Do you believe in good and evil?

[mik hardcore]

Do you believe in pure good and pure evil? Or does absolutely everything have two sides to it? I mean, killing is probably the most obvious form of "evil", yet some cultures practice infanticide (infant murder) as a solution to a population control issue. Does that make these cultures hellishly, Emperor Palpatine-style evil? Or are they just trying to do what they consider right by them?

Remember, no answer is wrong but try to think of the implications of your answer. If there is no true good and evil, how does this affect things like the death penalty or how we view international conflict?

 

[Batfred]

No one outside of fiction is pure evil or pure good. Even the best of us have dark thoughts now and then and likewise, the worst people still suffer from love and care for their mother/ father/ hencemen or whatever.

To answer the second thought you alluded to, good and evil are entirely contextual. Therefore infanticide although evil to us, could be good if it serves the greater good and is accepted practice within a culture.

This is indeed a slippery slope, but I guess it's all about what you're used to.

 

[Rachel317]

I don't believe in Good and Evil as two opposing forces that exist within the world, I think it's a metaphor or, at the very least, an exaggeration made by the religious in order to guide people, and give them something to be scared of.

I don't actually believe in Good and Evil at all, as it seems to be far too basic a concept for humans to fit into. There is moral and immoral, but we haven't even figured that out yet. In Fable 3, if you are a tyrant in order to help your people, you're evil, but if you save fewer people and decrease taxes, you're good. There's a lot of grey area, but it's easier to deconstruct things to their simplest form even though, applied to humans, this tends to not be accurate, because the mind is very complex and we each have or own individual moral code. A murderer might not think he/she is evil if they think God had told them to do it, but we would class them as such.

Likewise, a man who is generous, helps people and does charity work would be seen as Good, but if he plans on using his reputation in order to get away with a crime like murder or rape, is he still Good?

It's far too ambiguous to label one way or another.

 

[Paulie92]

Good and evil depend on context, because each action in itself is neutral, for example reproduction is neutral. Once you place context, a married couple decides to have a baby in a healthy environment, that is a good thing. A mugger raping a woman in an alley and her having a baby as a result is an evil act (on the part of the mugger). It also depends on societal context, in some cultures murder is commonplace accepted and encouraged (perhaps not many modern cultures) and that isn't necessarily 'evil' but in our society 90% of the time murder is seen as evil. I think Don Draper said it best "The universe is indifferent."

So to answer the OP no there is no pure good or evil, it really depends on context.

 

[TheXRatedDodo]

I believe in relativity. What is good to one person may be evil to another. Morality relies on objectivity, which is fundamentally useless seeing as human beings all view the world through totally different eyes.

I believe in Karma though. I find my actions and emotions resonate through the cosmos and find their way back to me in various forms, and this has shaped how I act, how I talk, how I think and how I treat people.

So you could say I believe in good and evil, but you could also say I don't. The dualism is quite fitting for such an idea.

 

[Fraeir]

There is no black and white, only shades of gray.

If controlling the number of childbirths is evil, I'd say the end justifies the means as Earth is too damned populated enough as it is.

 

[CactiComplex]

Pure good and pure evil are, at best, concepts in my opinion. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone in real life with such extreme alignments, and even then not everyone would agree on the verdict. Everyone's morality is different, and what one person would define as an evil act could be justified in the perpetrator's eyes.

If everyone had the same uniform morality then maybe pure good and pure evil would have a chance of existing, but it's unlikely to say the least.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

Anyone who denies their existence is basing it on the objective view, without realising that it's their very concept that defines them.

Measuring them, much more difficult.

How can you have grey without black or white?

 

[Soxafloppin]

I believe in Right or Wrong in terms of individual choices, I don't think anyone is 100% Good or Evil though. I also don't think Good and Evil are magic forces or anything like that, lol.

 

[DanDeFool]

No.

"Good" and "Evil" are both concepts based upon value judgments. Something that, generally, has a positive impact on people or society at large is seen as good, and something that has a negative impact is seen as evil.

Charity = Good
Indiscriminate Killing = Evil

If you see the world in black and white, in terms of good and evil, you can tend to make decisions arbitrarily, without thinking about the subtleties.

Spoiler: The Long Explanation

Example: The Pro-Choice/Pro-Life debate.

The Pro-Lifers, generally speaking, are taking the stance that ending an unborn child's life, no matter how far along in its development the child is, is evil. Therefore, we cannot allow abortion.

The Pro-Choicers generally have a different take on this situation. They too have a little bit of good vs. evil in their stance, in that they feel that an unborn child is part of the mother's body while it's still in the womb, and therefore outlawing abortion is tantamount to telling people what to do with their own bodies, which is evil. There are also those who see more ambiguity in the choice of whether or not to preserve an unborn child's life at the expense of the mother and her ability to live and be successful, and perhaps have the opportunity to raise children later in a more stable environment.

My opinion on the subject of "Is there Good and Evil" is informed by my personal experience and mindset. From what I have seen and heard in the world, there just aren't that many situations clear cut enough to draw the line between good and evil with certainty.

And since you can't separate the Good/Evil dichotomy without talking about religion, specifically the Judeo/Christian traditions, I think that God is an artificial construct, created by well-intentioned humans, with the intention of imposing rules upon a society in which the consequences of bad actions were apparent, but we didn't really understand why they were happening. It made sense to say that God was absolute good, and then say that there were a set of laws He expected us to follow. Therefore, disobeying God's laws means that you are Evil and deserve to be punished. Makes sense on paper, but if you believe in an absolute power like that, you can use that kind of system to justify actions that you couldn't in a purely rational society.

Example: Jews are forbidden to handle the dead. Obviously, you can get really, really sick from handling a dead person without the proper sanitary precautions, especially if they died of a communicable disease. However, since they didn't know anything about pathogens back in those days, it made more sense to say that God forbade handling the human dead, both to explain the obvious consequences in the absence of a clear cause-effect relationship, and just to make sure nobody did it.

Another Example: When you believe that it is possible to form a literal contract with a literal devil in exchange for the ability to put curses and hexes on people, possibly undermining an entire civilization, Hell yeah you're going to burn witches! You'll burn them witches with other witches if you have to! Even if you don't have proof that someone who is accused of being a witch is actually a witch, is it really worth taking the chance of leaving a witch alive to try to find out for sure? Probably not.

But we now have proper meat handling specifications and we're pretty sure that witchcraft doesn't actually work, and killing anyone who's accused of witchcraft is, in practice, setting up a government-sanctioned hit service free to the public, so we don't do that kind of stuff anymore unless its in the name of preserving tradition or because we're just stupid.

Bottom line, seeing the world in terms of Good and Evil isn't generally a good idea, mostly because we're not always right when we assign things to those two categories, and recognizing absolute Good and absolute Evil at all might be kind of dubious if your intention is to always make rationally sound choices.

The Short Explanation: Al-Queada members believe that suicide-bombing Israelis and Americans is good, because those two groups are evil.

I think that's a good enough example of how Good vs. Evil thinking can get you into trouble.

 

[luclin92]

i dont beleve in good or evil only people that are assholes or people who try not to be

 

[darth.pixie]

There is no good or evil, virtue or sin, just stuff that people do. We created good and evil as means to explain something. What people define as evil is selfishness and treating other people as objects.

It's context, prejudice and fear. It reminds me of the ring of Gyges question. If you do something while invisible and no one knows about it, would you commit illegal deeds or not? Most people would, because there would be no fear or repercussion. That's what keeps most men 'moral'. There are exceptions of course, but that stems mostly from education, which is also some form of prejudice or another.

 

[DanDeFool]

Anyone who denies their existence is basing it on the objective view, without realising that it's their very concept that defines them.

Measuring them, much more difficult.

How can you have grey without black or white?

Yes, you can't have gray without black and white.

However, those who don't recognize absolute good and absolute evil tend to believe that there aren't two big buckets of black and white, respectively, that dump all the good and evil into the world (these buckets being labeled 'God' and 'Statan', most of the time).

They also tend to believe that, although you find situations that are mostly black or mostly white in the world, you'll almost never find one that's ALL black or ALL white. Therefore, thinking in terms of black and white is failing to recognize the world as it is.

The problem with Good vs. Evil is that people have to assign things to those categories, and how they do it is based upon their subjective viewpoint. How can you confidently assign things to black and white if you can only do it gray-ly?

 

[MassiveGeek]

There is always another side.

At least that's my conclusion after 17 years of living in this world. -shrug-

 

[khiliani]

No such thing as good or evil. everything is via a point of view, we see x as evil because it conflicts with our world view, or is bad according to our society. for the person perpetrating x, it is the pinical of logic to do x.

whats more, it's dangerous to simply label something as evil, as it masks the reason behind the action. if we just dismiss a murderer or the like as "evil" we will never be able to stop their actions, or the actions of others like it.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Morality is purely subjective, so no.

 

[Sjakie]

The whole concepts of good and evil are just human inventions and on a galactic scale those just don't matter.

Things just are! be it setting babies on fire or preserving a wildlife species. we all prefer the latter over the former but that does not make us right.

Shit. just. happens.

And our opinions dont matter in the big picture

 

[John the Gamer]

"There are no good or bad actions or decisions. It's the people that do them and the manner in which, that makes them so."

That's what I was going to say before I realised that it doesn't really make any sense. That sentence would apply to force powers and other supernatural powers.

I'd say: No. Good and evil are ideas that humans came up with to explain and justify their own reasons and actions in life. The Nazi though they were the good guys, for instance. It's a matter of perception.

Nature does not beleive in such things. Trust the chaos theory. And the internet. Because we all know that's always correct... right?

 

[k-ossuburb]

Like I've mentioned a few times before, I'm a subjectivist; therefore everything/everyone is judged by its/their individual merit before I form an opinion on it/them, and even then my opinion is just that; my opinion, it's not right or wrong since those concepts are equally meaningless, merely my personal interpretation.

To me there's no such thing as good or evil, because for something to be considered as such you'll need a standard, for there to be a standard there needs to be a consensus but for there to be a consensus I'd need to first understand that you all aren't figments of my imagination and the reality I'm living in right now is actually real.

Since I can't tell if or if not my green is your red (sorry for dusting off that philosophical chestnut) then no concept can ever be objective, therefore it's all subjective and concepts like "good" and "evil" become meaningless nothings in a vast ocean of possibilities and interpretations.

Simply put: if a scale is infinite there is no method of which it can be bookended it with extremes.

 

[Sarah Frazier]

Maybe true Good and Evil could exist if there was some solid parameter for it, but until then it'll just be a very large range of grays based on what other people believe are good or evil acts. Slavery was once seen as a good thing because the slave owners thought they were giving what they thought were animals a place to live and food, even if it meant never seeing their family again. Now slavery is on the 'evil' list even though some places in the world may still practice it out of tradition or necessity. The same can be said about other practices, old and new, because someone out there will find something 'evil' about it just as other people would find something 'evil' with what that one someone does.