[Serious] The Good

[Angrboda]

I think it was Augustine who initially argued that evil is the privation of good, largely on the basis of God's inherent morality. I'm not sure it has any foundation outside of theism that can be defended. I know that Neo has argued that evil is simply privation of what is otherwise the function of a thing in its completeness. However, in order to draw that conclusion outside of theism one would need a conception of function which is not essentially teleological, i.e. function for some specific goal or end, and I rather doubt that can be achieved. That would seem to leave a non-theist without any defense of the concept of evil as the privation of good. As far as the theist goes, in reading Augustine, it occurs to me that God might create evil that is not the privation of good if he had a sufficiently compelling moral reason for doing so (or a practical one; possible worlds comes to mind). So, that would ultimately make evil itself a good thing, but not in the way that Augustine and theists intend, and thus probably results in a necessary equivocation if one tries to assert that evil, despite being created, is actually good.