This is day #13 of 30 days of blogs on philosophy. I will continue to attempt to provide answers to some big life questions as a learning exercise.
Yesterday, I started to write an answer to the question, “What is Evil?” and I found myself holding back. Worrying about if I actually knew what I was talking about. I felt the urge to read more instead of writing out my thoughts; to go and collect some other opinions. Then armed with the answers of others I could feel safer about my opinion. I could avoid thinking for myself in some ways, and avoid the risk of putting out an opinion that I would later look back on as “not well thought out”. I wrote my post, but I didn’t feel satisfied.
Yesterday, while I was thinking over the question I drew out to spectrums, to try and help myself think about the difference between good and evil, and the difference between evil and just simply wrong.
I looked and them and thought, to myself that’s not right. Are shades the only difference between good and evil? Is it subjective, or is it more black and white?
Something more like this:
I certainly don’t have the most refined understanding of Evil. But given how I think about it, and how I hear it used, it seems to be something close to extremely wrong.
Taking candy from the bulk section of a grocery store is theft. It isn’t evil, though.
Stealing poor families Christmas presents on December 24th is also theft, but seems a lot more evil. It has a sadistic quality about it, a void of humanity. Like some fundamental tenant of a person’s humanity must be lost for them to do something like that.
I can feel like I’m getting closer to an answer, but then things get murky. Initially, you could think that all murder is evil. Murder being killing someone, not in self-defense. Killing someone who is trying to kill you is certainly not murder. But, what about killing someone who assaulted your mother. Is that a response to aggression against you? No, not really. I would call that murder, but I struggle to call that evil.
So the position I end up landing on is that Evil is not the darkest shade on a spectrum of good to evil. Instead, it is a shade on a spectrum from wrong to evil. Theft is theft regardless of the scale, and it is wrong regardless of the scale. But it can be more or less evil. Murder is wrong regardless of the scale, but there are instances where it seems much less evil, than others.
Do you agree? Is there something you think I need to read about the issue? Let me know in the comments.
Leave a Reply