By what process do you distinguish evil from good?
How do we know that hurting cute kittens is bad?
If it is all culturally determined, where did the earliest ancestors come up with their ideas of good and evil?
Is it all just relative, an action is bad if the society says it’s bad, and good if society says it’s good?
Is their any universal good and universal evil?
Oh, that’s easy!
Because killing ugly, disgusting cockroaches is good!
Short answer: yes.
**
I don’t believe so, but a religious person might tell you otherwise.
I’m too tired to add more.
How to determine good and evil?
The concepts of good and evil are relativistic to individuals and cultures although most would consider certains actions like murder, theft, rape, and torture to be evil. These actions are disruptive and destructive to the both the individual and the collective and if unchecked, would cause great instability and anarchy.
By what process do you distinguish evil from good?
Through the development of personal morals and ethical beliefs.
How do we know that hurting cute kittens is bad?
If by hurting you mean torturing then most people would consider inflicting pain on a helpless animal to be wrong. If hurting means using that tender little kitten in a stew then we might have some disagreements. I watched a program where a restaurant in China serves rats as it’s signature dish. I can’t see anything wrong with eating rats but the manner in which they were prepared was very disturbing. The live rats were dropped into a pot of boiling water to kill them and loosen their fur.
If it is all culturally determined, where did the earliest ancestors come up with their ideas of good and evil?
Our earliest ancestors must have realized at some point that individuals within the society that killed others, stole, raped, or were violent were a destabilizing and destructive influence and probably needed to be removed or ostracized.
Is it all just relative, an action is bad if the society says it’s bad, and good if society says it’s good?
Societies develop group morality and ethics that dictate how individuals in that society are to behave. Those morals and ethics lead to the development of laws that determine punishment and or treatment of it’s offending members. When the society changes, the morality and the laws that govern that society may also change. A good example is the de-criminilization of marijuana in Canada where many people do not consider it’s use to be any worse than legalized (and taxed) activities such as smoking and the consumption of alcohol.
Is their any universal good and universal evil?
Yes… The New Jersey Devils are the spawn of Satan and must be exorcised… tonight. 
It seems that the idea “you shouldn’t do to other people what you don’t want done to yourself” has been universally accepted.
What constitutes “other people” seems to change based on social setting. To some humans “people” are only those in your tribe, to others it’s all of humanity, and to still others it’s all of humanity and animals. As long as they’re cute animals. And no neo conservatives.
Also the definition of things that are hurtful to other people changes with society.
–k
You do what you think will benefit you, within the limits of what you think you can get away with. So does everybody else.
This single, simple behavioral pattern is responsible for everything that’s ever happened in human society. It’s like the way desert termites build huge, elaborate nests without any of them having any clue what they’re doing.
Actions are neither good nor bad in and of themselves; it is the relationship of the action to all of the people (and/or other creatures and things) that are affected by it, and the desirability of those effects both short- and long-term, that make an act good or bad.
I personally am of the non-poststructuralist opinion that there is ultimate truth in all cases – that if everyone clearly understood everything from every aspect we would be in agreement about what is good and what is evil – but we never have that kind of complete and integrated knowledge, so we are best off remembering that our sense of what is good and what is evil is formed from incomplete knowledge and filtered through our single-faceted experience, and that we should avoid being arrogant and closeminded about it.
well just study up on your ethical philosophy and you will see what is granted for good and evil…
i think that benthams thesis is one of the best to use since we´re living in a community together with other sentinent beings but if we were in a more individualistic community then nietzsche would be the only one (he is anyways actually)
I seem to observe in my own life and experience of myself and others, that there is such a thing as front morality and depth morality. Front morality motivates a person to do or not to do things that are visible or potentially visible to others; depth morality is what makes you feel good or bad in doing an action.
Talking about myself, I would never kill anyone for the sake of gain, that for me is depth morality. Front morality for me as an example is to not cheat on my tax or to stop at the intersection on the red light.
I suspect that some people might have very little depth morality, but a lot of front morality. Do I have a lot of depth morality myself compared to my front morality?
I used to think and still do that Japanese who commit suicide upon being caught in some shameful public offense are possessed of a lot of front morality but little depth morality. Maybe I don’t know their culture well enough, and therefore I should not judge them.
We cannot talk about morality without going into religion. No doubts religion is the teacher of a lot of morality. But notwithstanding the religious commitment of people they can be very immoral, for example, Mafia people are very Catholic but obviously they are into a host of immoral activities.
What about myself, really? I think I am very cynical about morality. What I have learned so far in life is that given the opportunity to do something which I consider against dept morality, the occasion namely to do something to one’s own personal gain without being discovered, people will succumb to the opportunity.
For myself, luckily or unluckily I have not been exposed to such opportunities for gain without discovery by others. But I have seen others who are of very good repute, once exposed to opportunities do not think twice of taking advantage.
Let us consider the following scenario:
I come home one night and the whole house was empty, my wife and kids all out. On entering our bedroom I see a lusciously beautiful girl lying in the bed my wife and I share, completely naked. She tells me that she wants me and even writes a paper postdated that she has never been in the vicinity of our home on that occasion.
Shall I make love with her? I have never been given such an opportunity. Honestly I don’t know what I would do exposed to such an opportunity. I am a postgraduate Catholic, my own label of my religious commitment. Suppose I don’t take advantage of the opportunity, and then I die and have to face Jesus. What will he tell me?
“Well done, good and faithful servant!”, or “You stupid dimwitted dumbbell!”. And most probably I would tell him, whatever HIs words to me, I don’t want complications in my life, besides for any action I do I have to live with it; living with myself is the hardest part.
Susma Rio Sep
Isn’t this circular logic?
Has it? I can think of any number of things that are considered immoral or “evil” that do not violate this principle.
No. If morality is relative, it’s not morality; it’s hipocrisy.
This is from Robert C. Solomon’s Handbook for Ethics; it is the easiest to understand account of the problems of relativism that I’ve read:
So then, if something cannot be relative, we must rely on something that is universal. What is universally good and what is universally bad? If it’s good for us, it has to be good for everyone, and if it’s bad for us, it has to be bad for everyone.
As much as I dislike it, I think Vlad Dracul is right when he advocates Ayn Rand’s idea of enlightened self-interest:
People do what is in their best interest. While it would be great if I robbed a bank (I’d have so much MONEY!) it’s not in my best interest to wind up in jail. So I won’t rob a bank; not because it’s bad, but because it’s bad for me.
If you follow that philosophy, then, everything is good, in a way, because nothing is disallowed. Everything is possible and free will is absolute, it’s just that some action might not be the best possible course. You can kill without it being wrong; it would be nice to murder those in my way (which is good), but I won’t becuase of the consequences aren’t the greatest.
And so forth.
But I don’t like that theory. As much as I grudgingly accept it’s prominence in society, I still dislike it with a passion. IWhile its’ common, I don’t think it’s right. t’s not relativistic, but it never makes a morality call other than saying what’s good is what’s best for the individual.
And if you ask me what is the right way to tell good from evil, I will respond that I have absolutely no frickin idea. I’ve been racking my head for years trying to figure it out without resorting to relativism. I dont’ know what’s right and I don’t know what’s good or evil. Until I figure it out, I simply plan to be friendly to most people, work, go to school, not get in trouble, and occasionally have a drink. If you aren’t sure, the best option is just being nice and not killing anyone. And, if you paranoid, pray to God…just in case.
–greenphan
I’ve found the pragmatic concept of good and evil to be best at explaining these types of questions.
Two words: enlightened hedonism. Basically, what is “good” is what will ultimately produce a greater amount of pleasure than pain. What is “evil” is the opposite. But really, it takes incredible, superhuman foresight to be able to predict what will be for the better and what will be for the worse, so really it’s easier to make generalizations about what will eventually lead to pleasure/pain and label these as “good”/“evil.”
But “good” and “evil” are just artificial labels we attach to events, so we shouldn’t sweat all the small stuff.
Truth=good
Lies=bad
As the old adage goes, what’s good for the lobster is good for the rat… or something like that 
We have been talking about good and evil.
I guess it’s about time we bring up the question whether the war against Irag was good or evil.
I have reasons to judge it evil, because it was done against an evidently weak government which did not want to fight on the one hand, and on the other was doing as much as its self-respect would allow it to acommodate UN inspectors, and even to invite US and UK intelligence agencies to come in, to locate all the so-called weapons of mass destruction allegedly stored in its land.
Susma Rio Sep
This is the all purpose “Swami card”, used for determining Good/Evil whenever in doubt (Brain not required).
US = Good
Them = Evil
blue22, I don’t think pleasure is the ultimate good. If it were, then the best thing you could do for somebody would be to stimulate the pleasure centers in his brain so that he was in a state of bliss until he died of starvation.
zwaldd Does my butt look big in this?
bluee22 all you have done I think is redefine good as (more pleasure than pain) and bad as (more pain than pleasure). This is terribly oversimplistic. Dr Evil Bippy would then do the goodest (best seems an inappropriate term in this case) possible deed by gassing the plannet to death with laughing gas. Everyone laughs and is high = lots of pleasure then everyone dies painlessly = no pain, and no more pain or pleasure ever again (as a pessimist I susspect pain > pleasure for most possible futures).
As a somewhat masochistic person I must object to pain being the opposite to pleasure, unless you spank me
There was another thread quite a while ago (can’t remeber what it was) in which various posters tried to figure out *even one * general action which was either approved or disapproved of by all known societies (past and present).
We couldn’t find even one.
So, if actions can be thought of as good or bad, depending on where and when you are raised, then it’s really all relative.
This question has bothered me for a long time, and I think I know the answer. All the philosophers have been of little help.
There is no mysterious basis for morality. There is a human psychological/sociological tendency to develop sets of principles and indoctrinate each other into them. People follow them because they want the approval of other people and avoid punishment, etc. Often people develop a sense of self-worth for being “good” members of their society and will obey the principles even without external pressure.
Where do the principles come from? They are human inventions, accumulated and modified over time, and differing from culture to culture, sub-culture to sub-culture. Typically, but not always, they help the culture as a whole to operate more successfully.
Like any inventions, some versions work better than others. If we are seeking an “absolute” moral/ethical code we don’t really find one, but it seems reasonable to support the code that works best to benefit the society as a whole. The best principle would seem to be that a person is good to the extent he or she contributes to the overall good of humanity. This is the behavior we should all encourage.
This is selfish in the sense that a selfish person would choose to belong to a society that had this as their moral principle in preference to a society with no code or arbitrary rules. In such a society each person has the highest a priori expectation of happiness even though in certain situations he or she might be called upon to make a sacrifice for the overall good.