This Part 4 of the Ethics Series – What is Good and What is evil?
Part I can be read from here – Click Here
Part II can be read from here – Click Here
Part III can be read from here – Click Here
Note :- Not all names of philosophers to be remembered or used. The idea is to show the under current of thought and processes that shaped the idea of good and evil. So, a word of caution, don’t be over-whelmed by the reference to various philosophers.
According to Mill, Bentham, and Spencer :-
Recent philosophic thought regarding the problem of good and evil has been concerned with man’s social relationships. It has been an ethics of the human group rather than that of divine laws.
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Consequently, it has taken on the tinge of relativity. Goodness and evil become qualities of acts relative to the situation In which they are performed
JOHN STUART MILL is a good representative of the Utilitarian school in his contention that the measure of good Is in terms of “the greatest good of the greatest number*.
One must ask of an act, Will it bring much good to a great number of individuals? This eliminates selfishness and makes the criterion of good the social consequences of die proposed act. Further, Mill holds that “goods* differ in quality and that the goods of the intellect are better than the goods of the senses.
JEREMY BENTHAM is very close to Mill In his thinking about good and evil. He too bases good upon the Utilitarian principle of “the greatest good of the greatest number* But he does not admit that goods differ in quality. His only criterion is the number of Individuals affected by the act Bentham Justifies this position on the basis of selfinterest, holding that to so act will actually bring the greatest good to the one acting.
In this modern treatment of the subject, good and bad are not written in the nature of the universe, but are determined by social factors. The emphasis to placed upon the consequences of one’s act in the experiences of others. The idea of a God setting down absolutely defined moral laws is gone. Also the idea that an evil act angers God while a good act makes Him happy is missing. Here is a relative morality, and the determiner of good and bad is the effect of the act upon the lives of other human individuals now living or to live in the future.
HERBERT SPENCER attacks the problem from the point of view of the scientist and seeks to discover a scientific basis for right and wrong in conduct at large. From the point of view of evolution, conduct is a developing, evolving thing, a matter of adjustment of acts to ends.
For him, the most highly developed conduct, and therefore the best, is that which makes living richer for the individual and for those among whom he lives and those who will come after him. The social group, for Spencer, is the ultimate end of morality.
Goodness is to be determined in those terms. But he distinguishes between conduct that is absolutely right and that which is relatively right. Absolutely right conduct is that which is immediately pleasurable and at the same time produces future happiness for the individual and the group. Relative right is productive of future happiness, but is not immediately pleasurable. The goal is, of course, absolute right.
The Ethical Views of James and Dewey :-
The social and individual consequences of activity are emphasized by philosophers of the Pragmatic school as criteria of good and evil. Both WILLIAM JAMES and JOHN DEWEY, especially Dewey, are emphatic at this point.
The good is that which serves the ends of the group and the individual in the group. A good act is one which considers the individual as an end in himself and not as a means. But, by so considering each individual, we consider the welfare of the group. The human individual, as a social unit, is the ultimate measure of good and evil. That which enriches his life must necessarily enrich the lives of all.
Here the individual and the group are tied together, since, it was argued by Dewey, individuality is a social product and no one has true individuality save as a member of the group.
Thus, a survey of the thinking of men down the ages about good and evil reveals two fundamental positions and many shades of both. On the one hand measures of good and evil are thought to be inherent in the nature of the universe.
Man is to discover them by coming to an understanding of the universe and its nature. Whether the universe speak to man with its own voice, or whether the voice be that of the Creator of the universe, the position is fundamentally the same.
Good and bad are absolute, having been established from the beginning of time, and apply in all situations and at all times. When the criteria have been discovered, either by rational searching of the universe or by revelation, they are forever true, never changing.
The other position is that good and bad are relative terms, and that the measures, the criteria, are to be discovered by a study of the particular situation involved. Time and place are determiners of good and evil. For a sick man, certain foods are evil, but for a well man they are good.
In a modern social group, preservation of the aged and weak is good, but in a primitive group which is beset by enemies and must be on the move to escape destruction, to preserve the aged and infirm is bad since it slows down the group and may result in disaster. This position looks at the consequences of the particular act in terms of the life of society and determines the ethical quality of the act in terms of the good of the whole.
Man’s thought on matters of ethics has taken these two lines throughout history, the absolute and the relative. And, among present-day thinkers both positions are to be discovered, although the relative point of view is the most pronounced. It is difficult for modern man, possessed of great respect for science and human reason, to find adequate ground for an absolute theory of right and wrong. All the evidence which commands his respect seems to point away from this to a relative position.
Gandhi and His Concept of Evil :-
Gandhi had very few possessions: a pair of glasses, two pairs of homemade sandals for different occasions, some books, a spinning wheel, and little else. Each item has a story and a lesson to teach us. The item that stands out the most, in this connection, is a small wooden statue of the three monkeys telling us to “See No Evil, Hear No Evil and Speak No Evil.” It represents the sophistication of his understanding of the human mind and what philosophers call “the problem of evil.”
Gandhi’s answer to the problem of “evil” was two-fold. First of all, to recognize the nature of the world is understand the nature of dualities. If we have “goodness” in the world, then we will have its opposite. Yet, we can move closer to “the good,” which for Gandhi was tied intimately with nonviolence and Truth, which is the greatest challenge we have as human beings.
Furthermore, Gandhi said that evil only existed so long as we gave our attention to it: our ears, our eyes, our words, our mind, etc. This certainly does not mean ignoring acts of cruelty and intentional harm; rather, it means resisting dehumanization, it means raising the humanity of the person who was so morally degraded as to commit an act of intentional cruelty. This is why, in spite of all of their actions, Gandhi never called the British “evil.” He wanted to water the seed of a different quality within them and within his movement.
Mahatma Gandhi. On October 22, 1925, Gandhi published a list he called the Seven Social Sins in his weekly newspaper Young India.
- Politics without principles.
- Wealth without work.
- Pleasure without conscience.
- Knowledge without character.
- Commerce without morality.
- Science without humanity.
- Worship without sacrifice.
Arguing that the policy of an eye for an eye would soon leave the whole world blind in no time and warning that submission would only multiply evil, he sought to fight against Evil but to love the Evil doer.
He chose to separate the act from the actor and the deed from the doer. He fought one without hating the other. He argued that to fight evil with evil will only multiply evil. The evil must be fought by love and eliminated by converting the evil doer from the bottom of his heart. Punishment is only external and physical suffering would not change the inner mind and heart of the evil doer.
Punishment and retaliation will not reform the evil doer. So the only way to fight the evil is by non-violence because violence can never totally eliminate evil from the mind and heart of the evil doer. What is needed is the change of heart and that can be done by resisting all evil with love and nonviolence. Even the worst of man has a particle of good in him and we must appeal to that innate goodness so that evil is transformed in to good.
Passionately convinced about the innate goodness of Man, of every man even of the evil doers, Gandhi sought to separate the act from the man, the evil from the evil doers. He fought against evil without fear but also without hatred. The evil is to be totally eradicated even from the heart and mind of the evil doers. Gandhi always laid very great stress on change of heart and adopted an amazing technique.
EVILS ACCORDING TO BUDDHISM :-
What exactly is evil? Is it a force that is outside us and lures us or is it something that we create ourselves? Are we intrinsically good or bad? There are many philosophical questions the answers to which are wrought in debates. As far as Buddhism is concerned, it says that it is not people who are good or bad, morally wrong or right, but certain traits that that we create in ourselves. And, it is only us who can undo them.
“By oneself, indeed, is evil done; by oneself is one defiled. By oneself is evil left undone; by oneself, indeed, is one purified. Purity and impurity depend on oneself. No one purifies another.”
THE CONCEPT OF “DEPENDENT ORIGINATION’: Buddha preached the concept of ‘dependent origination’ which essentially stands for the interconnectedness of everything and everyone. So, how can anyone by above another? Or, how can someone think of himself as self-righteous and someone else as intrinsically wrong? The teachings of Buddha are mind-opening and so here we take a look at what according to Buddhism are the three capital evils
GREED: Greed is all-encompassing as it includes the sins that are related to desiring anything in excess. It is related to money, yearning, lust, food and an inability to let go of things easily. Of the seven capital sins in Christianity, greed, gluttony and lust come under the evil of ‘greed’ alone as per Buddha
HATRED: Hatred is a very powerful emotion, sometimes called even more powerful than love. It is a destructive emotion that drives one to anger, fury and destruction, both physical and mental. Giving into hatred is like bending the knee to your own enemy. From the capital sins of Christianity, it can be related to the sins of wrath and envy.
IGNORANCE: This can be called the versatility of the tenets of Buddhism that it includes ignorance as one of its primary evils. Ignorance is basically about delusion, about yourself and others. It can drive one to pride, sloth and envy, the Christian sins, besides encompassing other emotions such as blindness and being delusional.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.