Ethics
Chapter 2
Good and Evil
1
Good and Evil
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Good and Evil
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Plato says good was the source of all being
and morality, good is defined as pleasure
 And that the opposite of good is evil
Manicheans and Zoroastrians believed that
good and evil were two independent, equally
powerful forces that were always in conflict
St. Augustine said evil was not a real being at
all, but merely an absence of the good
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Good and Evil
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Good and Evil
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Others attribute evil to the devil
The Hedonistic Approach identifies the good
with pleasure and happiness and evil with
pain and suffering
Ask yourself this, how could a good God
permit evil? (Nazis)
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Good and Evil
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Good and Evil
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Benn has a purely naturalistic account of evil
 Any object, property or happening about
which it is both intelligible and correct to
say that it would be a better state of affairs
if that object did not exist or occur
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Good and Evil
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Billy Budd by Melville
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Would you describe Billy as good or evil?
 Why?
Would you describe John Claggart as good or
evil?
 Why?
Was there any conflict between Budd and
Claggart?
Why does Melville state that Claggart and
Budd in effect changed places?
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Good and Evil
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Billy Budd by Melville
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How would you describe Captain Vere?
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Why?
How would you describe the other members
that comprise the “jury”?
 Why?
 What is their question to Billy? (or should
they be asking Claggart)
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Good and Evil
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Billy Budd by Melville
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What is Captain Vere’s dilemma?
 What is his decision?
 What is his reasoning for the decision?
 Do you think he was right in handling the
way that he did?
 Why?
 How would you have handled the
situation?
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Good and Evil
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Billy Budd by Melville
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What does Vere mean when he says,
 But do these buttons that we wear attest
that our allegiance is to nature? No, to the
King
 That in receiving our commissions we in
the most important regards ceased to be
natural free agents
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Good and Evil
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Billy Budd by Melville
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What does Vere mean when he says,
 But let not warm hearts betray heads that
should be cool. Ashore in a criminal case,
will an upright judge allow himself off the
bench to be waylaid by some tender
kinswoman of the accused seeking to tough
him with her tearful plea?
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Good and Evil
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Billy Budd by Melville
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And the sailing master says
 Can we not convict and yet mitigate the
penalty?
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Good and Evil
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Billy Budd by Melville
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What does Vere mean when he says,
 Consider the consequences of such
clemency and arbitrary discipline
 No, to the people the foretopman’s deed,
however it be worded in the
announcement, will be plain homicide
committed in a flagrant act of mutiny.
What penalty for that should follow, they
know. But it does not follow. Why?
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Good and Evil
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Billy Budd by Melville
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What does Vere mean when he says,
 Should a man-of-war’s violent killing at sea
of a superior in grade be allowed to pass
for aught else than a capital crime
demanding prompt infliction of the penalty?
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Good and Evil
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Billy Budd by Melville
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Billy Budd was formally convicted and
sentenced to be hung at the yardarm in the
early morning watch
The next morning, Billy Budd was hanged
Billy’s last words were “God bless Captain
Vere”
The “Prodigal Son Parable”
13
Good and Evil
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The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
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Why is there Evil?
 How would you describe Ivan?
 Why
 How would you describe Alyosha?
 Why?
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Good and Evil
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The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
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Why is there Evil?
 Ivan questions?
 Did man invent God?
 If God was invented, could the idea
come from such a savage, vicious beast?
 Why is there suffering in the world? So
we can know good and evil? Why does
it cost so much to know good and evil?
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Good and Evil
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The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
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Why is there Evil?
 The story of the General and the boy
 Were the actions of the General just?
 How did his actions affect him
afterwards?
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Good and Evil
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The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
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Why is there Evil?
 Are men themselves to blame for good and
evil?
 They were given paradise, they wanted
freedom, and stole fire from heaven,
though they knew they would become
unhappy, so there is no need to pity
them
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Good and Evil
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The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
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Why is there Evil?
 Ivan’s question to Alyosha is why do the
children have to suffer?
 What have they done to deserve suffering?
 Would they have grown up to deserve
suffering too?
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Good and Evil
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The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
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Why is there Evil?
 What about the punishers of evil, are they
not in fact evil?
 Should we forgive everyone for their acts of
evil?
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Good and Evil
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Sophie’s Choice by Styron
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What is Sophie’s position?
What is her choice?
How would you choose if you were in this
situation?
Do you think you can answer truthfully
without experiencing the moment?
20
Good and Evil
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The New Slavery by Bales
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Is there such evil in the world that people can
treat other humans like Seba was treated?
 What would compel a person to commit
such acts?
 Is this the reason we need morality?
21
Good and Evil
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The New Slavery by Bales
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First Come, First Serve
 How is it that a 4 year old child can
understand this simple concept, yet adults
allow discrimination and segregation to
happen?
 Slavery ended in the U.S. in 1865. Bales
learned that emancipation was a process,
not an event.
22
Good and Evil
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The New Slavery by Bales
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What Does Race Have To Do With It?
 Ethnic and racial differences were used to
explain and excuse slavery
 The otherness of the slaves made it easier
to employ the violence and cruelty
necessary for total control
 Otherness could be defined in almost any
way, religion, tribe, skin color, language,
custom, economic class …
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Good and Evil
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The New Slavery by Bales
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What Does Race Have To Do With It?
 The U.S. founding fathers had to go
through moral, linguistic and political
contortions to explain why their land of the
free was only for white people
 They knew slavery was morally wrong, but
also understood that slavery was lucrative
 Today too the morality of money overrides
other concerns
24
Good and Evil
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From Cruelty to Goodness by Hallie
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Institutionalized cruelty involves the
undermining of dignity by perpetrating a false
inequality of worth and power
By degrading the victim, the victimizer exalts
his own perception of self worth, but in reality
becomes evil
25
Good and Evil
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From Cruelty to Goodness by Hallie
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Cruelty comes from the Latin bloodshed or
raw flesh and involves the spilling of the blood
Modern dictionary define cruelty as disposed
to giving pain
 Cruelty involves the maiming of a person’s
dignity, the crushing of a person’s self
respect
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Good and Evil
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From Cruelty to Goodness by Hallie
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As human beings, deep humiliation is
everything
Humans also believe in hierarchies
 When we feel that were are not higher
than dirt or filth, then our lives are maimed
at the very center, in the very depths, not
some localizable portion or our bodies
 And when our lives are so maimed we
become things, slaves, instruments
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Good and Evil
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From Cruelty to Goodness by Hallie
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The loss of self respect that the Saturnalia
created in ancient Rome, say, made it possible
to continue using the slaves as things, since
they themselves cane to think of themselves
as things, as sub human tools of the owners
and the overseers
Commitment that overrides all sentimentality
transforms cruelty and destruction not moral
nobility
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Good and Evil
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From Cruelty to Goodness by Hallie
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Cruelty and the Power Relationships
 The power of the majority and the
weakness of a minority are at the center of
institutional cruelty for slavery and the
Nazis
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Good and Evil
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From Cruelty to Goodness by Hallie
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Cruelty and the Power Relationships
 One of the most important projects of
slaveholders & their allies was that of
seeing to it that the blacks themselves
thought of themselves in these powerless
terms
 They diminished both the respect the
victimizers might have for their victims and
the respect the victims might have for
themselves
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Good and Evil
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From Cruelty to Goodness by Hallie
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Cruelty and the Power Relationships
 Cruelty then is a kind of power relationship
and imbalance of power wherein the
stronger party becomes the victimizer and
the weaker becomes the victim
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Good and Evil
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From Cruelty to Goodness by Hallie
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Goodness Personified in Le Chambon
 They obeyed both the negative and positive
injunctions of ethics
 They were good by being their brothers
keeper, protecting the victim…
 They were also good in the sense that
they obeyed the negative injunctions
against killing and betraying
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Good and Evil
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From Cruelty to Goodness by Hallie
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Goodness Personified in Le Chambon
 The opposite of the cruelties of the camps
was not the liberation of the camps, this
was the end of cruelty
 The opposite of cruelty was the hospitality
of the people of Chambon
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Good and Evil
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From Cruelty to Goodness by Hallie
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Goodness Personified in Le Chambon
 At the center of thought was the belief that
God showed how important man was be
becoming himself a human being, and by
becoming a particular sort of human being
who was the embodiment of sacrificially
generous love
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Good and Evil
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From Cruelty to Goodness by Hallie
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Goodness Personified in Le Chambon
 Not only to save the Jews, but also to save
the Nazis and their collaborators
 They wanted to keep the Nazis from
blackening their souls with more evil, he
wanted to save the Nazis, the victimizers,
from evil
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Good and Evil
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From Cruelty to Goodness by Hallie
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Goodness Personified in Le Chambon
 One of the reasons was the Trocme (the
minister) was successful was the
Huguenots had been themselves
persecuted for hundreds of years by the
kings of France, they knew what
persecution was
36
Good and Evil
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From Cruelty to Goodness by Hallie
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Goodness Personified in Le Chambon
 They saw no alternative to their actions
and to the way they acted, and therefore
they saw what they did as necessary, not
something to be picked out for praise
 They believed that we are all children of
God, and we must take care of each other
lovingly
37
Good and Evil
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From Cruelty to Goodness by Hallie
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A Choice of Perspectives
 One of the reasons institutional cruelty
exists and persists is that people believe
that individuals can do nothing
 Institutional cruelty blinds us to the victim’s
point of view and when we are blind to that
point of view we can perpetrate cruelty
with impunity
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Good and Evil
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From Cruelty to Goodness by Hallie
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A Choice of Perspectives
 The Holocaust was storm, lightning,
thunder, wind, rain and Le Chambon was
the rainbow
 Practice random acts of kindness
39
Good and Evil
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Wickedness by Benn
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Selfishness
 The person pursues their own good,
disregarding the rights and good of others
Conscientious Wickedness
 The person is unconditionally loyal to a
person or group even when it does evil
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Good and Evil
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Wickedness by Benn
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Heteronomous Wickedness
 The person abdicates personal
responsibility for their actions
Pathological wickedness
 The person makes evil their highest value
 This is the worst kind of wickedness
because in inverts evil into a value to be
sought for its own sake
41
Good and Evil
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Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche
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We all seek not happiness, but to affirm
ourselves, to flourish and dominate
Since we are essentially unequal in ability,
intelligence and imagination, it follows that
the fittest will survive and be victorious in the
contest with the weaker and the baser
Isn’t this the opposite of what Hobbes
believes?
42
Good and Evil
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Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche
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But this process is hampered by Judeo
Christian morality
Nietzsche calls this “Slave Morality” which
was invented by jealous priests, that were
envious and resentful of the excellent and
powerful, advocates that we become meek
and mild, that we believe the lie of all humans
having equal worth
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Good and Evil
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Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche
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Why do we have society and who is it for?
Nietzsche says society is not allowed to exist
for its own sake, but only as a foundation and
scaffolding by means of which a select class
of beings may be able to elevate themselves
to their higher duties, and in general to a
higher existence
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Good and Evil
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Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche
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What is the “Master Morality?”
 Nobility?
What is the “Slave Morality?”
 Utilitarian?
What are “Middle Class Measuring Rods?”
45
Good and Evil
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On the Origin of Good and Evil by Taylor
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The rules and practices that either promote
cooperation toward meeting our desires or
resolve interpersonal conflict are right rules
and practices
Rules and practices that hinder cooperation
and conflict resolution are wrong ones
46
Good and Evil
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On the Origin of Good and Evil by Taylor
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Men as Conative Beings
 Men have needs, desires and goals, they
pursue ends, they have certain wants and
generally go about trying satisfy them in
various ways
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Good and Evil
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On the Origin of Good and Evil by Taylor
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Men as Conative Beings
 Important Points
 Deliberate human activity is generally
interpreted as goal directed
 The goal might be exceedingly trivial
and of only momentary significance
 Reason appears to enter into men’s
purposeful activity primarily to devise
the means to attain the ends
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Good and Evil
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On the Origin of Good and Evil by Taylor
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Conative as the Precondition of Good and Evil
 The rules of society were not in place
waiting for men to discover them
 Men have created the rules, laws
conventions, customs and morals
49
Good and Evil
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On the Origin of Good and Evil by Taylor
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The Emergence of Good and Evil
 In the beginning, there is no good and no
evil, there is nothing but bare facts
 Those things that are good, one finds
satisfying to his needs and desire and those
bad to which he reacts in the opposite way
 The judgments of the solitary being
concerns only good and evil and no moral
obligation has arisen
50
Good and Evil
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On the Origin of Good and Evil by Taylor
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The Emergence of Right and Wrong
 When more people are added, the aims or
purposes of such people can conflict
 The possibility of mutual giving and taking
thus presents itself, wherein each can
benefit greatly at a small cost to the person
51
Good and Evil
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On the Origin of Good and Evil by Taylor
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Right and Wrong as Relative to Rules
 If needs are to satisfied and goals fulfilled,
then situations of conflict and situations of
cooperation must be resolved in the
context of rules
 The good of each is enhanced at no
significant cost
 But some may use the rule to promote the
very evil the rule was meant to avoid
52
Good and Evil
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On the Origin of Good and Evil by Taylor
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Right and Wrong as Relative to Rules
 So, right is simply the adherence to the
rules and wrong is the violation of it
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