Concept

Good and evil

Overview

In philosophy, religion, and psychology, "good and evil" is a common dichotomy. In religions with Manichaean and Abrahamic influence, evil is perceived as the dualistic antagonistic opposite of good, in which good should prevail and evil should be defeated.

Evil is often used to denote profound immorality. Evil has also been described as a supernatural force. Definitions of evil vary, as does the analysis of its motives. However, elements that are commonly associated with evil involve unbalanced behavior involving expediency, selfishness, ignorance, or negligence.

The principal study of good and evil (or morality) is ethics, of which there are three major branches: normative ethics concerning how we ought to behave, applied ethics concerning particular moral issues, and metaethics concerning the nature of morality itself.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Good and evil is discussed.

It is difficult to give a logically tenable account of this position without recognising that good and evil are subjective, that what is good is merely that towards which we have one kind of feeling, and what is evil is merely that towards which we have another kind of feeling. In our active life, where we have to exercise choice, and to prefer this to that of two possible acts, it is necessary to have a distinction…
Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays
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Reply Obj. 2: Good and evil are not constitutive differences except in morals, which receive their species from the end, which is the object of the will, the source of all morality. And because good has the nature of an end, therefore good and evil are specific differences in moral things; good in itself, but evil as the absence of the due end. Yet neither does the absence of the due end by itself constitute a moral…
Aquinas Thomas, Summa Theologica, Part I
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Here we have an antagonism of ethical significance, and ethics is a department of human history in which final truths are but slight and few. From people to people, from age to age, there have been such changes in the ideas of good and evil that these concepts are contradictory in different periods and among different peoples. But some one may remark, "Good is still not evil and evil is not good; if good and evil…
Friedrich Engels, Landmarks of Scientific Socialism
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Deff. i. and ii.), that is (III. vii.), when it increases or diminishes, helps or hinders, our power of activity. Thus, in so far as we perceive that a thing affects us with pleasure or pain, we call it good or evil; wherefore the knowledge of good and evil is nothing else but the idea of the pleasure or pain, which necessarily follows from that pleasurable or painful emotion (II. xxii.). But this idea is united to…
Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics
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_Soc._ And would you still say that the evil are evil by reason of the presence of evil? _Cal._ I should. _Soc._ Then those who rejoice are good, and those who are in pain evil? _Cal._ Yes. [Sidenote: _of which Callicles fails to see the drift._] _Soc._ The degrees of good and evil vary with the degrees of pleasure and of pain?
Plato, The dialogues of Plato in five volumes, Vol. 2
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Good and evil

Overview

In the original texts

Philosophers who discussed Good and evil

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