This is boring personal philosophy, of little interest to anyone I expect. If you read on, you have been warned.
I was immersed in the dogmatic statement of good and evil made by modern western religion until I was nearly twenty. Spoon fed dogmas of faith, defining good and evil as externalised forces battling for our souls, I was left, after full rejection of the tenants, with the question : "so, now, what is good and evil?"
Spending the next few years of maturation exploring other view points was fun. I met Wiccans, buddhists, muslims, new agers, neo-pagans, druids, Jehovah Witnesses, Mormons and even a satanist in my hobby-quest. I spent about 3 years earnestly looking for the truth behind the Holy Grail at one point and even have the bookshelf to prove it today. Having explored most of the readily available religious views, I came to one conclusion: nobody knew a damn thing. Often the religion was worn as an affectation, much like a beard or ear rings. Sometimes it became a way of life, but not of thought. It seemed no-one really knew what good and evil were, few even cared.
Gradually over the years I came to view the agnostic and atheistic world as perhaps, ironically, holding clues. Here, behaviour was judged by moral codes not entirely based on religion. Yet the moral codes laid out or used in law are so tainted by culture, which in turn is stained with religion that separating one from another was a task for someone with longer life expectancy than me.
Finally, I settled on a very introverted -the Jungian definition, not the armchair psychologist one- conclusion. Good was creation. Evil was destruction. It made sense. "And ... Go(o)d created the heavens and the earth". We seem to inherently understand that building things, creating things, leaving behind more than we take away is good. Killing is bad, its evil because it destroys life. War is double destruction. Destruction is evil. However, there was a logical and painful next conclusion. If evil was destruction, wasn't evil also the use of resources, the using up of resources, the destruction of resources? In other words, consumption.
Why was such a conclusion painful? It is the western way of life. It is my way of life. I use, I consume, I do not, per se , produce in equal quantities (blogs and software may or may not count). That would make me evil. I didn't feel that to be true. Yet the definition seemed sound. Its taken me a few years to move beyond that definition and find the flaw in its logic and come to a higher definition.
A thought exercise. You have eaten today. You know you will not starve for another ten days even if you do not eat again. Safe in that knowledge that you have consumed, you are free to read a blog - this one in this case. Yet, whilst you ate, many people died of starvation. You consumed, they did not, they died, you did not. Deep down you know this, but chose. like me, to ignore it. Is this then evil? No. It was not within your power to prevent those people starving. Even if you could have given them your meal, it would only have kept them alive a few days. It is not within your power to save them.Even if for a moment we allow ourselves to say that it may be within your power, it would take an extraordinary act to save them. It would be an act of extraordinary good, and conversely, it is not an act of evil to do nothing.
Power. The key is not creation and destruction but the use of power within that context. If you take food from a weaker individual and make them starve, when you have no need of that food, that is evil, we would all define it so. If you give food to those who need it, that is good. The use of power to benefit oneself at the detriment of a weaker person is evil.
Going back to the idea of creation and destruction and re-examining consumption, we can see that constant consumption with no creation benefits only the self. It is an abuse of the power we have over less fortunate, less powerful individuals. The previous idea of good and evil fits within the higher, newer, concept. It applies at the personal, and societal (country) level. Yet it can also be seen that the power here is marginal. It is inherent to society within which the individual exists and cannot be used easily for others. It is therefore a marginal act, one which borders more on the bad than the good, but cannot be strictly defined as evil.
Nietzsche would argue that a noble person would root out these evils on their life ruthlessly exposing them and eradicating them. He would say that in doing so, they would become less and less understood by general society. Imagne a person who cuts their food consumption to very low levels so as not to abuse the power they have. It would seem crazy to us. I think Nietzsche would smile knowingly.
I believe my definition of good and evil will change again in the future. For now it remains "use of power to benefit oneself over weaker, less powerful individuals is evil, to use it to benefit others is good". The power comes in many forms, some almost intangible (such as living in a society with constant food) and the level of badness of an action must be measured with respect to the level of power involved. An action isn't then all good or all evil in most cases, it sits, as most things in life, in an indefinable greyness between the blackness of evil and the whiteness of good.
I hope one day to move beyond these notions into a moral landscape where good and evil do not exist, where the very notion is considered foolish but as yet, I cannot.
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