Good and Evil

[Mudhammam]

I might not be following, but let that not stop me from adding a comment.

Things can be objectively good, but the context in which things are judged good cannot.  Something is good which achieves or contributes to a good goal; and that good goal is judged to be a good goal because it is necessary for a greater, also good, goal.  Things obviously required for life might be considered objectively good, since the desire to live is a goal applied to mankind before it even was mankind-- i.e. the nature of evolution itself-- to allow persistent patterns to persist-- may be called an objective morality.

However, even with this, you cannot transcend that context: the context in which humanity, life, and the process of evolution on Earth matter.  You cannot really say that existence matters-- of individual entities or even of the universe.

I suspect there is a religious vestige in the idea that ANYTHING is objectively good.  There is the assumption that since the universe (maybe deterministically) tended to arrive at the existence of life, then it was an objective process that led to the existence of subjective perspectives, and that ultimately, all morality is therefore object in some sense.  However, is it good for the universe to exist rather than not to exist?  Yes, we are tempted to answer-- because this was necessary for the existence of life, which we've already established to be good.

But there's a vicious circle here, isn't there?

If things can be objectively good, then why couldn't there be a context in which things are judged good? It would require a context that approaches "good" in the same manner that "objective truth" is ascertained---gathering information from the senses and coining definitions to which we can apply seemingly irrefutable conceptual relationships between a body of "facts." Of course, as we move from individuals to species and then to the entire history of the world, the "end" may be more difficult to define with precision and certainty, but this is only to be expected and allowed. I don't think our inability to say that existence---in the hypothetical context of 100 trillion years from now---matters in any real sense, restricts us from saying that existence now, or as it very reasonably may relate to the foreseeable future, whether that's a context that involves our grandchildren or our great-great-great-great-great grandchildren, matters, and moreover, matters more than an iota of anything else that could be said to be at all meaningful to sentient beings, present or sure to be in the approaching days, weeks, months, years, decades, and even centuries. We can try to diminish ourselves in the pursuit of truth as much as possible, and to the extent that this proves fruitful in satisfying our vain curiosities, I think it ought to be sought after, but when it---in what you call a vicious circle---diminishes the very pursuit, and the object of truth, itself, rendering both to be nothing short of absurd and worse, even less dignified than the designation of falsehood since we have no basis for claiming anything to be true or false, i.e. in any context outside of our own mental citadels, I think it may be safe to say that we have gone terribly awry. And speaking of vicious circles, didn't the philosophizing of certain presocratics lead them to conceive of god as an eternal sphere? 

Btw, I didn't respond to this earlier because I was hoping my discourse with Pyrrho would shed some light on my views, but with regards to your question that: 

Someone gave the example of antibiotics.  A course of antibiotics will kill more organisms (like trillions I guess) than it will save.  So are antibiotics good or evil?

It seemed to me to be the type of "dilemma" I've heard unthinking theists raise with respect to positing pleasure (which is almost immediately associated with the most base form of hedonism in their minds) as an end in which to place objective goods, which goes something like, "Is it then wrong to cut open a little girl's stomach with a large blade because it will cause her pain" (Even though the person wielding the sharp object is a physician about to perform a life-saving operation)? Antibiotics are good because the killing of trillions of mindless (and most assuredly unfeeling), microscopic organisms is not destroying any form of life that can be comparable in any sense to the well-being of sentient (let alone rational) creatures (a view which I would similarly hold in the case of abortions).

P.S. I don't mean to imply that your question was silly, or on par with "unthinking theists." I think it's a valid point you raised, asked from a place of goodwill, but not too difficult to swat down, and not particularly pertinent to the question of whether anything really is good.