So many pointless comments in here talking about how this cannot be objectively discussed. You are contributing nothing to the conversation. Of course it’s subjective. Do you see a thread called “what’s the best movie?” and respond like “☝️😏 actually there’s no such thing as a best movie because it’s all subjective.” Come on, the subjectivity is implied. You agree to a subjective discussion when you answer the question.
I find that the second model in your image is more accurate from a utilitarian perspective. At the most basic level, I think the origin of goodness is in pleasure (/happiness/whatever). Evil is the opposite: someone taking away your pleasure. Therefore goodness exists first, and then evil emerges as the absence of good.
Anything that’s evil, even pain and suffering and illness, is only evil because it’s preventing good. Why does this count as the absence of good instead of the presence of a novel concept of evil? Why not, rather, do we think of pain coming first with pleasure as its absence? I would argue that pain and suffering are not inherently bad; in a world without good, pain and suffering wouldn’t mean anything. On the other hand, pleasure is good even without the existence of suffering.Neither.
The universe itself is neutral as fuck.
Good and evil are man-made distinctions that constantly change depending on who happens to define them.
Just because they’re man-made distinctions doesn’t mean that they cannot be discussed or don’t have beginnings.
Sure.
But the beginning is a hen/egg discussion per definition.
And for the distinctions… There are currently about 8 billion different ones.
Discussing those as if there was an absolute answer doesn’t make sense.
Pyrrhonian (actually Aenesidemian)
Pyrrhonism is an Ancient Greek school of philosophical skepticism which rejects dogma and advocates the suspension of judgement over the truth of all beliefs. It was founded by Aenesidemus in the first century BCE, and said to have been inspired by the teachings of Pyrrho and Timon of Phlius in the fourth century BCE.
Pyrrhonism is best known today through the surviving works of Sextus Empiricus, writing in the late second century or early third century CE. The publication of Sextus’ works in the Renaissance ignited a revival of interest in Skepticism and played a major role in Reformation thought and the development of early modern philosophy.
The goal of Pyrrhonism is ataraxia, an untroubled and tranquil condition of soul that results from a suspension of judgement, a mental rest owing to which we neither deny nor affirm anything.
If only the Abrahamics could have taken a lesson from that book, a lot less people would have ended up stoned to death, hung, or burned alive.
This is in contrast to Socratian:
There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance
Wherein what is true is good and what is ignorance of that truth evil, as the Pyrrhonian good doesn’t seek to find the truth at all.
“Nature does not make mistakes. Right and wrong are human constructs.” –Frank Herbert
Neither, “Good” and “Evil” can’t exist absolutely and the universe doesn’t care one whit about any of us. Our morality was shaped by what was evolutionarily adaptive, and we developed post-hoc reasoning for it with the nice big brains we evolved.
What is good for the bird is evil for the worm
Do they have concepts of good and evil?
Maaaybee the bird, at least some birds are pretty high on the self-awareness scale.So in this case the bird-worm-relationship consists only of pure evil-free good.
Who’s asking the bird and the worm? We’re humans discussing this here, maybe a few bots in the mix.
Good and Evil aren’t some mythical power or taint on one’s soul or actions. They’re not equal eternal powers, no matter how comforting it may be to think there’s some grand celestial war of morality.
The whole world wasn’t good in the beginning, it just, was. Indifferent. The natural world just is, no good or evil, just existence. Only when conscious thought enters into things can morality and ethics exist.
The idea of Evil as an absence of good is silly. You see homeless people on the street, do you stop and help every single one? Is simply knowing they exist and refusing to go out of your way to help enough to be Evil? Is the failure to provide meaningful help at every single opportunity enough to be branded as evil? It’s an absence of good certainly, but calling every failure to impart good itself evil is an absurdity.
good and evil are just ideas. id say this image has negative value.
This feels reductive and semantically confused. 🤷
Good and evil are subjective interpretive constructs, they exist only conceptually, there is no “truth” to good and evil, or binary dichotomies of existence, ethics, and morality in general.
It’s all just wishy-washy childish nonsense.
“Good” and “Evil” are human concepts. They’re the product of higher cognitive ability and intelligence making judgments on things based, usually and generally, on how those things affect survival and the ability to pass on one’s own genes.
Our definition and understanding of those concepts varies from person to person, and society to society.
Neither of these models are capable of accurately representing either concept for these reasons.
Whichever makes the story more interesting
Good and Evil are ideas that help perpetuate the idea of Society. Good can be considered as “anything that helps my people” and Evil as “anything that hurts my people”.
I would argue that they are some of the earliest memes, in the original sense of the word - they are ideas that spread through imitation and story that helped early people (likely at least as far back as protohumans) maintain themselves as coherent groups.
I’d call good and evil human concepts, along with the moral or ethical codes and ideas that define them. They aren’t going to exist in a vacuum: what is called good and what is called evil depends on the social norms of a time and place.
Is charging interest to lend money evil? Is homosexuality evil? Is not taking on your brother’s widow as a second wife and impregnating her evil? Those are all things that would have been considered wrong by different cultures.
So I’d say that any question about “good” or “evil” kind of requires asking “good in the eyes of whom” or “evil in the eyes of whom”.
If you want to ask “did evil exist in the universe 4 billion years ago”, I’d probably say “we don’t have evidence that life existed in the universe 4 billion years ago, and I think that most conventional meanings of good or evil entail some kind of beings with a thought process being involved.”
If you want to ask “were the first humans good and then become evil”, I’d probably say that depends a great deal on your moral code, but I imagine that early humans probably violated present-day social norms very substantially.
If what you’re really working towards is something like the problem of evil:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil
The problem of evil, also known as the problem of suffering, is the philosophical question of how to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering with an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient God.[1][2][3][4]
The problem of evil possibly originates from the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BCE).[38] Hume summarizes Epicurus’s version of the problem as follows:
“Is [god] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?”[39][40]
So if what you’re asking is “how could good give birth to evil”, I think that I’d probably say that I probably wouldn’t call humans or the universe at large “purely good” for any extended period of time in any conventional sense of the word. Maybe in some sort of very limited, narrow, technical sense, if you decide that only humans or something capable of that level of thought that can engage in actions that we’d call good and evil and the first point in time that there was a being that qualified as human the first second of their activity happened to be something that we’d call “good”, okay, but I assume that that’s not what you’re thinking of.
I think that you had pre-existing behavior by humans at one point in the past and ethical systems that later developed which might be used to classify that behavior, and not in some consistent way.
The universe started out good, and then it took billions of years for large enough stars to form that their collapse could create supernovae capable of reaching the energies needed to synthesize evil particles.
I think it is more like the yin and yang Chinese concept.
There is some evil in good and there is some good in evil.
Evil is knowingly causing harm in order to derive pleasure (or profit, but what is profit if not deferred pleasure?). How evil it is depends on how serious and lasting the harm.
Evil came into being when the first animal that was smart enough to know what it was doing did something harmful that it didn’t need to in order to derive that pleasure.
Humans happened long after that. (Or around the same time if you prefer your religion’s creation story.)
Was the first carnivore evil? Sating hunger is pleasurable. Was it knowingly doing harm? How many brain cells did it need to know that?
Eating flesh to survive is a necessary evil for those that are smart enough to understand they’re killing another animal, and it’s not evil for those that aren’t. It’s probably not an either-or, either. There might well be another sliding scale there.
It’s what they evolved to eat and they have no means of creating an alternative. Carnivory almost certainly evolved in parallel with brains increasing in size, which is a curious consequence. You eat flesh, so your brain gets big enough to try to tell you to stop eating flesh.
There have been instances of predator animals temporarily adopting the offspring of the adult prey animal they ate. I think it would be wrong to call that a guilty conscience in a non-sapient creature, but whatever the ‘merely’ sentient equivalent is, I bet in some cases, it’s that. In others it might well just be a snack for later, but it’s curious how they treat that child with care and respect before they do.
FWIW, I’m no saint here. I eat meat even though I could probably get away with not doing that.
