Whatever other debates about the nature of evil we might have, about this, we’re in perfect agreement.

I watched with glee
While your kings and queens
Fought for ten decades
For the gods they made
I shouted out,
Who killed the kennedys?
When after all
It was you and me

Some folks insist that it means “Harm none”. I say that’s impossible. You can’t go through life harming none. Plus, that interpretation ignores “an it”.

I say that this is merely a statement of freedom: if no one is harmed by your actions, you are unconstrained in how you act.

Anyway: point is, yes, you will harm people going about your business. You can’t help this.

But I say that this is not evil… it’s wrong, harmful, and often the result of stupidity or foolishness (or delusions) or impure motives… but it’s not intrinsically evil to harm someone.

You’re defining evil purely as a value judgment, and that’s valid. It’s not a tangible thing, but just a concept, and one concept is as valid as another. I’m just conceptualizing it differently, more along the lines of karma. Karma — “volitional action” — is cause/effect. The cause/effect are not two separate things, so you can’t separate the cause from the effect. If the cause/effect is harmful to anyone, then it’s evil. Of course, the same cause/effect might be helpful to someone else. It’s not a simple binary thing. It’s also important to recognize there is no first cause, because any act has been preceded or caused by other acts. Round and round and round. And all us sentient beings are in this mess together.The point is not to go around feeling guilty, but to acknowledge that we’re all responsible for each other.

evil is the lack of effort to prevent action on those desires.

Unless you can arrange to keep yourself sealed off from the rest of humanity, your thoughts, words and deeds are going to have an effect on everyone else, and sometimes those effects are going to be harmful. This may be unconscious on your part, but that indicates lack of mindfulness and understanding. So, no excuses.

Let me just focus on this to try to make my point (which you are, of course, free to disagree with - I’m just trying to make sure my point is clear.

I agree about harming others; there are debates over the Wiccan Rede, which says “an it harm none, do as you will”.

Some folks insist that it means “Harm none”. I say that’s impossible. You can’t go through life harming none. Plus, that interpretation ignores “an it”.

I say that this is merely a statement of freedom: if no one is harmed by your actions, you are unconstrained in how you act.

Anyway: point is, yes, you will harm people going about your business. You can’t help this.

But I say that this is not evil… it’s wrong, harmful, and often the result of stupidity or foolishness (or delusions) or impure motives… but it’s not intrinsically evil to harm someone.

See, I base my moral reasoning on what I call the fundamental theorem of morality. If you’ve made the best choice you can make about the morality of an action, you should follow that choice. Note that I’m begging the question a bit on what “best” means, and also recognize that you can never know what another person’s best choice is.

Nevertheless, think of the implications of this. What if that rule was not being followed? It would say that, even if you’ve brought all of your resources to bear on a question, sometimes you *still* shouldn’t do that.

Note that I’m not saying that this means the choice is *okay*… you might find out that you were wrong, later. You might do something horribly destructive that you didn’t (couldn’t - or it wouldn’t be your best choice) anticipate. It might be a learning experience in the unhappiest sense of the phrase. It might be a terrible thing you’ve done, but it’s not an evil action for you in that moment.

(It might be evil for almost anyone else… if an insane person thinks I’m a demon who is going to destroy the world, and tries to kill me to save the world, well, that action would be evil for everyone but that one person.But within that person’s perspective, it’s the right thing to do, and they’re following it as best as they can.)

Evil must come in, then, when you have not taken sufficient care to make sure the choice is good enough. (Being human, we can never make our best choices all the time.) Somewhere between “you’ve investigated it as best as you can from all angles” and “you did whatever the hell you felt like, with no concern for the harm it might cause” is “evil.”

I’m not trying to excuse unintentional harmful behavior. If you feed a kid a peanut butter sandwich, and the kid goes into anaphylaxis, you’re still on the hook for taking care of the harm you’ve caused (however inadvertantly). And you’re even more on the hook if your action was more obviously dangerous. But it’s not evil to cause harm accidentally. Where evil comes in is whether or not you’re striving to learn the lessons from the effects of your actions.

This is a bit complicated because, obviously, any morally mature individual strives to avoid harming others. But my feeling is that evil comes in the lack of striving, not the lack of harm.

Hmm, well, I’d say good and evil are comparatives of each other. I don’t think it’s correct to define evil only as an absence of good. If Mary makes up her mind to murder John, and does so, that would be, like, a plus (as in quantity) evil act as opposed to a minus good act. Or something. It’s rare for an act to be pure good or pure evil. Everything we do sets off a sequence of causes leading to multiple effects, and rarely are all of those effects going to be entirely beneficial or entirely harmful.

Regarding moral relativism, since I’m quantifying “good” and “evil” by the harm or benefit of an act rather than the act itself, I guess that would fit common definitions of moral relativism. To me, the relativity depends on what you’re measuring.

In Buddhism and some other religions/philosophies, the ideal is not to follow some external set of rules but to act with selfless compassion, or loving kindness. An act “pure” of ego attachment or selfish ends will (the teachings say) generally turn out to be beneficial, whereas an act defiled by ego attachment or selfish ends probably will turn out to be harmful. This way of understanding morality is not unknown to western thought — I believe Saint Augustine might have agreed with it — but because it can seem ambiguous American conservatives hate it. They want a list of one-size-fits-all-circumstances answers to all moral questions, and they call this “moral clarity.” I say it’s more often a kind of faux morality.

This (in the context of the Einstein misquote), interestingly, posits a somewhat different model of evil. One I’m not sure I wholly dispute. It would be the affirmation that we measure, and achieve, good. That one might be able to say that any act or instance has goodness, has merit, in the same way that any object has a temperature. Evil is a comparative - it is what we say of something which possesses less merit either than some normative baseline, or than a specific other thing. Seen in this light, moral relativism is both unarguable (”cold” means something different outdoors in Canada than it does on the beach in Puerto Vallarta) and unobjectionable (because the very definition of evil in these terms, like coldness, can only be parsed as a comparative).

Don Rumsfeld…

Interesting post, Maha. And interesting comments, all.