[Serious] Good vs Evil

[Angrboda]

How do you define good and evil?

Something is morally good if it reduces or ceases suffering and something is morally bad if it increases or initiates suffering. And I think that 'evil' is too loaded of a word to be useful to ethics.

My ethics group discussed Bentham's ideas yesterday. Apparently, morality is measure according to the dyad of pleasure and pain. An increase of the former or decrease of the latter. I think many people would be sympathetic to that assessment. I have my doubts whether pleasure is the driving motivator in any behavior. My theory is that we are driven by pain avoidance and so you can drop the seeking of pleasure out of the calculus without loss, as you have done. It's not that I'm confident that pleasure has no role, so much as I just haven't found out how to make it accord with behavior that is primarily driven by pain avoidance, and pain avoidance seems primary. Pleasure as a motivator seems more of a post hoc explainer than anything.

A couple useful points from our meeting.

In Bentham's framework, pleasure and pain are all encompassing, if someone does something, then according to Bentham, it must have been motivated by one or the other. Which makes the definition of Bentham's morality a bit hollow. Everything satisfies Bentham's framework because Bentham asserts that, definitionally, everything fits his framework.

The other point, mine, as a good Taoist who knows the chapters which assert that pain exists because pleasure exists, beauty, because ugliness exists, and so on, suggests that you can define the motivations as either consisting only of pleasure seeking or only as pain avoidance. For example, suppose that I observe that someone is motivated to get a college degree so that they can get a better job and live a better quality of life. That would seem to be seeking pleasure, without question. Yet one can turn that around and say that the person is seeking a degree so that they can avoid the pain of spending the rest of their lives serving fast food at McDonald's. Ultimately it is simply arbitrarily definitional. That seems to happen a lot with hedonist ethics. The definitions start doing more work than the original intuition when you start defining things such as "being virtuous" as something motivated and meaningfully consisting of pleasure. That's probably a side effect of the fact that, philosophically, hedonistic ethics is a zero sum game. Any thing that can't be explained as a function of pleasure or pain counts as a big strike against the moral theory. So the motivation is to exclude the possibility that there may be more to life than pleasure and pain. When you do that, you end up with such a distorted definition of pleasure and pain that the original intuition about morality consisting of a calculus involving the two becomes strained and difficult to maintain without a charge of equivocation.