What is good and what is evil

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The little son came to his father and asked the little one:

- What is good and what is bad?

V. V. Mayakovsky

Good and evil are fundamental concepts of morality. But despite the fact that for many centuries mankind has been under the influence of the thesis that it is necessary to do good and not do evil, as one of the main ones that need to be guided in their actions, these concepts still do not have a clear meaning. Like other abstract, but important, concepts, unreasonable people cannot give a clear definition of good and evil, cannot figure out how to distinguish good deeds from bad, cannot understand what will be good in specific conditions. As a result, it turns out that many actions of people who declare that they serve good are absolutely immoral, meaningless and selfish. Some actively do evil, convincingly (in the eyes of the majority) hiding behind good, others, observing the situation in the world, get confused and bewildered what is good and evil in fact, indulging the first with their inaction. In this article, I will examine what is good and what is evil from the point of view of a reasonable approach.

1. The relationship between good and evil

Clarification of what is good and what is evil, we begin with clarifying the relationship between good and evil. As I wrote earlier in this article, emotionally minded people are characterized by a false idea of this relationship, which leads to fundamental problems. In their views, good and evil exist as two poles, as two separate independent sources.

This idea is close to the thinking of emotionally minded people who are used to focusing on their positive and negative emotions, who are used to putting positive and negative labels on everything. However, this view leads to many serious problems. Emotionally minded people fixate on fixed antagonistic assessments of things, which prevents them from at least in any way adequately perceive the situation as a whole. Many points of reference arise in a person's head, what is considered good and what is evil, in which he gets confused. Confusion also arises in the perceptions of the entire society. By manipulating labels, more cunning and selfish people turn everything upside down, passing off evil for good and good for evil.

In fact, more or less thinking representatives of humanity have long given the correct interpretation of the relationship between good and evil. It is wrong to consider good and evil as two independent sources; it is correct to consider evil as the absence (more precisely, a lack) of good.

In the mind of an emotionally thinking person, there is no understanding of where the starting point is, allowing one to determine what is good. Is good what is good for him? Or for someone else? If something is good for one, but bad for another, where to find a compromise, etc. In modern society, in which there is an ever-increasing bacchanalia of egoism, each egoist or group of egoists chooses their own, advantageous for him, point of reference, relative to which they are trying evaluate all things. It is clear that this cannot be correct. The only correct option is to use the only absolute reference point to determine what is good. This reference point will correspond to the understanding of good as a harmonious state of the Universe, while evil (more or less) will be a deviation (more or less) from this state.

2. Fight against evil. Good and false good

An obsession with antagonistic notions and the vision of good and evil as two separate sources has done a lot of harm to humanity. Considering themselves servants of good and labeling others as villains, religious and other fanatics committed genocide of millions. However, along with such an inadequate idea of the fight against evil, there is another, very harmful idea that there is no need to fight against evil. Proponents of this view advocate a false interpretation of good as not doing evil and not resisting any evil. For example, such a false interpretation of good is extremely popular in modern Christianity. Not understanding, due to their unreasonableness, the absolute nature of good and measuring it, like egoists, from a specific person or group, equally for an egoist and an honest person, these preachers of false good interpret the struggle with evil as evil, looking at it from the point of view of a separate egoist. Guided by their false interpretations, these would-be well-wishers are on a par with the villains, supporting the division of people, beneficial for those, into immoral, selfish predators and passive victims. In addition, it is obvious that what is seen as evil when viewed from the point of view of an egoist, for example, the punishment of a criminal, is in fact good not only for those against whom he can commit crimes, but also for himself. The path of evil can lead no one to anything good, and the sooner we stop the criminal and correct the defects in his thinking, the better it will be both for society and for himself. A similar logic underlies the active planting of dangerous tolerance lately. Replacing stable moral norms with the arbitrary interests of egoists, dangerous toleranceists replace the thesis of serving good with the thesis of loyalty to these selfish interests of others and their actions, no matter what comes to mind. This has already led to a sharp increase in deviations in society, a shift, under the influence of permissiveness, of the average pattern of behavior to behavior that is extremely immoral, aggressive, selfish and irresponsible.

There is no doubt that any normal person, striving for good, will correct deviations from good, that is, fight evil. At the same time, unlike unreasonable fanatics, he will understand that good is absolute, and evil is relative, and his task is not to fight evil until he turns blue, but to correct a defect. Obviously, the correct force must be applied to correct the deviation. Insufficient effort will not allow the defect to be corrected, and it will remain, excessive effort will lead to the fact that instead of one deviation, another deviation occurs, only in the other direction. Small evil must be fought with little effort; big evil must be fought with great effort. Unfortunately, people, as a rule, absolutely do not understand even such simple things, and while evil is small, they do not pay attention to it at all, when it becomes noticeable and begins to greatly annoy, they absolutize it and begin to fight zealously, creating instead of one deviation another, the opposite deviation - they come from dictatorship to anarchy, from artificial leveling to artificial inequality, etc.

3. How to find out what is good

It is obvious that the situation in the world is far from harmony and the triumph of good. Therefore, striving for good, we will have good in mind as a guide. But how to understand how accurately one or another of our actions leads to good? Emotionally minded people are constantly bewildered by this question. Measuring the action from different points of reference and according to different criteria, emotionally thinking in any action see the pros and cons. In this situation, determining which action is better and which is worse, they may decide to give one pluses or minuses more weight than others, try to calculate which - pluses or minuses - are more, or try not to do anything at all, what they see as minuses as would-be preachers of false good.

Using a sensible approach, it is not difficult to understand what is the right thing to do from a moral point of view. First of all, it is necessary to understand that there must be one good, absolute, and not subjective or temporary. It is impossible to compare, making a decision, good and evil in magnitude, trying to make a choice in favor of "more" good or "lesser" evil. First of all, you need to understand what result will be obtained in the end. In this case, it may turn out that the "good" that we do will evaporate, and the consequences will be only negative, or vice versa, the evil, the commission of which we saw in action, will subsequently be neutralized, and the final result will only be positive. In calculating the consequences of one or another choice, we must come to a point where the advantage of one of the options becomes obvious. Of course, this is not always easy to do, nevertheless, following this rule, a person will always do more good than blindly following emotions.

We can say that act A is (more or less) a deviation from good if there is another act B that can be done in the same situation, and which contains more pluses than A (with the same number of minuses), or fewer minuses (with the same number of pluses). Let's look at a couple of examples. Let's say we caught a drug dealer. You can take drugs away from him, punish him slightly and let him go. Is it correct? No, this is wrong, because a drug dealer can take up the old and cause additional harm to society by distributing drugs, compared to the case when we will not let him go. You can shoot a drug dealer. Is it correct? This is also wrong, because there is a chance that the drug dealer will improve and bring some benefit to society. Thus, we must isolate the drug dealer and apply measures to him that are sufficient to re-educate him until he consistently realizes the erroneousness of his actions and does not change his ideas. Let's look at another example. Should the GKChP in 1991 act more decisively, arrest Gorbachev and Yeltsin, seize the Supreme Soviet and disperse a rally of traitors who were going to "defend" him? Yes, it should, because although this would be a formal violation of the law and would entail other negative consequences, it would prevent the collapse of the country, the law of which would be violated and other negative consequences, including and significantly exceeding the consequences of the first option.

We can conclude that a reasonable person always follows the path that will lead to good in the end, while an emotionally thinking person is guided by a private, momentary and therefore often a false vision of good and evil.

4. Immorality of emotionally minded

Emotionally minded people are immoral. Even if they try to do good on purpose, the result of their efforts is usually characterized by the phrase "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." The reason for this lies in the peculiarities of their thinking. Emotionally thinking spontaneously, their gaze snatches out of the whole picture only its individual fragments, and what they paid attention to is completely distorted under the influence of their emotional-evaluative matrix and dogmas. Evaluating what is good and what is evil, emotionally minded people do not see the whole, noticing only individual, often completely secondary pluses and minuses and, on the basis of them, making verdicts. For example, a deficit artificially created by pests in the late 1980s prompted many to support the absurd reforms and traitors who were destroying the country. The narrow gaze of the man in the street overshadowed (and for many continues to overshadow to this day) the main thing. There is no doubt that only reason and truth are synonyms for good, and unreasonableness and ignorance, characteristic of emotionally thinking, are evil.