Topics Ethics

Question Hello, My name is John T., a senior in high school. My question, I do regret, does include "what is evil", but before this message is ignored I wa hoping to bring the idea of existentialism into the topic. I specifically have been looking into views of Albert Camus in his book "The Myth of Sisyphus" which deals with absurdism. I will admit this does unfortunately have some connections to my Ap Literacy class. Before you decide to ignore this I'd like to narrow it down as a great personal interest. I decided to go all out and do real research. The assignment asks us to define our personal definiton of evil. As I stated before I have included absurdism. The central idea of my definition is one that completely cancels out all study of morals, ethics, psychology, religion, etc... I have decided that there is no evil. Evil is a term that humans have created to describe the world better. But beyond humans, evil has no meaning. We use it to categorize and theorize because that's who we are (which I understand is debatable). Moral and psychological are simply social and individual definitions that are , from my understanding) decided by current culture and upbringing of the individual. In a nut shell this is the view I have decided on. I'm asking for opinions, references to other works that may help, etc.... Thank you for your time

Accepted:
February 14, 2013

Comments

Hi John. Humans create lots of terms to help them talk about the world. But if you think about it, none of our terms have a meaning for creatures who aren't capable of language. The word "electron" doesn't have a meaning for your dog, but that doesn't tell us anything about the reality of electrons.

But terms as such aren't the point. Outside of the human world, few if any earthly creatures have a concept of evil. But from that nothing follows about whether some things just are evil. Indeed: I'd be willing to say that wanton cruelty to animals is a clear example of evil, even though the animal doesn't have the conceptual wherewithal to see it that way.

Your further idea seems to be a kind of relativism: what gets counted as "evil" is simply a matter of culture and upbringing. That's a familiar view but it's not as obviously correct as it might seem. For one thing, the fact that people in different groups disagree doesn't mean that there's no independent fact of the matter. For example: certain groups predictably and reliably deny that that evolution occurred, or that climate change is real; other groups disagree. But that hardly shows that there's no fact of the matter about evolution or about climate change.

This doesn't show that there really is such a thing as objective evil, but that wasn't the point. The point was to suggest that there's a problem with the reason you offer for thinking there isn't. On the more general matter of relativism, I'd suggest seeing if you can get a copy of James Rachels' little book The Elements of Moral Philosophy. It includes a very clear, well-argued discussion of relativism.

Best of luck!