Good and Evil

Plato refuses both the relativism of the sophists and the reductionism of those who identify the good with pleasure, maintaining instead that the Good is a real and objective Form, the highest of all realities, more fundamental in dignity and power than being itself. Against those who hold that good is whatever each person or city takes it to be, Plato argues that such variability could never yield the standard by which wise men distinguish what men should seek from what they in fact do seek.

In the Republic, Socrates compares the Good to the sun. As the sun gives visible things both their existence and the light by which the eye sees them, so the Good gives intelligible realities their being and enables the mind to grasp them. It is "not only the author of knowledge to all things known, but of their being and essence." The Form of the Good is not one good thing among others; it is what makes every other thing good and knowable, so that all genuine goodness in the world is a participation in this Form.

Evil, on this account, is not a rival principle or an independent force. No one, Plato insists, does wrong willingly; whoever acts badly does so through ignorance, mistaking a lesser good for a greater one. The soul that truly apprehends the Good cannot fail to pursue it. This identification of virtue with knowledge, and of vice with ignorance, is Plato's most distinctive moral teaching, and the philosophical life, conceived as an ascent toward the vision of the Good, is proposed as the remedy for the evil that proceeds from such ignorance.

Plato establishes the classical terms of the inquiry: good is real, objective, and intelligible; evil is privation or error. Aristotle will contest the claim that virtue is simply knowledge, arguing that it cannot account for weakness of will, the condition of the person who sees what is good and yet chooses otherwise. That disagreement between Platonic intellectualism and Aristotelian moral psychology runs through much of the subsequent tradition. The question of whether evil has positive being or is merely privative is treated more fully in the chapters on BEING and on SIN.

Aristotle turns the Platonic Form of the Good toward the more particular question of what the good is for man. The good, he observes at the outset of the Nicomachean Ethics, is said in many ways, and there is no single Form shared by all the things we call good; each kind of thing has its own proper good, relative to its nature and function. The good of a craftsman's tool differs from the good of a political community, and neither is captured by an abstract Form standing apart from all particular goods.

For human beings, Aristotle argues, the good is the activity of the soul in accordance with reason and virtue, and if there is more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete. This good is eudaimonia, translated as happiness or flourishing: not a feeling or a momentary pleasure but the full and active life of a person exercising the excellences of character and intellect over the course of a complete life. Aristotle is attentive to what this requires: external goods, good fortune, and time are all necessary for flourishing; a single day of noble action does not make a man happy.

Evil, on this view, consists in the failure of such flourishing. The vicious person has not simply made an intellectual error; he has allowed his desires and pleasures to be miseducated, so that they pull him toward actions contrary to his own good. Habit, circumstance, and the quality of early education bear heavily on whether a person develops the dispositions that constitute virtue or those that constitute vice. The question of the relation between knowledge and virtue, disputed between Plato and Aristotle, is taken up more fully in the chapter on VIRTUE AND VICE.

Aristotle grounds ethics in human nature as a teleological structure oriented toward its characteristic end. Hobbes will argue that this structure is a fiction: human nature, properly understood, reveals not a telos of flourishing but a restless desire for power and a fear of violent death. That challenge severs the connection between nature and goodness on which Aristotle's account depends and compels subsequent thinkers to seek other foundations for the moral order.

Epictetus draws the boundary between good and evil more narrowly than either Plato or Aristotle. External things, including wealth, health, reputation, and bodily life itself, are neither good nor evil in themselves; they belong to the class of "indifferents." What is truly good lies solely within the power of the will: right judgment, virtuous choice, rational assent to what reason approves. What is truly evil is the contrary: wrong judgment, vicious choice, the mind's assent to false impressions about what matters.

This division has a precise consequence. If external goods were genuinely good, their loss would constitute genuine harm, and no person could be secure in virtue. But if good and evil lie entirely in the will's own response to things, then no circumstance, however adverse, can make a person evil without that person's own consent. "Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things." The tyrant has the power to kill; he does not have the power to corrupt the judgment of one who refuses to allow it. The wise person thus cultivates a kind of interior sovereignty that no external misfortune can take away.

Epictetus's teaching is not indifference to others. The Stoic recognizes duties of friendship, citizenship, and family, and the wise person discharges these willingly. The point is rather that one's own moral condition depends on nothing outside one's own rational will. Good and evil become, irreducibly, matters of the soul's own quality. The relation of Stoic ethics to the question of happiness and external goods is considered more fully in the chapter on HAPPINESS.

The Stoic account concentrates the whole of morality in the will's self-governance. Augustine will borrow this interior emphasis while pressing a question the Stoics leave unanswered: if good lies entirely in the will, what accounts for the will that knows the good and cannot choose it? The need for grace, for assistance from outside the self, is precisely what the doctrine of Stoic self-sufficiency does not provide for.

Augustine confronts a problem that presses with special urgency within monotheism: if one God created all things good, how can evil exist? The answer he works out, partly against his former Manichean conviction that evil is a positive substance co-equal with good, is the doctrine of privation. Evil is not a thing but a defect: the absence or corruption of the good that ought to be present in some being or action.

The argument turns on the convertibility of being and goodness. If God is the source of all being, and everything that exists derives its being from God, then everything that exists is good insofar as it exists. Evil, accordingly, cannot be a substance or an independent force; it is the diminishment of something that is otherwise good. Blindness is not a positive entity alongside sight; it is the absence of sight where sight ought to be present. Moral evil is not a rival power opposing God; it is the creature's turning away from higher to lower goods, a misdirection of the will rather than the exercise of some alien principle. As Augustine writes, if things "be deprived of all good, they shall cease to be."

To this metaphysical analysis Augustine adds his account of original sin. The first disordering of the human will, he holds, produced a fallen nature that every subsequent generation inherits. The human heart is now divided against itself, capable of knowing the good and yet incapable, without grace, of reliably choosing it. Evil is thus both a metaphysical privation and an existential condition that pervades human history. The question of God's permission of evil, and of whether a greater good may justify it, is taken up in the chapter on GOD.

Augustine formulates the problem of evil in the terms that will govern Christian thought for a millennium. The difficulty he leaves open is one that later thinkers will press more sharply: if evil is merely the privation of good, it remains to explain why a perfectly good God permits the scale and distribution of suffering the world in fact contains. Aquinas will argue that God permits evil only insofar as some greater good follows from it; the adequacy of that response is a recurring question in the chapters on HAPPINESS and on SIN.

Aquinas brings together Aristotle's teleology and Augustine's privation theory into a single, comprehensive account. Every being, insofar as it exists and acts, is oriented toward ends proper to its nature; and the good is what fulfills that orientation. Good and being are, in Aquinas's phrase, convertible: to be, in the full sense, is to be good, and a thing is good in proportion to its actualization of what it is by nature meant to be. Evil, correspondingly, consists not in a positive reality but in the defect or privation of a due perfection. "No being," Aquinas writes, "is said to be evil, considered as being, but only so far as it lacks being."

In the moral sphere, evil is more specifically the defect of a voluntary act. The will, ordered by reason toward the true good, may nevertheless choose a lesser good at the expense of a higher one; when it does so, the act is morally disordered. A person who steals does not will evil as such; he wills the good of possessing something, but he wills it against the order of justice, and thus his act is vitiated by the privation of rectitude it should have had. The analysis of what makes an act morally good or evil, covering its object, intention, and circumstances, occupies a substantial part of the moral portion of the Summa Theologica.

Aquinas preserves Augustine's insight that evil has no positive being of its own while retaining Aristotle's insight that good is flourishing, the actualization of a nature's proper end. The resulting account grounds morality in natural law: reason's participation in the eternal law by which God governs all things, directing each creature toward its due perfection. The relation between natural law and the goodness of human acts is treated more fully in the chapters on LAW and on VIRTUE AND VICE.

The Thomistic synthesis rests on the claim that nature has ends built into it that reason can discern and that serve as norms for human conduct. Hobbes will deny that nature has ends in any such sense, finding in it only motion and desire; and Kant, though he agrees that natural teleology cannot ground morality, draws a different conclusion, locating the source of moral obligation in the autonomous rational will rather than in any order of nature.

The treatment of good and evil in Shakespeare draws on the older theological and philosophical understandings, and adds to them a set of characters whose resolve to do harm is not adequately accounted for by any of the received doctrines of privation or ignorance. Iago, in Othello, is the case the older doctrines cannot readily accommodate. He has been passed over for promotion, and he gives this as one of the reasons for his hatred of the Moor; he suspects that his wife may have been unfaithful with him, and he gives this as another; but the reasons he offers are inconsistent, and by his own admission he does not himself know quite why he hates. The doctrine that evil is merely a privation of the good, which Augustine and Aquinas had taken over from the Platonic tradition, does not quite cover the case of a man who chooses to work for the destruction of another with so little sense of the good from which he has turned aside.

King Lear offers a second kind of case. Edmund, the illegitimate son, speaks to the audience of his determination to advance himself by betraying his brother and his father. His self-consciousness is complete; he knows the moral weight of what he is proposing; he dismisses it with a wit that is meant to be its own reply. Goneril and Regan, having flattered their father for the sake of his kingdom, turn him out of doors on the ground that his retinue is too large. Macbeth presents still another case: a man who begins in the service of his king, is tempted by a promise of greater honor, yields to the temptation, and is in the end so accustomed to the taking of innocent life that the murders are done for him by hired men. Each of these shows a growth of evil from a small beginning, and each resists a merely mechanical account of how the growth took place.

The questions raised belong to the treatments of Sin, where the specifically religious aspect of evil is discussed, and to Will and Desire, where the capacity of a soul to be set against its own good is considered. What Shakespeare contributes to the idea of Good and Evil is the showing of cases in which the agent is not merely in error but is, in some manner, in love with the harm he is doing, and the showing of what that manner amounts to when the theorists have said what they can.

Hobbes, reading the Shakespearean villains against the background of his own doctrine that the passions are the springs of all action, will argue that what appears as a love of evil is a confused name for the pursuit of an end the villain has judged advantageous. Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost is in part a descendant of the Shakespearean evildoers, and has more in common with Iago and with Edmund than with the older iconographies of the devil. Dostoyevsky, much later, will take the question yet further in the figures of Stavrogin and of Ivan Karamazov. What all these owe to Shakespeare is the refusal to reduce the evil will to a mere mistake, and the insistence that in its worst cases it knows what it is doing and chooses to do it anyway.

Hobbes cuts away the metaphysical foundations on which earlier accounts of good and evil had rested. "Whatsoever is the object of any man's appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth good; and the object of his hate and aversion, evil." Good and evil are not features of the world independent of human desire; they are names given to what attracts or repels particular persons. "These words of good, evil, and contemptible, are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: there being nothing simply and absolutely so."

The consequence follows directly for politics. If there is no objective good to which appeal can be made, disputes about what is good cannot be resolved by reason or nature; they must be settled by some authority capable of enforcing its judgment. This is the role of the sovereign in Hobbes's political theory. Civil law determines what counts as good and evil in public conduct, not because the sovereign possesses superior moral insight, but because without such determination the disagreements of private persons tend toward the war of all against all.

Hobbes is not, however, a simple relativist on all questions. He recognizes certain enduring features of human desire, of which the most fundamental is the desire for self-preservation, and from this he derives what he calls the laws of nature: rational maxims of prudence, such as seeking peace and keeping covenants, that any person valuing survival has reason to follow. These maxims are not arbitrary, but they are grounded in human appetite rather than in any metaphysical order of the good. The relation between Hobbes's laws of nature and the classical natural law tradition is considered in the chapter on LAW.

Hobbes sets the terms for modern ethical subjectivism. Kant will respond that if good is nothing but what a particular person desires, morality dissolves into contingency, and that the very demand to be moral presupposes a standpoint above desire from which the will can legislate a universal law. Mill will accept Hobbes's rejection of metaphysical goods but attempt to give human welfare the kind of objective, impartial standard that Hobbes's account of desire does not by itself provide.

Kant recovers the objectivity of the moral good, but on a foundation entirely different from those proposed by either the classical or the scholastic tradition. The good, for Kant, is grounded neither in God's commands, nor in natural teleology, nor in the order of being, but in the autonomous rational will itself. "It is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even beyond it, that could be considered good without limitation except a good will." Every other good, whether talent, fortune, health, or even happiness, depends for its goodness on the will that employs it; without a good will, such things may be made instruments of evil.

A good will is one that acts from duty, from respect for the moral law, rather than from inclination or the desire for advantage. Kindness, courage, and temperance are not unconditionally good; exercised by a vicious will, they serve evil ends. Only the will that gives itself the moral law and acts in conformity with it, regardless of consequences, has unconditional worth. This is the force of Kant's categorical imperative: act only on maxims that could be willed as universal law, treating rational beings always as ends in themselves, never merely as means.

Correspondingly, evil for Kant is not privation but perversion: the will's free subordination of the moral law to self-love. In Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, he speaks of "radical evil," a propensity in human nature to place inclination above duty. This propensity is freely acquired; we are responsible for it; and only a fundamental reorientation of the will, which Kant compares to a kind of moral conversion, can overcome it. The distinction Kant draws between an ethics of happiness and an ethics of duty is discussed more fully in the chapter on DUTY.

Kant offers what he regards as the only defensible account of the moral good, one that is neither contingent on desire nor dependent on the deliverances of theoretical philosophy. Mill will object that an ethics focused on the form of the will and indifferent to consequences cannot adjudicate conflicts of duty and provides no means of correcting a sincere but misguided conscience, and that happiness, rather than formal conformity to law, is the standard any rational being must ultimately accept.

Mill maintains that the good is happiness, understood as pleasure and the absence of pain, and that right actions are those that tend to produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number affected. This is "the greatest happiness principle," and Mill holds that it underlies almost every serious moral judgment, once inherited dogma and the confusion of means with ends are set aside. Against Kant, he argues that any standard divorced from consequences and from the welfare of actual beings has no claim on rational assent; a morality that abstracts from happiness produces rules that may be sincerely followed while causing great harm.

Mill distinguishes, however, between pleasures of higher and lower quality. Intellectual, aesthetic, and moral pleasures are not merely more intense than sensual satisfactions; they are of a superior kind, preferred by those who have experienced both. The competent judge who has known both intellectual life and mere bodily gratification invariably prefers the former, and this preference is itself part of the evidence that human happiness is not reducible to animal pleasure. Human nature, Mill holds, is so constituted as to desire nothing that is not either a part of happiness or a means to it; happiness is thus "not an abstract idea, but a concrete whole" within which the various goods of human life find their place.

The utilitarian standard reaches beyond the agent to all persons affected. Utilitarianism requires strict impartiality between one's own happiness and that of others; the moral agent is called to calculate the consequences of actions for all sentient beings as a disinterested spectator would assess them. This extension of the good to the common welfare connects ethics to social and political reform in a way that neither Kantian nor Aristotelian ethics easily accomplishes. The relation between individual happiness and the common good is considered in the chapters on HAPPINESS and on CITIZEN.

Freud will press a question that the utilitarian calculus leaves open: if the good is the greatest happiness of the greatest number, what follows from the fact that civilization requires the systematic suppression of the very drives that most directly produce individual satisfaction? The utilitarian framework assumes that renunciation and gratification can be rationally weighed against each other; Freud's account of the unconscious suggests that this assumption is far more problematic than any utilitarian had supposed.

Dostoyevsky's treatment of good and evil is inseparable from his treatment of the idea of God, and the question he forces on the tradition is whether the moral distinctions the tradition has relied upon can survive the removal of their theological ground. The phrase most often cited from his writings is the one attributed to Ivan Karamazov and reported more than once in the novel: if there is no God and no immortality, everything is permitted. Ivan does not himself draw the practical conclusion, but Smerdyakov, the illegitimate half-brother who has been his disciple at a distance, does, and the parricide which Smerdyakov commits is offered to Ivan, in the conversation of the eleventh book, as the application of a doctrine Ivan had not meant to be applied. The force of this scene is that Ivan cannot quite disown what has been done in his name.

In Crime and Punishment the same question is posed in another form. Raskolnikov has convinced himself that great men stand above the ordinary moral law, and that he himself may belong to the class who have the right to step across a line which ordinary men dare not cross. The murder he commits is intended as the proof of this theory. What the novel shows is that the theory does not stand up in the presence of the act itself: Raskolnikov, after the murder, is not the superior being he had taken himself to be, and the feeling of separation from other men that descends on him is itself the refutation of the view he had held. The argument is not logical but experiential. Whatever may be said for the doctrine that there is no good and evil but only the will of the strong, the soul of a particular man who tries to live by it finds that it cannot.

The questions raised here are taken up also under Will, Sin, and Punishment. Under the idea of Good and Evil, what Dostoyevsky contributes is the showing that the moral distinctions do not depend upon being proved from a set of premises the skeptic can accept, but upon being lived out in a world in which the consequences of their denial are visible to anyone who will look at them. The claim is not itself an argument; it is a displacement of the question.

Nietzsche will take the rebellion of Ivan and the theory of Raskolnikov as premises for his own announcement of the transvaluation of all values: if the traditional good and evil were grounded in a God who no longer commands belief, then a new table of values must be written, and the work of writing it falls to those who have the strength for it. Freud, in another direction, will argue that the experience of guilt which Raskolnikov cannot talk himself out of is a product of the super-ego and cannot be silenced by argument. Between them, these two later writers inherit the question Dostoyevsky had asked, and neither gives an answer his novels would be satisfied with.

Freud approaches good and evil as psychological formations produced by the conflict between instinctual life and the demands of civilization, rather than as properties discovered in the nature of things or prescribed by reason. The superego, which develops through the child's internalization of parental and social authority, sets up the standards by which persons judge themselves and others. What is called good is, in large measure, what the superego approves; what is called evil is what it condemns. The moral vocabulary of any culture, on this view, reflects the particular history of instinctual renunciation that culture has required of its members.

Freud adds a further observation about the dynamics of conscience. The aggressive impulses that civilization demands be suppressed do not dissolve; they are turned inward, directed against the self, and experienced as guilt. The stricter the superego, the more relentless the conscience, so that the most morally scrupulous persons frequently suffer the greatest sense of guilt, not because they have done more wrong but because civilization has more thoroughly trained them in self-reproach. The paradox is that moral progress, measured by increasing renunciation, tends to increase the unhappiness of those who achieve it.

Freud does not claim that moral codes are without practical necessity. Civilization requires the restraint of instinct; without such restraint, collective life is impossible, and Eros, the instinct for life and union, cannot accomplish its work of binding individuals into larger wholes. But he regards the metaphysical ambitions of traditional ethics as unsupported. Good and evil are not, as Plato supposed, discovered in an order of Forms; they are not, as Kant supposed, deduced by pure practical reason; they are, on Freud's account, the psychological residue of the struggle between Eros and the death instinct, shaped and transmitted by particular cultures. The bearing of this analysis on the theory of happiness is considered in the chapter on HAPPINESS.

Freud's naturalistic account transforms moral philosophy into a branch of psychology and cultural history. Good and evil become artifacts of psychological development and social organization, subject to therapeutic and anthropological inquiry rather than to moral proof or refutation. Whether this reduction leaves room for the kind of normative ethics that the earlier tradition had pursued is a question that the subsequent century has not settled.