can good possibly exist without evil?
 

well, that's just it. Is it possible for good to exist without evil? I am working on an argumentative paper explaining that God does not have Aseity (he does not exist indipendantly of anything else) and it seems to me that God cannot exist without some sort of Evil out there whether it be the Christian's Satan or anything else. I was hoping to even suggest the idea that God might even contain some sort of bad and/or evil if the claim that God has aseity is something that someone will choose to bite the bullet on.

Do metaphorical concepts cease to exist if they don't have opposites? I say no. Assuming you have a definition for what "good" and/or "evil" means, it can exist without the other side of the coin.

God existed before Lucifer and his merry band of followers revolted and tried to overtake heaven....He was not "evil" in the beginning he became that way.

So I would say that God did indeed exist with no evil

Sure good can exist without evil. Consider the nature of the two -- evil is parasitic on good. No person ever commits an evil act for the sake of evil, but for the sake of some good. For example, someone might do something evil for the sake of money, or for the pleasure. But people do perform good deeds merely for the sake of good -- not because it gives them pleasure or otherwise benefits them. Or, looking at it another way, good is a prerequisite for evil. You can't commit an evil action without having some good thing. Power is the easiest example here. You have to have some power to do something evil, but power is itself a good. So we can see that evil cannot exist without good, but the relationship is asymmetrical. So good can exist without evil.

but good and evil are relational terms. one implies the other. i dont think the question is whether at any given point you can imagine someone acting entirely "for the good" but more whether one can have the good without its opposite.

the story of the fall would have you think no:
but the complication is that the story is more about free will, which cannot be exercized without the possibility existing of the rules being broken--without that, there is no choice, and without choice no free will (which exists in practice, not in principle). so without an opposition good/evil there can be no free will.
without evil, good cannot be defined, and vice versa.

I don't think that's true. People do in fact do good because it gives them pleasure or otherwise benefits them. If people are doing things that don't give them pleasure or otherwise benefit them, that would be insane. Literally.

I was going to say that crazy people can do evil with no gain, but then I realized that it would suit their crazy logic, ie do them good. Very interesting point!

My personal view (before entering this thread) is that good cannot exist without evil, one implies the other, as suggested. I'm sure I could be considered evil next to Gandhi, but still more people could be considered more evil than me - this makes me good. In a perfect world, where I was the least good person alive, would not many consider me evil? Then again, they'd also be evil for thinking less of me... Now my brain hurts :(

To make a quote from the Earth X comics (I'm such a nerd!):
"...There is no good to be countered by evil. There is only a struggle. There is merely a power play between beings. Good and evil are hollow adjectives. And therefore, the outcome of these struggles is inconsequential and irrelevant to all. There is not a moment in these heroes' histories which amounts to anything. Their every battle is a victory rooted in vanity. Every life saved is a part of some self-serving crusade to undo the effects of the inevitable."
X-51
(but then again, in Earth X, emotions are just a safety function instilled on us by aliens, to keep the human race within certain parameters :eek:)

charlie brown liked cookies
 

actually, your logic here is supporting the opposite from what you conclude. :orly: . If God were to exist without another being one could question his credibility of only functioning as completely good as evil exists and if God did create everything then he must have also created evil. One might say that Satan became evil. My response to that would be that God did create satan and if satan was created by God, then God created evil as he is supposed to be omnipotent (all knowing) and would have known of this evil. I believe that this leaves us with two choices. If God were all good then there must have been another completely evil being existing as long as God because we shouldn't pin the problem of evil on God. Another option is to state that God is not completely good and that he also has an evil side to him (I do not wish to believe this but there is a scripture out there for you Bible-beaters out there that states that God is a jealous God; I believe that jealously is not a good characteristic and alot of evil comes about from it). I dont want to offend anyone but this is where logic takes me. According to epistemeology we can't know anything so if you dont want to believe all this go for that argument. To reiterate, if good cannot exist without evil we have the problem (problem for christianity, don't know about islam) of God not creating all things and he not being a being that posesses Aseity (existing in and of itself, existing with no need for anything else, existing by no cause of another). If God did create all things then there is the problem of Evil and how Evil was created by God himself. One might argue that God could have created a being that turned evil. The problem here is that why would a perfect being with only good around him allow Evil to inflict pain on the good around him? Also, I hold the opinion (one of which I cannot think of a good argument to support this opinion at the moment) that something that is completely and perfectly good cannot have anything spawn from this completely and perfectly good thing to be maleovelent or bad. I hope all this makes sense. Tell me what you think.

I get what you're saying. Keeping gods out of the mix, and paraphrasing a little bit: If something is by definition perfect, does this not imply that everything that is derived from it is also perfect?
(actually, my paraphrasing makes it sound less certain, I think. I need sleep :p)

Maybe there is no absolute good or evil, only a huge gray area?

Merely because two terms are opposites doesn't mean that one can't exist without the other. For example, you could have light without darkness or darkness without light. And I don't see why you couldn't have the good without its opposite. It may be true that you cannot have good without the possibility of evil (though I would argue that this would be the case if God had not created). But that is merely because good is capable of gradation, so its existence entails the possibility of things having different grades. But this does not imply that the existence of good entails the existence of such things. Possibility is not the same thing as existence.

the basis of this is simple enough, so maybe we might shift gears for a minute:

it depends on whether you believe that meanings are the reflections of forms or not.
if you do believe in such forms, then your argument follows.
if you dont, then mine does.

this is not a chicken-egg argument either: it comes down to how you understand meanings to come about--whether they are effectively divine creations or if you see them as historical in some way. when it comes to referencing data or scenarios, both lend themselves equally to abstractions that are pushed back into some mythical prehistory--so it is a matter of dispositions, how you approach the question, what assumptions you bring to it.

I think the problem with your line of reasoning is that it doesn't really answer the question -- the question already presumes the reification of good and evil. If you mean to make the linguistic claim that *we* couldn't have developed the concept of good without also developing the concept of evil, I would tend to agree with you. We live in a world that contains both things generally described as good and things described as evil, and given the obvious relation between the two concepts, it would be very strange if one developed independently of the other.

However, I don't think that's what people usually mean when they ask this sort of question. Rather than the linguistic* question, they mean to ask the ontological question of Good existing without Evil. And as I mentioned, this presumes some sort of existence of the two concepts independent of language. I don't think either the question or my answer to it requires some sort of platonic existence of the Good, and I really hope it doesn't, since I don't believe in that any more than you do.

*I'm sorry about the use of the word 'linguistic', since I'm sure there's a better word I'm just not thinking of. I hope you won't hold it against me.

asaris:

o boy. either i say something kinda glib or i write at some length about ontology and linguistic forms. and i have to take my increasingly impatient husky for a walk. so let me swat the ball back to you in the interim:

i don't understand what you mean when you say ontology in a manner that is opposed to how the categories of good and evil have come to be/function for us---particularly if you want to avoid one or another version of a notion of platonic forms. maybe you could explain the position a bit more (please) and i can take my increasingly impatient husky out and then we can see where we land/have landed/will land.

Well, I'm about to go out drinking, so I'll try and come up with something tomorrow. But does it help if I say I'm basically an Aristotelian about properties?

This question essentially boils down to semantics. It is certainly the case that we (as a society) would not refer to good things as "good" in the absence of the things we now consider to be evil. The terms are relative, as Roachboy said. Even so, I don't understand why good actions would cease to be good actions simply because we no longer recognized them as such, unless...

The second consideration is how it would come to be possible for only good actions to be performed. This could become the state of affairs if human action became determined and we had no choice but to perform "good" acts. In the absence of meaningful choice, the good acts accomplish no less good than before, but the agent deserves no moral praise for his "good" action, so it looks like the label of goodness might itself be misplaced in this example.

The other possibility is that humans might always freely choose to do good. But again, this requires that at least the possibility of evil exists, even if evil itself does not. In this scenerio, good actions would still be morally praiseworthy because the agent could have chosen otherwise.

In sum, linguistic terms do not generally refer to properties possessed by everything, as these terms would essentially be useless. If every existent thing is voon, the term voon is a useless descriptor. Likewise, if everything in the world is good, the linguistic terms of good and evil would no longer be used. Whether that entails the demise of "Goodness Itself" is another question, and not a particularly well-defined one at that.

nice post, politicophile. it does more or less what i would like to think my husky-interrupted one would have.

a couple of questions:

this would be a space for argumentation--politics in a sense. for example, marx's critique of capitalist alienation is an ethical critique that emerged from and looped back into a broader political project. it seems to me that any political project rests on ethical claims, at one level or another. whether they present them as amenable to debate or as functions of some "natural law" is a matter of the dispositions particular to the folk who generate the project. personally, i view ethical claims as arguments.

2 and 3 seem to outline the story of the fall.

with the last sentence of the summary, we are kind of back where we started from tho: if i understand what asaris was arguing, the problem is whether there is a "good in itself"---i dont see how it could be argued that there is something like that--but asaris presented it as leaning on a type of ontological claim that does not involve a doctrine of forms--maybe i am thinking about all this too much through a language-base framework--but i dont see it.

Good-In-Itself, eh? But not in the Platonic sense? To tell you the truth, I'm not even sure what the Good-In-Itself would consist of, barring some kind of Form-like role. Good, as I see it, is a social concept denoting favored objects and actions. I think we can all agree that good and evil are opposite poles of a normative scale for evaluating [actions, decisions, etc]. With this in mind, I don't understand what a Good-In-Itself would be. Normative concepts exist only in the minds of those who use such concepts to rank entities in some kind of hierarchy. And as I said earlier, when all possible entities possess the trait of one of the poles of such a hierarchy, the hierarchy itself ceases to exist.

You people are so religious, it's amazing.

Please explain though, are you talking a about "God" here (god without evil) - or good. It's unclear, and there's surely a big difference.

The concept of good cannot exist without the concept of evil.
IMOgood: chocolate, coffee, our environment.
IMOevil: making stuff up to deceive yourself or others, pretending that some(body)thing outside yourself is doing this to you, not enjoying your life.:love:

I think a problem with this question is that it seems to have a predefined parameter. It is based on binary oppositional thinking, and I have always found that thinking in twos is dangerous. Why is it that good and evil are even positioned as polar opposites, as if these are the two only possibilities in this scenario? Maybe you just need good people to do nothing for so called evil to exist, but that is not to say that one exists because of the other. Is indecision a good or evil thing? Is fear? Is making a uniformed choice is also a possibility? Are unintended consequences good or evil? Neither concept is universal, absolute, or clear and I don't think you need one for the other to exist. It is like saying there is no gray area or there are no other colors, just black and white. It is also like saying neither bleeds into the other or informs the other. To think this is to limit both the discussion and one's thinking.

When you're discussing conceptual opposites, it is necessarily the case that neither pole would exist in the absence of something different with which it can contrast. So, the concept of "big" is meaningful only if we also have the concept of "small", as big and small are meaningful descriptors only relative to each other. Thus, if every object in the world were "big", we would never use the concepts of big and small because they would become meaningless.

By analogy, if everything in the world were good, we would not use the terms "good" and "evil" because they would be similarly content-less. This need in no way imply that all decisions fall neatly into the polar opposites of good and evil. Rather, the middle ground, as it were, can exist only between the two poles. The absence of the evil pole, then, necessarily collapses into the absence of a middle ground.

Exactly :) If good existed without evil, then we wouldn't have developed the concept "good" to describe it because it would just be normal behavior.