Why Good is Good and Bad is Bad, It's Origin and Nature
Good and evil are categories that a community has agreed upon. What one society allows can mean a rule violation in the other. This can be very useful because people are social beings who live in a group. There is no general definition of what is good and what is bad. Nevertheless, all people quickly fill these abstract terms with content. Content that is relevant to everyday reality which applies to all cultures.
It quickly becomes clear that it is better to be compassionate and to help others than to leave them to their suffering. Also, there seems to be little doubt that it is better to be fair than a scam. The truth is also preferred to the lie when it comes to naming the good. Everywhere you will quickly be able to agree on these and similar conventions. Everything is just an interpretation. Because just as there are no exact definitions for good or evil, neither are both concepts static. It can vary from situation to situation whether something is assessed as good or bad or bad.
Is it bad to lie?
As a rule, it is bad to lie. But there are moments when it may be appropriate to hide the truth. Maybe if it can save someone else's life. The white lie is less dramatic but much more common in use. Studies have shown that people do not take the truth up to 200 times a day, for example in order not to put the other person in an uncomfortable situation or even to hurt them.
What is certain, however, is that man has both good and evil within him. It is obvious that it makes more sense for human society to give priority to the good, that is, to treat each other peacefully. Everyone benefits from this because this is the only way to build a stable and future-oriented system. However, it is also correct that aggression as a variant of evil was already anchored in the first living beings that populated the earth. For many animals, killing meant survival by making prey or defending their territory.
In contrast, humans are the first and only species to make targeted use of aggression in the form of violence. The repertoire is as inexhaustible as it is brutal and sadistic at the same time. No other creature inflicts as much suffering on a fellow man as man. Be it to take revenge, to satisfy your own instincts or simply to exercise power over the other. It is also inconceivable in the animal kingdom that a group unconditionally follows a single animal in order to meet its killing requests. People do that. They go to war and annihilate each other.
Ethics
A wide variety of sciences have dealt with the question of good and evil. In ancient times it was the Greek thinker Aristotle who introduced ethics as an independent philosophical discipline. It deals with the values, norms and customs of society called morality. So what a society considers good or right. These social values are not set in stone, but only a mirror of their time.
Ethics guides people to use their minds to orientate their actions according to moral principles. You could also say that ethics provides people with an orientation in everyday life with other people, what is right, what is wrong? To make the right and wrong decisions, ethics provides two different tools, among other things.
Firstly, utilitarianism, according to which an action is good or right when it is useful. This contrasts with deontology, according to which it doesn't matter what is right or wrong. Because there are actions that are defined as wrong from the start and therefore must not be carried out. All moral values have one thing in common they are, without exception, abstract conventions of a community. Many of these values can also be found in the different religions. Here the good in the form of a god watches over the actions of men.
Grammar of morality
The natural sciences have also tried to fathom good and evil. There is much evil in this world. Billions of people have asked themselves the question of suffering over the centuries. Why do we have to suffer? Why is the world full of conflict and tragedy? And where does good and evil come from? Does good and evil really exist, or does it only exist in our imagination? Humans are living beings who can distinguish between good and evil in an ethical sense. Many traditional philosophers say that humans distinguish them from animals by the following factors.
In their behavior, animals follow instincts, instincts or learned reflex-like reactions to stimulus patterns. Psychology describes these learning processes as classic conditioning and as operant conditioning. Presumably they cannot weigh different options for action against each other and suppress an impulse to act because they know that they are harming themselves or others.
But how can we know what makes an option good or bad? Why is it good to help other people in an emergency? Why is it bad not to give away your own abundance when other people are in need? Why is it bad to physically or mentally torture other people or animals? Most people share certain norms helping others, not tormenting others. But there are people who disagree and think that one should. Mistreat animals or one may suppress or even kill people with another religion or one should not share with poor people.
There are many situations in which we find ourselves in an ethical dilemma. We have the choice to treat ourselves to a little luxury or to save for later or to donate our money to people in need. We have the choice to help a classmate in a crisis or to learn for the important school work in two days. What is the ethically better solution? There may be different correct answers to this.
How a person answers an ethical question in a specific situation depends on what he has learned in his life story. It depends on the culture in which he grew up. It depends on the experiences he has had in his life. It depends on role models.
Ethical Consensus
As a society, we are also dependent on finding central answers to central ethical questions. If this doesn't exist, a society breaks apart. This applies to small communities such as friends or groups or families. But this also applies to large communities such as states.
For a long time it was assumed that morality was something specifically human. An important question in this context is to what extent and how our brain is involved in our ethical reflections and decisions. The modern possibilities of watching the brain think and feel are giving rise to new approaches for thinking about this question. The question of how certain brain structures influence the personality and thus also the actions of people arises. In connection with violent criminals with a psychopathic personality structure. Neurology provides exciting insights into the interaction between biology, environment and personality traits such as empathy or inhibition of aggression.
Traditions on good and evil
An important task of social communities is to pass on important traditions from one generation to the next. Parents and adults teach children what values apply in the community and what behavior is desirable or undesirable. But young people also learn about stories to differentiate between good and bad or right and wrong.
The most original norms are probably taboos, especially the incest taboo and the killing taboo. In many societies, taboos also refer to certain times or to certain places. The great stories are also part of the means by which values and norms are passed on. They encompass everything that belongs to the general cultural property of a society. In our culture these are many biblical stories, the great stories of ancient Greece, many sagas or fairy tales or literary classics. Because these stories also convey an ethic by showing how prototypical characters behave in difficult situations, what mistakes they make, how they prove themselves. By getting to know them and, in part, identifying with them, we also adopt part of the ethical message.
Media and educational institutions mediate sometimes very directly, sometimes more indirectly, about language and what they choose or leave out norms and values. This is one of the reasons for the discussion about a non-discriminatory language or about groups of people that hardly appear in textbooks.
What parents, grandparents, educators and role models exemplify have a great influence on the development of values and ethical convictions among young people. Whether reading or good quality food or mobility or financial independence or religiousness is something important for young people, they learn first of all from what adults do or don't do in their environment.
Religions definition of good and evil
Religions derive good and evil from powers beyond or from an eternal order above man. The goal of life is also defined religiously. Christianity, for example, knows many aspects and layers of good and evil in a moral sense. God communicates ethical rules and principles to people either by addressing them directly, or by sending them his messages about chosen people or prophets. The most important ethical document is the 10 commandments that God gives his people on their way through the Sinai desert.
To this day, they are at the core of Jewish and Christian ethics. Adhering to them would be what constitutes an ethically good life in the Christian sense. There are new accents in Christianity through Jesus and what he preached and exemplified, and interpretations by different ecclesiastical authorities such as church teachers or religious leaders
In the religious sense, ethical evil is logically everything that contradicts and violates the divine commandments. Theologically it is not easy to explain why people do this. It is an aspect of the so-called theodicy problem. On the one hand, it is associated with a destructive counterforce to God, the devil, Satan, seducer. On the other hand, evil should also be an expression of human freedom, which is essentially the freedom to choose between good and evil that is, sin. Evil would therefore be the price of freedom.
The Old Testament is full of stories of people who violate God's commandments and choose evil in its way. It all starts with the myth of Adam and Eve, who let themselves be seduced by the snake and violate the divine prohibition, from the tree the knowledge of good and evil, and as a consequence become mortal and have to leave the paradise garden. In the story of Cain, who kills his brother Abel, the first murder, a particularly shameful fratricide is told.
It continues with the story of the deluge with which God punishes sinful people. Only the righteous Noah, his relatives and a few animals with whom God has pity survive this mega catastrophe. Or there is the story about the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah , which are destroyed by God because the people living in them sin and have forgotten God. Or there are stories about the sins of big minds such as King David, who sleeps with Bathsheba, the wife of his general Uriah, and has him himself underhandedly killed.
In religious ethics, good and bad are concepts that are ultimately transcendent. They are always related to a transcendent instance, an eternal law or a god, whose will, whose creation. God communicates the laws of good and evil to people, people have to accept this divine ethics.
Unlike in secular thinking - on which, for example, the idea of human rights is based - ethics in religious thinking is not purely from this side. Because its core is set and defined by a higher power, this core is also not negotiable or democratically decidable. The only negotiable question is what this core consists of and how it should be understood in concrete terms.
Country to good and evil
Whether and to what degree states should and may define what is good and what is bad is controversial. One pole is formed by very liberal positions, which say that states should be ethically neutral. They should not interfere in people's lives and values and make regulations for their lifestyle. Because that contradicts the principle of freedom and maturity of independent, adult people.
The opposite pis represented by positions that the state should make good mandatory through its laws and, where possible, sanction bad. He can do this indirectly through criminal law. Or he can create appropriate incentive systems. These positions are called paternalistic because the state has a quasi parental / educational position.
But however one positions oneself between these poles, on a very basic level, every state must define by law what is legally binding in its sense for all people in its sphere of influence and what everyone must therefore accept. And on a very principled level, a constitutional state that does not want to endanger itself must define and defend very basic principles. Above all, this includes the rule of law, democracy and fundamental human rights.