Do we as a society still understand and accept that there is a demarcation, a defined line between good and bad, or do we all separately define good and bad based on what we individually believe?
There never has been an absolute demarcation between good and bad and always has been what we each believe. It is just sometimes lots and lots of individuals believe in the same set of rules at the same time, usually in the form of some religion.
(Nearly) everyone believes in good and bad. It’s just that, unfortunately, one’s good is sometimes another’s bad, and vice versa.
In the past, the societal definitions of good and bad were the ones that benefited the folks in power. Other people never got any consideration.
This says it all. All other comment is superfluous.
Agreed. Good and bad are strictly human constructs, and always have been; they have no objective existence otherwise, and never have.
You can move closer to something more objective if we accept that behaviours and actions that cause other individual humans suffering. pain, distress and physical harm are “bad” and those that alleviate the same are “good”.
Not perfect, but it is probably as close as you can get.
Actually, those are very strongly value judgments that are in no sense universal. I personally agree with your choices, but …
Many people would say that “good” is what benefits me and “bad” is what doesn’t benefit me. And you are expected to believe the same about you. Therefore the sum of all those competing “goods” and “bads” determines the optimal AKA “most good” or “best” outcome.
I do believe in Good, and Bad. But that doesn’t mean that I believe there’s a clear, sharp, defined line between them.
Even the people that are nearly universally considered bad or evil didn’t consider themselves bad – they thought they were doing the right thing for some reason or another, only they could lead their people to some better outcome even if some people had to be hurt or killed along the way.
A long time ago I read a book called Moral Minds by Marc Hauser. One of the takeaways is that morality, is, more or less, universal across cultures. The difference is where they place the most priority. So every culture believes that killing is wrong, but in these cultures there are varying exceptions to when some other principle takes precedence. For example in the US many believe that killing is wrong, but they believe that punishment for atrocities or law and order or bodily autonomy is more important than not killing.
Hauser’s core argument is that morality is something we all have an innate capacity for, like language, and that it is something we learn from the people around us. And it’s possible to acquire a different set of moral beliefs the same way you can learn a new language.
One interesting thing researchers found is that people have a gut instinct for right or wrong which they use to make judgements, then after making the judgement they justify it, usually with reason. But people do not come by their moral judgements rationally.
This kind of fits in with the neuroscience I was reading in an evo psych book called Why Buddhism is True that discusses the idea not of one cohesive brain, but competing networks called modules. Consciousness they posit is really just the PR department of your brain, justifying the decisions you made after the fact. Interesting stuff.
And then there are the children. We all know that little children are paragons of virtue.
https ://youtu.be/-N_RZJUAQY4?feature=shared
This may be true of some, but I doubt that it is true of all “bad” people. I think a lot of them just don’t care about “doing the right thing”; that’s not something they even consider.
That sounds like it has considerable overlap with Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
We are all consumers of stories. Whether it be in the form of actual literature, theater, history, news, politics and even sports. Stories are best if there is a protaganist and an antagonist, the good guy and the bad guy. It is a concept that people easily relate to. So many times, even if there isn’t really a bad guy, or true antagonist present, our story tellers (writers, journalists, politicians, clergy, documentarians, etc.) create one so that the story is better conveyed in the manner the story teller wants to. This reinforces our concept of good and bad, us & them.
But which is which?
I think we always run into problems with subjectivity and the associated values we assign, we can’t escape it.
No doubt, that’s why in my terminology I tried to lift it above the personal to the abstract. i.e. a dispassionate observer making an assessment of what harm is being caused in a given situation.
But, no. We aren’t ever going to solve that problem of personal values.
But even that is a difficult judgment. One view might say that converting heathens to your religion is good for them, others might say that imposing your culture on others is bad for them. There is no objective answer.
It is difficult, you would have to consider how the conversion is being done v the happiness and fulfillment gained/lost by the conversion from/to.
Yup. Even people like Hitler/Nazis never phrased their ideology in terms of “We love evil, lulz, more evil for the win!” It was all couched in righteous language; the evil Jewry and whatnot.
Actually, in more positive terms – we’re the superior race and we need more room to grow, right?