Ask Lemmy

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.

What is good for the bird is evil for the worm

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.

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.

good and evil are just ideas. id say this image has negative value.

This feels reductive and semantically confused. 🤷

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 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.

Manichean. The problem is that evil has a tendency to grab power by the throat and never let go, which gives it the leverage to dominate good.

Whichever makes the story more interesting

Neither. The world started out all evil and is slowly transitioning to good.
Things we see as evil acts today were completely normal and accepted in history.
That's progress. And it's ongoing.

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'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.

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.)

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.

Torah teaches that God created human beings with both good and evil impulses. Human beings uniquely have knowledge of our drives and impulses and can learn to master them. The same needs that drive us to consume can lead us to overconsume or do so unethically. Our animal drive for safety and security can also lead us to attack perceived threats.

According to this philosophy, evil comes from people misdirecting divinely given attributes.

The idea of good and evil as absolute "powers" independent of human choices is foreign to many philosophies and theologies.

I think in the beginning there was only evil, now good exists as an absence of evil.