The Philosophy of Good and Evil

Most of us are taught to be good, then why this world is still more evil than good?

I really admire the concept of confession and absolution in Christianity. Because in order to confess a sin, you have to accept it first to be a sin. Apparently, so that one could go back and return with more sins.

The question is what sins are? where do they live? Do they live outside or inside of us?

A sin is an act that is considered unanimously by a group of people to be immoral. i.e. — thinking about your neighbor's spouse while making love to yours is a classic example of sin.

As to where they live, is a bit complicated, but one can say that they don’t live anywhere and they live everywhere!

The question which really helps us find the locality of sin is ‘Do they live inside or outside of us?’

Well, to answer that question, let's consider a situation where a boy is born with none of his senses working. He is blind, deaf, anosmic, can’t taste anything, and is numb to the touch. We could say that such a person is free from all sins.

Now you must be getting what I am trying to say — We all are slaves to our senses! And our senses are ready to have all the pleasure this world has to offer. But where there is pleasure, there is pain. No one can change that. Yet we want one and detest the other.

To limit our hunger for pleasure, an arrangement was made many years ago — Society. The purpose of the society was to coexist peacefully wherein the ownership of the Pleasant was allocated; so that no one take what is not his. Only if we were that compliant a species, this world would never have entered The sixth Mass extinction.

Our insatiable appetite is what caused a phenomenon that would change the course of humanity forever. When most of us were busy killing each other for more, very much like animals, there were some who were curious about the existence of the world and its creator. Their constant contemplation gave birth to what we call Religion today. Religion clearly defined what is Good and what is Evil. According to religion, taking what is not yours is Evil, and giving what is yours to someone in need is Good.

It further explained that every person is born with both potentials, i.e. — Good and Evil. It depends, therefore, upon the person what he chooses. However, to say that we are the person who chooses would be wrong. Think about it, when you say I choose this or that, what do you mean by ‘I’? You might say, ‘‘I’ means ‘me’, the doer.” That’s where you’re wrong again.

Let’s go back in time to when you were born. As an infant, you had no clue as to what is good and what is bad. As you grew older, you learned a few things from your parents; a few from your friends, and few from the people you read(if at all), few from the movie and TV shows you watched. You picked up something from everyone you came in contact with. Everything is summed up as what you call ‘I’. And this ‘I’ is still in the process of adding more from outside.

In short, the person you call ‘I’ is a byproduct of all social interactions you had. If you go back again and make a few changes to the people you met, you’ll be an entirely different person. No, I am not talking about the Butterfly Effect here. Although it does have relevance regarding the point I am trying to make.

So you are the aggregation of your surrounding; which means your will is not yours, it’s borrowed. If something is borrowed, how can it be yours? (if only there were a copyright infringement law against that, this world would be a prison) And if you choose to act on a will that is not yours, how can you be the doer of that work?

You might say, that your body is what executed that work, which would mean that you think you are your body, right? After all, you see yourself when you look in the mirror and say, “‘I’ look hot!” right?

If we consider that statement as truth, that your body is indeed yours, where did it come from? Don’t answer that. We all have been there. My point is, if you came out of your parents, that would imply that you are the property of the people who manufactured you, wouldn’t it? But you don’t think that because you have a will, a borrowed one however.

In this way, we are all the same — byproducts of our surroundings. So if I go out and kill someone, you’ll have all the authority to call me a murderer; but can say with utmost conviction that had you been in my shoes you would have acted differently? Let me answer that for you — you can’t. You could never have been in my shoes the same way I can never be in yours. Because you can’t imagine yourself in my situation without being affected by the biases that came with the surrounding you grew up in.

I would be convicted as a murderer in a court of law not only for the crime I have committed but also to deliver a message to you so that no matter in what circumstances you are, you will always remember it before committing the same act yourself.

What we learn from the above argument is None of us is evil, and none of us is good; it’s the circumstance that makes us do what we do. And it’s where the Evil lives.