Topics Ethics

Question Would it be logically coherent to have a world in which everything that happened was bad or have a world in which everything that happen was good? Can good and evil exist independently of each other? Do we need one to define or contrast the other? Can each of them be definable in their own right? Is there any arguments that can be put forth to show that good and evil are not polar concepts?

Accepted:
June 7, 2013

Comments

You've raised a large and complex set of issues. I'll address just one part of one of your questions. It seems to me that the burden of proof rests with whoever claims that good can't possibly exist without evil. For one thing, the claim implies that the monotheistic God is impossible, since God is supposed to be perfectly good and independent of anything distinct from himself (or at any rate independent of evil). Moreover, it's not as if every property is instantiated only if its complement is instantiated. The property of being self-identical is instantiated by everything, but necessarily its complement, the property of being self-distinct, is instantiated by nothing. The property of being physical is instantiated by many things, but it's at least controversial whether the property of being nonphysical is instantiated at all.