His will and these trade-offs will no longer occur. Amillennialists (most main-line Protestants - when they think about such things at all. They tend not to focus on the end times or the afterlife. Only a bit more than half believe in Hell and 1 in 5 don’t believe in an afterlife at all. We’re just weird that way. - and Catholics) think then that the goal is to use our actions to create this type of world on earth and promote good without a need to appeal to evil. Their eschatology is simplistically along the lines that we are currently living in Christ’s Kingdom and we want it to be a pretty nice place for when he comes back. (They don’t necessarily think that that will occur though and most amillennialists think that it’s a fruitless quest and that humanity will likely become more ‘evil’ rather than less ‘evil’, but that doesn’t give license not to try. Amillennialists are Sisypheans, you keep pushing that rock knowing that it’ll roll down the other side, but your job is to worry about the incline, not the fall.) Premillennials (Most Evangelicals) think that the world is completely irredeemably corrupt, so the goal is to get as many people on the life boats as possible before Christ comes back and all Hell breaks loose. Postmillennials are the most optimistic of the bunch and they think that eventually the Good News of Christ wins out and that we actually manage to create this utopian world and once we have done so, then Christ just shows up and says, “Good on you, mate.” and we spend the rest of eternity living in a utopia of our own making. Enjoy your brief Christian eschatology lesson for the day.
Again, do you? And, why are you considering social cohesion as always good?
I begin by disagreeing with both the notion that you “need evil to defend the good” and with your definitions of evil. For example, I don’t think that social cohesion based on cops beating people is particularly good, or worthy of defending.
To get back to my anarchist roots, the state has always functioned via the threat and/or use of violence. If you don’t pay your taxes for example, the state will authorize itself to take the money from you. If you refuse to give it, someone will show up at your door and attempt to jail you. If you refuse to go to jail, they will use some sort of violence to force you to jail. They will then use the threat of violence to keep you in jail until they deem you have suffered enough that you will give them your taxes in the future. Almost every state (I can’t think of any exceptions beyond possibly very small groups that are more communities than societies) has functioned in a similar manner, “Do what we say or sooner or later, we’ll physically force you to do what we say.”
I mean, I agree we live in an imperfect world, but the fallen part puzzles me. Are you one who believes, possibly based on a fundamentalist religion, that the world was once better than it is, and has deteriorated? If so, please elaborate.
The world was created in an ideal state. A ball of elements being attracted to one another and forming a more elaborate system suffers no injustice, nor offers affront to other groupings of atoms. Over time, injustice came to exist. When and where this injustice began is a matter of some debate. Can single-celled organism be unjust? Is a lion that eats an impala morally corrupt? Who knows? Right now, most of us would say that injustice or evil exists in the world. A few hardcore physicalists might not, but they are an exception. Most of us acknowledge that the world that we are in contains things that are not ‘good.’ A world of just elements wandering around and bumping into one another is likely a world that doesn’t have ‘good’ or ‘evil.’ It merely is. Thus, I think that it’s not a stretch to say that the world has ‘fallen.’ ‘Evil’ exists now and did not at some undefined earlier point. Enjoy the casuistry.
Your “ideal state” world never existed, and cannot exist. It was created through violence, explosions and destruction, followed by creation, followed by more destruction, then more creation.
I’ll let you define it. I don’t want to set up a red line. Right now, I think there is evil in the world and other than a few hardcore physicalists, I think most of humanity agrees with me. Do you think that two atoms colliding, shedding protons and turning into other atoms is evil? I’m inclined to say no and again I think that the gallery would agree with me.
To drag you into Czarcasm’s objection, chaos is not inherently evil. A waterfall is chaotic, but it’s not evil. Some might even posit that a waterfall is beautiful and brings good into the world.
Moving the goal posts is one thing-refusing to plant them at all is quite another. You asked me if something was evil, so it is up to you to define the term you brought up…and let the gallery agree or disagree as they see fit.