For many, the discussion of good and evil is part of an outdated discussion, of a remote past where ideas such as guilt or sin predominated. For others, it is a need for a time where strong rules are missed to ensure coexistence. Let us read what some and others have to say and draw conclusions.
Minimum review of a legendary discussion
Like almost all the great problems of philosophical thought, , we can trace the subject of good and evil back to ancient Greece, between the fourth and fifth centuries before our Christian era.
There are certain historical circumstances that explain the emergence of ideas. The way life is lived creates the conditions to be able to think about this or that problem. There is always a frame of reference that serves as a basis for what is possible to think.
The Greeks of that time confronted a very particular reality, they lived surrounded by peoples that in their eyes were ignorant, inferior or backward. They considered the need to understand the behaviour of these peoples and in the process developed their idea of good and evil.
It is no coincidence, then, that the Greek idea of good is associated with the virtues that the Greeks possessed and that they considered man transcendent. Nor is it a coincidence that these ideas were associated with the possession or not of certain knowledge. Knowledge was good and ignorance was evil.
It is important to note that at that time the ideas of good and evil did not have the theological connotations with which they began to think after the emergence of Christianity. It was not thought the good and evil related to any idea of transgression of a divine mandate, or as a reason for guilt or sin.
Aristotle.
All arts, all methodical inquiries of the spirit, the same as all our acts and all our moral determinations, seem to always have in view some good that we wish to achieve; and for this reason it has been exactly defined the good, when it has been said, which is the object of all our aspirations.
Moral to Nicomacheus{1} - book first, chapter first
Socrates.
There is only one good: knowledge. There is only one evil: ignorance.
A morality based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion.
I wish knowledge was of that kind of thing that flows from the container that is full to those that remain empty.
Kant and morale
In this brief tour on the evolution of the idea of good and evil it is important to stop at a fundamental author on this subject, Immanuel Kant.
Kant does not live the situation of the Greeks of the fourth century, his problem is not to give an answer to the ignorance of the peoples around him, as we had commented in the Greek case. Kant's problem is how to give a rational basis to thought. Let us remember that at the time of Kant there was a hard struggle to eliminate from the thought the theological contents that had been incorporated into the world of ideas during the Middle Ages.
So, Kant tried to create a kind of bridge and looked for a way to give a strongly rational content to religious ideas. He departs from the idea of good and evil that came from religious thought and places this discussion in the realm of reason. It argues that all human beings have an innate capacity to distinguish between good and evil, since the moral norm is an attribute of reason. In Kant, reason has a kind of immutable structure that is common and innate.
Kant places the discussion of good and evil in a perspective other than sin. For this author moral problems are not subject to interpretations but are imperatives of obligatory fulfillment inscribed in an idea of duty as an unappealable norm.
Goodwill is good not because of what it does or makes, not because of its aptitude to achieve some proposed end, but only because of its will, that is, it is good in itself, and considered by itself, it is to be estimated much more, without comparison, than anything that could ever be carried out by it in favor of some inclination, even, if you will, of the sum of all inclinations.
Foundation of the metaphysics of customs.
"I slept and dreamed that life was beauty; I woke up and warned that it is duty".
Friedrich Nietzsche. Farewell to morality
This brief review I will end with an author who revealed himself to the questions we have raised, especially those raised by Kant. Friedrich Nietzsche.
Nietzsche is a groundbreaking author. A man who reveals himself before the course that the European rational thought is taking, which he considers to be destructive to life. Nietzsche proposes a return to the natural, to a life without rigid moral norms, where human creativity can be widely deployed.
He is the creator of the relativism that has become very widespread in our time. For Nietzsche, the discussion of good and evil must be transcended since both ideas are relative, defined by each one from his personal perspective. He states that ideas of good are identified with the position of those who have them, so the powerful are good for them, and the "moral resentments" are good for them.
Moral Judgment
"The moral judgment has in common with the religious to believe in realities that are not. (...) Moral judgment, like religious judgment, corresponds to a level of ignorance in which the concept of the real, the distinction between the real and the imaginary, is still lacking; so that, at this level, the word "truth" simply designates things that we today call "imaginations.
Friedrich Nietzsche: "The Twilight of Idols
The problem of Socrates
"When one has the need to make reason a tyrant, as Socrates did, by force there is a no small danger that something other than it could become a tyrant. Then it was guessed that the reason was the savior, neither Socrates nor his "sick" were free to be rational (...). The moralism of the Greek philosophers since Plato has some pathological conditioning; and the same goes for their appreciation of dialectics. Reason = virtue = happiness simply means: we have to imitate Socrates and permanently implant, against dark appetites, a daylight - the light of reason. We must be intelligent, clear, lucid at any price: any concession to instincts, to the unconscious, leads downwards.
Friedrich Nietzsche: "The twilight of idols".
Beyond theory
As I see it, the issue of good and evil is much more than a theoretical problem, to be a discussion with which one entertains oneself in conversations of cafetines. In the twentieth century and so far in the twenty-first, humanity has lived through terrible events. How can we value the millions of deaths caused by war? I don't think that when faced with a situation like that, the answer could be: Does it depend? Does it depend on where you stand? Does it depend on the glass you use to look at it?
No, there are facts that threaten people's lives and dignity. These situations can only fall into the terrain of evil. Can a murder be seen as good? Can a rape of a person be seen as good? Can the hunger of peoples be seen as good? Can we leave our conscience alone by dispatching those answers with a dependency?
In our time we have wanted to relativize everything, but there are ideas that have a very important function to be able to coexist socially, among them, good and evil.
It may be that for some, like Nietzsche, they are castrators of the individual will, that they consider them arbitrary controls established by certain instances of power, I am not saying that there is no part of that present in the matter. But the man, thrown to the pure will, without moral norms that contain it, is no guarantee of survival.
Thank you for your time.
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