the great debate

 "The question of good and evil remains in irremediable chaos for those who seek to fathom it in reality. It is mere mental sport to the disputants, who are captives that play with their chains."

The dichotomy of “good and evil” has troubled humanity since the very first civilizations, and it has bothered philosophers even longer. The chaos apparent is in part due to its scope; “good and evil”, as it stands, is not a simple, singular question and should not be treated as such. Semantically, it is not a question at all, it is a common collocation, like “land and sea” or “birth and death”; but unlike these physical antitheses, “good and evil” seems to lack a verifiable scientific construct, and it is left to those with little else but time and lube on their hands to ponder the various vagaries the words imply. The very phrasing of the statement places me, disputant, in manacles, disparaging my admiration for the chain work.

Pretty chain work it is. To analyze good and evil, separately or in opposition, we must first abstract them from reality, to the hypothetical “ultimate good” and “ultimate evil.” This is analogous to the Platonic world of mathematics; the “perfect square” may not exist in the real world, but mathematicians must assume it exists regardless of whether it can be reproduced in reality. So it is with good and evil, eros and thanatos, God and Satan. Here, the would-be philosopher promptly hits a stumbling block. Many of us have only the vaguest concept of “ultimate good”, and while humanity is sharper at condemnation than accreditation, and the depravity of humankind is not to be taken lightly, when considered dispassionately “ultimate evil” is really as unreachable as ultimate good. Therefore we accept this as we accept the impossibility of constructing a perfect 90˚angle.

Continuing in the Ancient Greek tradition, we now should try to find examples of the closest approximation to each extreme occurring in nature.  This presents an even greater hurdle fraught with social, ethical, and moral minefields. Even through an anal retentive system of quantification, we can never truly know how close any thought, word or deed is to the concept of ultimate good or ultimate evil. The common solution to this is to redefine “good” and “evil” as mere perceptions of the human mind, not existing externally but present only to the extent that we consider them to be present. “for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” This is convenient and seems, at face value, to make ‘common sense’ particularly in terms of our self-involved culture, but it places the thinker in a quandary regarding the ultimate good / ultimate evil hypothesis. It supposes that there is no such thing; the “ultimate truth” is, like relative perceptions of good, bad, and evil, a figment of the human mind.

Moral relativism, of itself, has a vast array of anthropological support- there do factually exist wide-ranging differences in moral decision-making across cultures. It also has laboratory studies to back it- the famous Zimbardo prison experiment and the Milgram shock experiment both seem to indicate that environment shapes our understanding of what is acceptable behavior. Another satisfyingly scientific conjecture is that human designs of “good” and “evil” are biologically determined. Brain imaging of institutionalized psychopaths shows deficiencies in amygdala function as well as other structural ‘abnormalities’. Oxytocin release in the brain prompts feelings of love and generosity. For completeness sake I include that beyond the individual, morality makes an evolutionary logic (although most evolutionary explanations should be heavily seasoned with skepticism as they are all post-hoc  rationale).

However, if we believe in the metaphysical “ultimate good” and “ultimate evil”, differences in considerations of good and evil occur because we do not perceive good and evil precisely or perfectly.

This is a trap. One should never make the mistake of assuming that one’s own culture or personal viewpoint is normative. On the contrary, this view holds that “good” and “evil” as they ought to be, do not exist to be perceived; that is, we cannot observe them in any existing culture. So then, you ask, (I heard you) what relevance, pray tell, has this for real life good and evil? What can we take from this masturbatory cognition to apply to, say, the Nazis, or serial killers, or rapists?  The answer is, of course, nothing. All this, when adequately thought about, has zero real-world value.

As of yet, the truth about “good and evil” is not known. For the present moment, we content ourselves with the idea that it exists in entropy somewhere in the median of the didactic absolutes presented here. In that sense it is chaos, in the ‘chaos theory’ sense, possessing an order unmappable by current systems.

And I play with my chains.