Good and Evil

[AdamLOV]

Hi dahrling (I can't type that without thinking of Black Adder Goes Fourth),

Now, the question here is: are good and evil truly points of view?

Yes, they can be nothing else as ethics are subjective. From my perspective, I navigate the grey areas using definitions of the 'harm' that might result from action/inaction.

Is there anyway to define good and evil in an universal sense - a definition that everyone, from every culture, can agree on?

I'd argue that there's no such thing as 'absolutely' good or evil, once again due to the subjectivity of ethics. I don't like the terms 'good/evil' as they polarise thinking and trick people into using broad classifications which detract from deep consideration of the questions at hand. I'd ask you to consider if anyone can really be 'absolutely' evil (did Genghis Khan love his mother, for example)? So for me, you could define the terms however you like but since they don't add value to my ethical framework, I won't use them. Consequently, universal acceptance is impossible.

And is being "selfless" truly a good thing - what makes it so? It may be "good" for others, but is it good for you? And is being selfish then "evil"? Putting your own desires and necessities first? Is there a limit to it? A line?

It's a trade-off. A certain amount of selflessness is a good thing. I'd suggest that someone who acts with no selflessness at all would risk doing harm to themselves and others (for example, being unkind to others therefore being socially excluded to their detriment). To the corollary, someone who acts only with selflessness would risk doing harm to themselves (for example, not defending themselves against attack). So there's a balance which can be struck both personally and socially.

Also, take for example someone who is a Muslim and defends his/her book of teaching by saying that the evils it presents (like how a little girl was wed to Muhammad when she was only 6 years old, and how their marriage was consummated when she 9) were considered "correct" or "acceptable" at the time they happened. How does one respond to this? How can we argue against this if good and evil aren't universal truths, if they are only based on culture?

As intimated above, I argue the harm. A non-consenting child being traded, as property, to an adult for social and sexual gratification is harmful. It may have been 'accepted' at the time, by the local culture, but it was still causing harm and people would likely have known it (I wonder how many of Aisha's female relatives would have felt sorrow at the transaction?). The trade-off was that the benefits to Mohammed were a greater consideration than the harm done to Aisha. In a 21st C, UK context, we would grant (in law) the lack of consent to be the overriding consideration, given that we honour individual rights to personal autonomy and freedom of expression (it's a shameful thing, indeed, to own another). Since the transaction resulted from an ethical framework based upon patriarchal, misogynistic, bigoted slave ownership, I would say that it was unethical.

The claim that mysogynistic and patriarchal belief systems are immoral is a strongly normative stance. One may be of the opinion that such norms are unacceptable, but one cannot objectively prove their demerit vis-a-vis, say, misandryous and/or matriarchal social systems. I am not saying misogyny and misandry are the only choices available to societies, but it nevertheless seems to be the case that social systems tend to harm either men or women disproportionately. It could even be argued that so-called patriarchal societies have harmed men in greater proportion and to a greater degree than they have harmed the interests of women. Furthermore, I fail to see the connection between Islam and the purported harming of women's interests. One could argue that the veil protects women from the unwanted advances of men. In order to ascertain whether Islam really does lead to misogynous discrimination of women, we would need access to unbiased surveys of women living in Muslim countries, and even then we would not be completely sure that such polls tell the whole story. In short, the issue is a bit more complex than is regularly supposed.

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If what is good for the virus is not good for me as a human, then there cannot be a greater good that connects both of us. There is simply no common ground between the good of a deadly virus and the good of a human individual…there simply cannot be any overarching "good" that would transcend the individual interests of the components of the system… Conflict, in other words, is the rule, and we cannot discern a "right" and "wrong" side in absolute terms.

I never claimed there was an overarching moral code that applies to every component of the physical universe, from electrons to elephants. You cannot draw such an absurd conclusion from my examples. There is no right or wrong kind of triangle. There are however better or worse examples of a triangle.
The same applies to humans. The average army ranger is a better man, i.e. more discerning, emotionally in control, and physically fit, than I am on my best day. It is not a moral question to discern how well a person displays the essence of what it means to be human. The moral question is whether the choices people make take them closer to or further away from their humanity: rational and loving animals.
Suppose someone substituted the concept of wise/foolish for right/wrong. Would their choices be any different? No, because anyone can see that making wise choices are what bring someone closer to his or her humanity and anyone can see that that is good.

Since the thread has already correctly discounted pure essentialism as adequate fount for ethics, we now see why science, which does so well at questions of nature, is nearly helpless before questions of value.

If based on the critique by AdamLOV, your dismissal in premature.

Why would the question of whether a human plays the "role" of human assigned to him/her by "essence" (whatever that means) be of greater importance than the performativity of a virus? If the wise choice were to consist in behaving according to one's own nature, then it is still incomprehensible why the survival of a human being should matter more than the self-replication of a virus. Furthermore, if we understand the human to be a kind of virus, a destrictive infestation whose purpose in life seems to be solely self-reproduction, why would the continued survival and reproduction of such a destructive species constitute a moral "good"? So what if humans are capable of "attaining their human potential"? Any creature is capable of realizing some kind of potentiality. This still does not exclude the possibility of mutually-exclusive potentialities. There morality must be considered relative after all. It matters a lot to myself whether I realize my own potential, but for salmom swimming in the Atlantic Ocean, my self-realization may even be an ecological burden, an obstacle to the realization of their own fish-potential.

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So as to really annoy believers in truth, I would also like to throw in a quote from Michel Foucault:

"'Truth' is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, circulation and of operation of statements. 'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A 'regime' of truth."

While I find Foucault's logocentrism disagreeable, the quote captures nicely the conundrums relating to the question of truth.