The topics of this article is exceptionally Simple, yet most of the time, the Simplest Questions are actually the most complex and elusive ones. For example, What is happiness ?, is a simple question but it’s answer is as complex as it can ever get.
WHAT IS GOOD AND WHAT IS EVIL? – This question has had different meaning at different times and at different places. For example, what was good/evil in 18th Century may or may not be good/evil in 21st century (Think of LGBT issue or Sati Practice). And what is good/evil in USA may or may not be good/evil in Middle eastern states (For example-use of contraceptive) or India or any other nation-state. To put it simply, the GOOD/EVIL dichotomy has both Temporal as well as Spatial dimension.
The following write up probes this dichotomy, and as it is understood by the greatest philosophers that we know of and what they thought as good/evil.
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WHAT IS GOOD AND WHAT IS EVIL?
What is the measure of good and evil in the world? How can we know whether or not an act is good or bad? Is there in the very nature of the universe a code of laws which determines good and bad? Or, is goodness and badness a matter of the relation of an act to other acts?
Open the book of the story of mankind anywhere and you will find the question being asked over and over again: What is good and what is evil? This has been, without doubt, one of the most persistent problems of philosophers throughout the ages. Answers have been given in abundance, answers which appeared to the particular philosopher giving the particular answer to solve the problem for all times, but in a very few years the problem has arisen again in the thinking of others.
Is there an absolute, ultimate, and unquestioned measure of good and evil, one that was established at the beginning of time and that will stand until time is no more? A great number of people have believed in such a measure, and there have been thinkers who have attempted to state it in a code of commandments or basic principles of conduct for all times. The Ten Commandments of the ancient Hebrews is an example of this trend in human thinking. Here is a code of conduct which is believed by many to have been handed down from the seat of divine authority and which has authority at all times and in all places.
At the other extreme are thinkers who have believed that both good and evil are relative to the conditions of the time and place, and that an act which is good in one place and time will be evil in another. For example, a maniac is chasing a man with intent to kill him. The man passes me and turns to the right and disappears. Then the maniac comes up and asks which way his intended victim went I say that he turned left, and thereby save the life of an innocent man. This untruth is good, they argue in an attempt to prove that truth is not always good.
Between these two extremes are many theories of good and evil. Philosophers desiring to prove the absolute goodness of God have difficulty at times explaining the existence in the universe of death, suffering, and ill will. How can an all-good God create a world in which there are these apparent evils, they ask? And they have offered many ingenious arguments to reconcile a good God and an evil world.
And so, throughout the history of man’s thought we discover the problem of good and evil (which we speak of as “ethics” or “the ethical problem”) persistently challenging each philosopher.
Good and Evil According to the Early Greek Philosophers
HERACLITUS, the Greek philosopher of change, believed that good and evil were two notes in a harmony. He found many things changing into their opposites. Ice, which is hard, changes into water, which is soft This led him to believe that the combination of opposites resulted in a whole in which there is harmony. Just as in music harmony results from the combination of low and high notes, so in the universe harmony results from the combination of opposites, good and evil.
We, he taught, see only the opposites, the good and the evil. But God sees the harmony, so that for him all things are fair and just in that they are parts of a great universal harmony. Thus, the good life for man is that life lived in harmony with the universal reason, the law which pervades all things. Man should seek to understand this harmony in the universe and to fit into it so that his actions are in accord with the principle governing the whole universe
Evil, for them, was but a phase, a note in the universal harmony and, thus, was not really evil but was another kind of good, a necessary part of the good whole.
DEMOCRTTUS, the leading figure of the Greek Atomists, taught that the goal of life is happiness. At all times man should seek happiness. For him, happiness was an inner condition or state of tranquillity which depended upon harmony of the soul. He taught that one should not depend for happiness upon things of the world since these come and go and a lack of them causes unhappiness. Rather, happiness should be a state of the inner man, a balance of life, an attitude which combines reflection and reason.
Goodness, for him, was not only a matter of action, but depended upon man’s inner desire. The good man is not one who does good, but one who wants to do good at all times. “You can tell the man who rings true from the man who rings false,” he said, “not by his deeds alone, but also by his desires.” Such goodness brings happiness, the goal of life.
With the coming of the Sophists thinking on this problem of good and evil entered a period of confusion. If, as Protagoras held, “Man is the measure of all things,” then man is the measure of good and evil. And, by man, the Sophists meant the individual man, you, me, your neighbor. Each one has the right to determine for himself what is good and what is evil. The end of this practice is, of course, chaos. What I consider evil, you may consider good. The Sophists let the matter rest here.
As a result, each man had his own code of good and bad. He defied others to prove him wrong or to justify their condemnation of him. Many representative Sophists, such as EUTHYDEMUS, THRASYMACHUS, and CALLICLES, taught that morality was mere convention, habit. That actually there are no moral laws, no all-inclusive principles of right and wrong. These men sought to justify the principle that each man should live as he desired, get what he wanted by any means possible, and frame his own code of good and evil.
The result of this position was moral anarchy, pure individualism, and the ultimate in selfishness. Nevertheless, a closer study of this position reveals a tendency which is rich in possibilities. The Sophists were making their appeal to the independent human mind. They were rebelling against arbitrary authority in matters of morals and were arguing that the human mind must think for itself and in thinking discover a code of right and wrong. The Sophists were champions of the individual and his independence.
True, they went to the extreme and lost the forest by concentrating attention upon the trees. Nevertheless, they had hold of a thing which is very precious to modern man, freedom to think and to arrive at conclusions about the good and the evil. The Sophists challenged moral theory to justify itself before the bar of human reason.
This is a new initiative by UPSCTREE, where in we will publish some of the great writings and content, that will not only help you in your ethics paper but also in your essay and optional papers as you deem fit. This is part of our Essay Test Series, where in we are not only giving topic-wise strategy but also two more aspects are added to it – Wisdom and Content Enrichment. Wisdom deals specially with philosophical aspects where as Content Enrichment deals with report, data and all things analytical.
These articles can be found here :- Click Here
P.S. – Few articles are open to all but most of them are exclusive for our Essay Students. As far as, this Ethics Series articles are concerned, only Part I is open to all.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.