I like M. Scott Peck's definition of Evil (From People of the Lie) which I would summarize as "Anyone who doesn't consider the possibility that they might be wrong." It makes most people evil in turns, myself included.

Peck does acknowledge that this ends in a paradox that no one can know they are doing non-evil. I thought at one time I had resolved this but I'm not sure how it goes anymore.

Seriously, this type of story has the villian inside the people (self doubt that has to be overcome) and the situation (prejudice, cultural barriers that have to be overcome). Strictly speaking I don't think the villian needs to be a particular person, but it often helps to have a particular villian or at least evil's representation. (Darth Vader was a villian, but only really the rep of greater evil of the Dark Side and Hate inside us all).

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We all need antagonists in our stories, after all.

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I don't know if the antagonist needs to be a person, it could just be the human condition. I actually believe that in real life and in the best stories, some of the most pressing plots and problems don't have a neat villian. Take the Iliad, for example.

The second problem I have with the need for an antagonist is that we live in a bureaucracy. The is no one evil person, just the aggregate little evil inclinations of a large groups of large groups of people.

Briggs, I've been thinking about character lately, and the people who have it vs. the people who are just mannered. It seems to me that if you have any sort of character, it's going to open you up to a vulnerablity. You don't need to have a character flaw, you just need character period, and trouble will begin.

I always consider the possibility that I could be wrong. I often underestimate that possibility (if you consider that there are almost always nearly innumerable different reasons you could be in error about something, it isn't surprising). But I never fail to consider it. That doesn't mean that I'm good. It illustrates that consideration of the possibility that you could be wrong is simply insufficient to avert evil.

What is "good"?

Until we can answer that question, it is meaningless to speak of the definition of "evil", as db said. My own definition of good is pretty simple. That which leads towards the maximization of my sentient potential is good. Anything that leads to the limitation or contraction of my potential is evil. I therefore find Peck's notion of willful rebellion against truth very useful. Because (in my experience) God is infinitely helpful in maximizing and expanding my sentient potential, I can accept that God is good and that the maximization of sentient potential for all individuals is pursuent to my own desire for greater sentience.

But people can have different ideas of what is "good". I have difficulty understanding how it is possible to fully pursue a desire without maximized sentience, since sentience is necessary to the cybernetic process of pursuit and the volitional process of imagining a desire. But many people do apparently follow their desires to the diminuation or degradation of sentience. Though I regard those desires as evil, those following them sometimes (but not always) regard them as good.

It is also possible for a person seeking maximized sentience to be cut off from experience of God for one reason or another. Most commonly, a person desiring maximized sentience will make the a priori assumption that admitting the existence of a being superior in sentience would constitute an insuperable barrier to ultimate sentience. I'm not quite sure how this argument runs, it seems totally illogical on the face of it. Suffice to say that, for reasons which cannot be explained to my satisfaction, it happens. The individual thus afflicted generally falls into the recursive logical trap of believing all sentiences to be basically in competition with each other for maximization, thus turning the quest for sentience into a zero-sum game.

Personally, I find it to be a catch-all for more of those things I'll never understand. If I can't find a palatable reason for harmful actions/events, I find myself labelling it "evil".

It's not exactly the opposite of good, because I consider one can plan to do good, and can apply intent and action to achieve an outcome that is "goodness." But I don't believe people plan to do evil. They may be foolish, selfish, greedy, or corrupted by faulty neurotransmitters...or simply have a standard for "good" which is in opposition to mine, but nobody wakes up each day and looks in the mirror planning to do anything they would call, in their own minds, evil.

There are many other words that are equally nebulous, when used in the context of a large group of individuals. When I say, "I love" or "such and such makes me happy" or "I hope you have success", I can never be sure that the person I am speaking to understands, really, what it was I said.

There are classic examples of people throughout history whose motivations were not to benefit others, but to benefit themselves. This in and of itself isn't evil. What makes it evil is when this self interest caused harm to others, and the harm was deliberate.

I agree there are people who make plans that result in needless harm and pain to other people. If I can't understand what kind of reward could possibly come from such actions, I'll use the word "evil". But this is simply a way of saying, "I don't understand this, I can't make sense of it, so it falls into the blank area of 'unknowable'." And I call unknowable bad-things "evil".

When I set out to do something evil, I don't have to trick myself and pretend that I'm not doing something evil. Sometimes I plan something evil and don't do it, but that doesn't make me a hero or anything. Who even could do all the evil things I plan out? And sometimes I plan something, think to myself "this is evil", and go ahead and do it anyway. That isn't because I'm particularly evil (well, maybe I am), it's simply because the road to sentient maximization is a little bumpy at times. We all have destructive inclinations, I'm simply not good at telling myself that an action I know to be evil is not evil just because I happen to be in the process of planning or executing it.

Not that good people don't get angry. I consider myself a good person and I've gotten mad about things that have happened to me or to somebody I know. Often, I can use that anger to find ways to make sure that such injustices don't happen again, or at the very least, find a way so that it won't be as much of a problem anymore.

However, the anger emotion has a way of overwhelming an individual more violently than many others. If it isn't controlled, it has the potential to lead to hate, revenge, and any kinds of physical or mental violence, which is why it's considered to be one of the seven deadly sins.

Happiness, on the other hand, is an emotion that when it overwhelms a person, usually has the effect of making people charitable, fun, and otherwise loving to the world. It can have it's negative side, like if people derive happiness from seeing themselves above others or other selfish motivations.

I guess this is a longwinded way of saying I agree with you. I ought to be more concise in the future, or just make sense the first time. Or make sense at all.

About the planning of evil, well, of course that alone isn't a satisfiable gauge to whether a person is good or bad. I often fantasized about building a bomb back in elementary school and watching the place burn to the ground. This is an altogether wicked idea, but that certainly doesn't make me evil. Not only because it was a foolish whim that I didn't take seriously, but also because it wasn't in the realm of believability.

But what is within the realm of reason can judge what kind of person I am. I can have an evil intention, like ruining a person's position in life, and then I do it. I started off wanting to hurt somebody, and I performed the action. This makes what I did evil.

Now, let's say that I consider drug addiction to be bad, and yet I am addicted to it. This would make me, at best, weak. But if I chose not to do it anymore, and then followed the steps so that I never did it again. I had an evil desire, but I suppressed it and now can consider myself good.

And this kind of thing I do consider to be heroic. Heroes are people with good intentions who follow through with the appropriate actions. There are forces, both external and internal, that are put in place to overwhelm the individual from reaching those purposes. Often, these can lead a person to want to succumb to these evil desires, but what makes them good is when they shrug the bad off and continue with their pure desires.

The justification of evil is often based on a personal victimization myth, or an accusation of greater evil on the part of the other party. Hitler (I'll he's invoked appropriately in this discussion) got people to believe that they had been done wrong, and he was just putting things right again, plus maybe an overage for the value of their pain and emotional distress. They had been punished by the French for what happened in WWI. I'm not sure where the Kaiser got his justification that he had inflicted on the French. Guess I'll have to look into it.

I suppose there are "some sacrifices are necessary for the greater good" kind of evil. Like Magneto in the first X-men movie. Here I'm basically saying hurting other people is the smoke by which one identifies the fire of evil.

I guess in order to define good, you have to see where it begins. If you look at a single person who is completely isolated from others, that person can create his own personal rules or values on what is "good." But if the individual breaks his own rules, does that make him evil? I don't think so, because obviously, he would have some rationale for doing so, either from curiosity or the protection and preservation of his life.

I think that good is defined by society instead. It doesn't particularly matter which society. It could be a family society, a national one, or a religious one. Those are three top societies that I'm aware of, and each has set in place their own rules of conduct for how people are to behave. So really, good and evil is about functioning among other people, for the betterment of yourself in these family, national, or religious institutions.

My idea of good (not from stories of the classic knight who saves the world kind of thing) is someone who obeys the laws, someone who knows between right and wrong and chooses that right thing over the wrong thing. A person like that to me has a high standard of morals, a personal code of conduct. A person who has morals, who lives by them is what my idea good.

Evil for me is someone who goes out and breaks the law deliberately. Like when gangs carry illegal weapons on themselves, or assault people then I consider that evil or wrong. These sort of people prefer to live that way, sometimes unoblivious that what they're doing is wrong.

But say the thief doesn't have the money. He used the money to buy a lamp. It wouldn't be fair for the victim to take the money from the seller because the seller didn't do anything wrong. A fair solution would be to give the seller back the lamp and the victim his cash. Only the seller doesn't want the lamp back because he made a fair profit. It wouldn't be fair for him to end back where he started because he didn't know the thief had stolen money.

So the solution would be to give the victim the lamp. Only the victim hates the lamp and wants his money back instead. A fair solution would be to have the thief work for the victim until the debt has been satisfied. Only the thief won't do the work. What would be a fair solution for everybody?

Banish the thief. Since the thief is the one that brought about this unfair situation, the only fair way to deal with it is to take the thief out of the picture. True, there's no compensation for the victim, but at least now he knows that he'll never have to worry about this in the future.

Using this logic with every unfair situation, if it can't be compensated, banish the villain is the only just thing to do.

To be honest, I didn't get to the part of the book where this event was described, even though I read for quite a long time.

I haven't read Les Miserables, so I can't claim to understand the whole situation with Val Jean. From what I understand, his motivation was good but his actions were considered bad. And in fact, I'm sure that he considered stealing to be an evil, but the end justified the means.

Of course, later he comes to a more equiable understanding of justice, but when he stole the bread he was putting his own desires first. Sure, some of those desires were "unselfish" in a very limited sense. I could call my desire for shoes unselfish because it benefits my feet rather than my brain, which I regard as the seat of my "self". That doesn't change the fact that when I steal your shoes, I'm putting the needs of my feet ahead of those of your feet.

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I think that good is defined by society instead. It doesn't particularly matter which society. It could be a family society, a national one, or a religious one. Those are three top societies that I'm aware of, and each has set in place their own rules of conduct for how people are to behave. So really, good and evil is about functioning among other people, for the betterment of yourself in these family, national, or religious institutions.

I'm looking over this, and once again, this is more about how good and evil exist. There's still no actual definition for them yet. <sigh>

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Oooh, can I try?

First, I agree that they're defined by society.

My take: I believe that one of the main purposes of life is to discover that other people are just as human as you are. I define "charity" or "pure love" as "knowing (as deeply as possible - some would say 'internalizing') the exact worth of yourself and others and acting in accordance with that." Not that it's entirely possible to do that in this life on your own, which is why my religion defines it as a gift...

That's what "good" is: anything that charity brings about. It's societal in nature, which is why society defines it. It's not as if a society sets out to supply Mirriam-Webster with a definition one day, it simply emerges from their set of beliefs about how people ought to treat each other.

"Evil" isn't the opposite of good - it's much, much worse than the opposite of good. The opposite of "good" is "selfish." Me, me, me. I haven't yet realized that other people are worth as much as I am, so I'm in it for myself. "Evil" is "selfish taken to the extreme."

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My own definition of good is pretty simple. That which leads towards the maximization of my sentient potential is good. Anything that leads to the limitation or contraction of my potential is evil.

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Caveat: this is my understanding of things only.

Classically (say, Socrates until the Enlightenment), the notion of evil is bound up in the idea of purpose or teleology. Good things help you achieve the purpose for which you were designed; evil ones disrupt the design. Melkor in _The Silmarillion_ was classically evil; Illuvatar had the Vala sing the creation, and Melkor conspired with others in the troupe to disrupt the song.

This doesn't take away freedom. Melkor had total freedom to invent his parts for the song, provided the result was harmonious. Only his deliberate choice to destroy the harmony was evil.

Similarly, Adam and Eve both had almost complete freedom. It wasn't a binary question of "eat the apple or don't". They could have done anything _except_ disobey God. That's the general pattern that makes rules compatible with freedom: we can choose from a tremendous variety of actions, all good and sometimes even _made_ good by the simple fact that we exercise our freedom to choose them. We only commit evil when we choose something that runs counter to our purpose. (There's a question of accidentally committing evil, which I'll discuss if anyone cares.)

Closer to home, we must look what people are designed for: to participate in the ongoing creation of the world (including procreation), to shape and steward the earth, to work with each other in the ordering of society.

We have goods, and we do good. (People don't say "we have goods" in this sense much anymore, but it used to be very common.)

Having goods: the soul provides us with the freedom to choose the way in which we act; the human body actually acts; pain warns us that we've overexerted ourselves, or that we're in a life-threatening situation. Survivor's "sentient potential" is a good.

Doing good: we _do_ good when we act in accord with the world's design: caring for children, recycling, building towers, inventing things, curing people, searching for cures, etc.

The definition for "good" is thus _extremely_ broad (which is good, because that maximizes freedom). Early Christians like Augustine said that the fact of existence is good, because it allows for all other goods. The Scholastics (e.g., St. Thomas Aquinas) developed the notion further. That led to, or fed, their definition of God as that being whose very essence is the good -- existence, justice, love, knowledge, etc.

Evil, then, is anything that thwarts the good.(*) Thwarting the "maximization of sentient potential" would be one from of evil. War thwarts all of the things just mentioned; some things are more evil than war, which leads to the notion of a "just war", but that's strictly delineated. Torture takes a good in the body (the sensation of pain) and distorts its purpose to coerce someone (i.e., to take away their freedom of action, which is a good). Murder takes away the good of existence. I haven't figured out how to say this concisely, but theft is evil because society requires the stability given by ownership -- if you're considered to "own" something (and there's considerable leeway in determining what should be owned), then society's stability depends on your ability to determine (in whole or in part) its disposition.

* (Many early philosophers said that evil was the absence of good, which, when considered in conjunction with the broad idea of "good" just given, might make more sense than it does at first glance: I have mixed feelings on the idea.)

This definition of evil allows for redemption, and (for our purposes) for more sophisticated characterization. Paraphrasing Augustine now: evil people are evil insofar as they do evil things, but they are good insofar as they are people. I like that idea, because it doesn't deny the intrinsic goodness of the individual person. It's what allows redemption, whether of ourselves in real life or of characters like Darth Vader or Gollum. (I know Gollum ultimately wasn't redeemed, but that's part of what makes his ending tragic: he could have been.)

This definition _doesn't_ fit very well with the atheistic or non-theistic view of life, in which there's no purpose to the universe or our evolution. Personally, I think that's why much of society seems to be ethically confused.

People mentioned emotions. I believe (stepping out of classical philsophy now) that emotions are the sense experience for good and evil, just as the eyes are the sense experience for color. Just as the eyes can experience the same things differently depending on circumstances (e.g., with sunglasses on, with colored lenses, with deterioration of the eye, etc.), the emotions can experience things differently depending on circumstances; this accounts for why we don't all call the same things "evil". Generally, though, gratitude is the experience of gratuitous mercy or charity; anger is the experience of evil; happiness is the experience of goodness; and so on.

I've gone on too long already.

For the classical perspective, I like Aristotle's _Nicomachean Ethics_ (read a summary, not the whole thing), Augustine's _On The Free Will of the Soul_ (it's short and pretty straightforward), and Alisdair MacIntyre's _The Macintyre Reader_. That gives you pre-Christian, early Christian, and modern neoclassical thoughts on the matter.

For the Enlightenment perspective, I'd start with John Stewart Mill's _Utilitarianism_. You can find it on my web site, http://www.freivald.org/~jake in the eTexts / Philosophy section.

As you might guess, I don't like the modern pseudo-solutions to these problems. My problem with Utilitarianism is that there's no definition of what "utility" really means; in an effort to say that it's more than mere pleasure or pain, Mill more or less leaves the term undefined. I think Utilitarianism is reconcilable with classical notions of right and wrong, even though Mill probably thought he was stepping outside of those restrictions. Still, the text is worth reading.

Regards,
Oliver

This gets into a sticky theological question of how much we maximize own own sentient potential vs. how much it is maximized for us in accordance with our choices. That choice, free will, what ever you want to call it is the same principle I've been talking around.

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Hmmm. Selfishness vs. the maximization of one's sentient potential.

This gets into a sticky theological question of how much we maximize own own sentient potential vs. how much it is maximized for us in accordance with our choices. That choice, free will, what ever you want to call it is the same principle I've been talking around.

At what point does one stop reaching toward God and instead take a swipe at the sceptre?

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The "maximization of one's sentient potential" is good for one's self. Why isn't it selfish?

I think that it could be selfish if you did it at the expense of more important things.

A good choice is one that balances the various goods: for example, your personal obligations, your desires, the demands of charity. A bad choice is one that unreasonably favors some goods over others, imbalancing one's life, to the detriment of you and society.

Examples: When you cheat, you destroy someone else's ability to keep their own goods because of a disordered desire to keep your own money (which is good, in itself). When you commit adultery, you transgress someone else's covenant for the sake of your desire for sex (which is good, in itself). When you murder, destroy someone else's life for the sake of your desire for <whatever>.

The best way to use your free will, then, is to choose good things, because that's good for you and for society. There are an infinite number of good things you can choose. Even "swiping at the sceptre" is fine, provided that you are actually in a position to do so, and that's the correct balance for society at that time. In fact, not taking power when you should is potentially as great of a failure as taking it when you shouldn't.

Or so it seems to me.

Regards,
Oliver

Edited to fix tags

I already did that, but you may not accept such a simple definition of "good" and "evil".

Evil = diminiuation of sentient potential
Good = maximization of sentient potential

There is also the point that my definition of "good" is quite selfish in the sense that it is judged from an individual perspective. However, it is unselfish in that I believe that multiple individuals will most effectively maximize their sentient potential through cooperation and a shared vision rather than through exclusion and domination. However, I do not insist on this point. I conceed that an individual with a exclusive view of sentience would regard my sentience as thwarting other quests for domination and thus could consistently (though incorrectly, in my view) regard my "good" as "evil". There are also going to be individuals who not only disagree with my concept of sentient potential and how it is measured, but disagree that maximization of sentient potential is "good". The concept of "Nirvana", as it is sometimes explained, would seem to suggest that the goal is elimination of the sentient process. Of course my reading of that is that "Nirvana" indicates a redirection of the sentient process away from material (and thus inherently limited) objectives. It is therefore possible to understand it as being a state of pursuing "spiritual" (for lack of a better word) objectives. It is a failing of language and its concepts that this ends up being described entirely in negative terms.

The implication is that evil has no absolute independent existence. Satan cannot create, only corrupt. The concept of "pure evil" is, in an empircal sense (maybe I should say meta-empirical), pure nonsense.

In other words, Tolkien and C. S. Lewis believed that the war itself (not their enemy, particularly) was a monstrous and unecessary evil. The Germans, by and large, found it unpleasant but were accustomed by their upbringing to regard the question of "good and evil" as being irrational. Ironically, they were brought into the war themselves by the necessity of defending themselves against an enemy even less prepared to consider the morality of waging this war. Even more ironically, the nations that dragged Germany into the war were the allies of the English. If England had been aligned with Germany, the war probably wouldn't have happened.

And yet history would have rendered it's own judgement on the war in that case. Because it would have come to war eventually. Indeed, it will come to war again, though the battles won't be fought in Europe anymore.

Basically, this gets back to the idea that it is having a notion of good which makes evil possible. Because the Germans thought of the war in terms of expediency rather than morality, they weren't "justified" in waging the war. But if they had thought of the war in terms of morality, it wouldn't have made any difference, given their strategic position. They were surrounded by belligerent nations, and faced imminent invasion.

The elevation of the self over others involves the intrinsic falsehood that they do not have the same inherent worth as the self. This is pride, and the lie behind various types of bondage.

I think another principle lie is the Manichean fallacy that physical matter is inherently more corrupt and debasing that spiritual matter. If one believes in the fall, why does it not affect the spirit as much as the body? True the body may seem to give rise to bad, but I think it only does so when surrendered to by the spirit (or mind) just as a family being run by the 4 year old will not be exemplary. I see lust, gluttony and all them as symptoms of the spirit following after the body rather than leading it.

The issue isn't whether you attempt to aquire the power and authority associated with God. It's whether you go to God to get them. Satan's big mistake was thinking that he could get the blessings by turning away from God.

I don't think that all selves have the same inherent worth. If they did, it would be incomprehensible for God to admit some to His presence while excluding others. I think that all selves have the same potential, but it is a matter of individual choice how much of that potential is used. A person who makes bad choices is not "equal" to a person who makes good choices, except in the past tense. By doing well while others do poorly, you elevate your self over theirs. Your self gains worth while their selves diminish. To evade this, you would have to make your behavior identical to theirs.

Physical matter is inherently less stable, less organized. It is more easily corruptable. Getting into doctrine, as a result of the Fall, it is corrupted (on this planet). Also getting into doctrine, the Fall expressly affects the body. Because the body is associated with the spirit, it affects the spirit, but indirectly. As for leading and following...those aren't the only arrangements to be found. Think of an ox-drawn plow.

The key point of sentience is that it is recursive. The fundamental assumptions that you make about what it means to be sentient constrain you in such a way that it is impossible to identify those assumptions as limiting your sentience as long as you truly hold them. But it is impossible to be sentient at all without holding at least some assumptions. If you assume that sentience is a zero-sum game, then your measuring stick of sentience will read that you are more sentient by virtue of denigrating the sentience of others. Just like how some people believe that the poor in a wealthy society are genuinely worse off because the wealthy are so damn wealthy, even though the poor in a poor society have far less actual wealth.

To a degree, I can see the validity of that point. After all, what is starving to death next to losing your dignity? We all die eventually anyway. Imagine that some natural catastrophe destroyed all the food in the world (and we couldn't find a way to make any more). Everyone would starve alike, rich and poor. All would be equal. Which would you prefer, being poor in a society where being poor was mainly an injury to your pride, or being poor in a society where wealth was meaningless because the rich were starving to death too? I suspect that most of us, most of the time, prefer the former. But be honest, we all have felt the appeal of the latter.

> If you assume that sentience is a zero-sum game

I'm not sure that it's a coherent idea, but it may be that I'm not interpreting you correctly. If all Hatrackers are sentient, and someone else that we've never met -- maybe that nobody ever met, he was born on an island, deserted except for his mom, who crash-landed there while she was pregnant with him, and now she's dead, and he's still on that island -- is "more sentient" that us. (Not sure if I know what "more sentient" would mean, precisely, but I'll play along for now.) How would the existence of that sentience reduce ours?

As for sentience being a zero-sum game, I never said it was a coherent idea. I compare it to the common idea of "wealth" as a zero-sum game.

Think of a game like Chess or Go. Would you rather lose to someone slightly better than you or win against someone who was utterly hopeless? Which is more fun? Which teaches you more? Which is "better"?

If we want to talk "doctrine", the physical body is appointed for death while the spirit "died" in being separated from God at the fall. At least, that's my take on it. This reminds me of that time we speculated on whether dishonestly would be the baldness of the afterlife.

I've never been good at grasping the concept of a "zero-sum" game. Do you mean one in which one player must lose and the other must win?