How do we define good and evil?

By Geoffrey Moore

Author – The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality

This is entry number three in our ongoing reply to Twenty Philosophical Questions That Are Hard to Wrap Your Head Around.? Here is the blurb that introduces it:

The intricacies of ethical standards vary across cultures and contexts add complexity to this ever-debated subject. This debate has been published on the Medium website:?The Philosophical Debate on the Nature of Good and Evil: Exploring the Boundaries of Morality ?offering various definitions and viewpoints, on what qualifies as good or evil conduct as well as the reasons and repercussions behind such behavior. The terms “good” and “evil” are often employed to discuss ethical actions. “Good” generally denotes behaviors that are considered upright such, as aiding others in speaking the truth, and avoiding harm. On the other hand, “evil” pertains to actions that are seen as incorrect like lying, cheating, or causing harm.

The blurb suggests that the key question at stake is what we define good and evil to mean, but I don’t think that is where the challenge lies.? Sure, there are grey areas that will give us pause, but the more interesting question to me is how we define good and evil.? Here’s what I mean.

In religious traditions, the way we define good and evil is relative to a divine being, either personalized as God or impersonally presented as Being or the Absolute.? Either way, it is the governing force for all life, and all living things need to align with it.? In this context, moral values are grounded in an objective and transcendent reality independent of humanity.? Our job is to engage with this reality as best we can, to experience its impact on our consciousness, and to shape our actions in ways that accord with its principles.

There is a lot to like in this tradition, not least of which is that it frees us from the soup of cultural entanglements involved with taking a more humanist relativist approach.? Historically, however, religious institutions, authorized to represent divine guidance, have repeatedly succumbed to corrupt appropriations of power and have used both doctrine and sacred texts to justify horrific actions, often at genocidal levels, in the name of religious war.? In Western cultural history, such wars were what gave rise to the Enlightenment and its insistence on separating church and state.?

One could wish we would have learned much from this movement, but contemporary theocracies, as well as demagogic politicians, show no signs of so doing, positioning themselves instead to be vehicles for patriarchal suppression, ethnic persecution, and terrorist acts.? Tolerance, far from being seen as a virtue, is faulted for failing to express appropriate outrage.? Spirituality is displaced by zealotry, benevolence by righteousness, and the opportunity to promote acts of evil skyrockets, something we are constantly forced to bear witness to around the world today.

What are we to do?? We cannot abandon ethics, for they are foundational to social stability, and we need standards of good and evil to guide ethical engagement.? If these standards are not to come from above, then where are they going to come from??

In The Infinite Staircase I argue they come not from above but from below.? The staircase as a whole traces the emergence of reality in layers, beginning with the materialist layers of physics, chemistry, and biology, transitioning to the evolutionary layers of desire, consciousness, values, and culture, culminating in the human-specific layers of language, narrative, analytics, and theory.? In this hierarchy of systems, good and evil emerge at the layer of values and get institutionalized via the layer of culture.? That is, they get defined prior to the emergence of humanity—how is that even possible?!

The answer is that good and evil, as we understand them, are embedded in the mammalian strategy of living.? That is, all mammals share two common values.? First, they are compelled to nurture their young, regardless of how much sacrifice that might entail.? From this comes the definitions of goodness that are centered on love, with evil being defined as violations of same.? Second, all mammals self-organize into communities of governance led by socially powered alpha figures, charged with maintaining both internal and external order and security. ?From this comes the definitions of goodness that are centered on virtue, with evil again being defined as violations of same.

Of course, as humans, we modify our mammalian roots through the higher-level mechanisms of language, narrative, analytics, and theory.? In so doing we create separate and conflicting traditions that can indeed make war upon each other.? But goodness and evil per se are universal.? We are all mammals first, and everything that separates us from one another emerges thereafter.?

We may bemoan this separation, but we should honor the fact that community, which is also inherent in our mammalian nature, by definition entails a boundary between them and us.? There is no community without that boundary.? Culture is an artifact of community, and it evolves separately in each of its instantiations.? Language, narrative, and analytics allow culture and community to transcend time and space, but at the end of the day there will always be a boundary that separates an us from a them.? How we reach across that boundary to interact with others outside our community is open to us to choose, but dissolving the boundary is not an option.

The key takeaway from this line of thinking is that our values are universal because they are founded in our mammalian roots.? Our ethics, on the other hand, are not universal because they are grounded in culture, which is specific to every community.? Good and evil belong to the domain of values.? Right and wrong belong to the domain of ethics.? The former calls for us to be courageous, the latter to be humble.? Many of us struggle most of our lives to get this right.

That’s what I think.? What do you think?

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