Bill's Comments

These four words have no meaning outside of a human context. Their meaning requires sentience both to provide the value judgment and to provide the actions to which they are applied. In my thinking, these four words are a matrix, not a linear relationship. The two axes are active-passive, and beneficial-harmful. Benevolent and Evil are active, good and bad are passive. Benevolent and Good are beneficial; Bad and Evil are harmful. In all four cases it is human judgment that creates the classification. Good and Bad refer primarily to facts, whereas Benevolent and Evil include intent.

To illustrate, let’s start with a rock, about a foot square in size. As long as it is sitting on the ground where it was last located by natural forces, it is simply a fact, a rock with various attributes. Of its own, it does nothing except occupy a given space for a length of time. It is neither good nor bad in itself. If a human takes the rock and builds with it, it can be considered good as it sits in the wall of the building. If it were to block a road, it would be considered bad. In this case, it may arrive in its road-blocking role without human intervention. The important thing to notice is that whether good or bad, it is in reference to human activity and need. In the first case, human action might have created its new role, but it could have happened simply by the building being built upon its original location, with the rock incorporated into the foundation in situ.

Can the terms benevolent and evil be applied to the rock itself? I think not. Building the building may have been done by a person or persons with benevolent intent, but the rock itself is not benevolent. Similarly the road-blocking role may have been done with malice or evil intent, but the rock itself is not evil. Its goodness or badness derives from the role it was given by human action or with respect to human action, not from any properties inherent in itself. I challenge anyone to find a value of good, bad, benevolent, or evil without bringing human thought and/or action into the discussion, directly or indirectly.

A rock is a neutral object. People don’t hate rocks for their existence. So let’s look at a more emotional issue. Imagine a loaded Glock automatic pistol on a table. Is it good or bad? If it is one or the other, how is it different from a rock, which is neither good nor bad? Is the existence of the pistol bad, because it can be used to kill someone? Immediately the argument is lost, because the killing of one person with the pistol requires the active use by another person. Do you argue that if the pistol did not exist, it could not be used to kill another person? But if it does not exist, the argument is moot, there is no pistol to discuss. One cannot apply a value to something that does not exist.

It is the use of the pistol, not its existence that creates the value, positive or negative. But only humans use pistols with intent. It is theoretically possible to train an ape to use a pistol, but again this is human intervention, and the ape does not have the intention of use a human does.

So let us approach the pistol from another viewpoint. It is manufactured by humans with the intent to make a tool that kills either other animals or other humans. The intent is with those that make or purchase the pistol, not with the pistol. Regardless of why it was created and manufactured, the pistol has no intent of itself lying on the table. Without the intent, there is no good or bad in it. The point is, firearms just like rocks exist and have no value, good or bad, outside of human use. By this point, it should be obvious that the same argument applies to nuclear weapons.

At this point, it is interesting to apply the concepts directly to humans. Similar to the above discussion, is a human standing in the middle of the room good or bad? Unless we know what the person is doing other than standing or what he/she is thinking, the question is unanswerable. Other than to anti-humanists, the existence of humans is value-neutral. However, it is not the existence of humans an anti-humanist is condemning, but rather their actions. Without acting, a human is no more than a rock with respect to our values being discussed. Once again we are back to the point—values are the result of human assessment of human action.

Good and bad may be applied to active behaviors as well as passive existence. A good behavior would be one that is done without error, or achieves its result. A bad behavior would be the opposite. However, what do we do with a behavior that is perfectly executed to accomplish a bad, in the sense of harmful, result? It would seem necessary to separate the execution from the result. The execution must be assessed relative to its correctness, where as the result is evaluated with respect to its impact on people.

As an aside, it is the impact on people that determines good and bad. The impact of human action on the environment is often described as bad. As far as the environment itself is concerned, there is neither good nor bad. The environment is constantly changing and adapting, and human activity is often erased in less than 100 years, which is nothing in comparison to even the current inter-ice-age period, which has lasted for about 10,000 years so far. It is some humans assignment of bad to that impact that makes it bad. So the so-called evil or bad of human impacts on the environment is actually the impact of how those changes are perceived on other humans.

Having established that good and bad are human-assigned values, now let us look at benevolent and evil. As has been stated at the beginning of this post, benevolent is not the same as good, and evil is not the same as bad. They are definitely respectively related, but not equivalent. Good and bad may be applied to inanimate objects as well as animate behavior, but benevolent and evil apply only to behavior.

The main difference between good and bad and benevolent and evil, is that good and bad are the respective ends of benevolent and evil action. Additionally, benevolent action is characterized by its intent, to do good. Conversely, evil action has the intent to do harm. There is, however, a subtlety here. Benevolent behavior is not doing good as a return for earned value, but as more than earned or even unearned. The concept of benevolence, the noun form, includes generosity or an excess of goodness—goodness that more than accomplishes its goal. So too, evil action is that which intends to cause extreme harm.

The difficulty with benevolent and evil is the matter of degree. At some point one can say bad behavior becomes evil behavior. Or good behavior becomes benevolent. In the cases where the intent is unquestionable, the intent defines the action. The desire to do good for the sake of doing good defines benevolent as the doing of bad for the sake of doing bad defines evil. But, even with it defined that clearly, the amount of good or the amount of evil seems to enter in. Helping someone fix their car just out of caring or friendship is good, but doesn’t qualify as benevolent, unless, for instance one springs for an engine rebuild or provides the labor for it. Equivalently, simply purposefully doing annoying things or mildly injurious things doesn’t qualify as evil, unless they escalate into serious harm to the victim.

We also refer to people as benevolent or evil. Again, this is a characterization that is based on our observation of their behavior over time. If a person’s actions continually lead to harm to others, and especially if they seem to be pleased by it or enjoy it, we will start calling them evil. There can also be covertly evil people, who have a façade of well-meant behavior hiding their real intent which is harm. We can also construct the opposite situations for benevolent people.

It now crosses my mind to ask, “How to classify the Count of Monte Cristo?” The end result of his actions is the ruin of his victims. But we know that these victims had already harmed him excessively. It is obvious from the story that he relished the destruction of his enemies. However, he also revised his goals with the revelation of new information, and was remorseful over the death of the child of one of his enemies. It would appear that vengeance and/or justice can carve out limited exceptions to our concept of evil.

To reprise, good per se is not benevolence, bad per se is not evil. Good is not the opposite of evil, bad is. By the same token bad is not the opposite of benevolent, evil is. Most importantly, all four terms require the presence of sentience to have meaning. With these concepts in place, we now have a frame in which to discuss theodicy—why does God allow evil in the world?