Published by An epic battle between two phenomenal forces happens everyday, in our homes, at our schools, and in our minds. Everyone alive finds themselves at a point where they must decide to do something evil or do something good, whatever they decide will forever determine their character. Whether the judge of their character be human or a celestial entity, their actions decide their fate in this world or the next.
But what is good? What is Evil? Why are they such opposing forces? How can someone determine what action is good and what action is Evil? For people who strictly follow a religion or belief than these answers are easy. Their religion probably explains it’s standard of good and evil. Even people that follow a religion, though, still find themselves wondering if what they’re doing is good or evil. So I will attempt to design some fundamental principles to help determine good or evil. To begin let’s get a stand point on the most basic of good versus evil.
I’m sure that most sane people beleive that murder is wrong, so we understand that ending a persons life is a very basic form of evil. To this respect, creating life is a very basic form of good. Good and Evil are expressed as opposites because it is assumed that they cannot be the same. People want other to live life to their fullest and have a chance at happiness which is why they view killing as wrong. If you ever had someone close to you die then you know the horrible dread that follows their death, it’s such an uncomfortable horror that no one wants to feel it if they can avoid it. Everyone wants to be happy and if we are all feeling depressed or sad then there is no happiness.
Using the basic form of evil we can determine one of it’s principles and because we’ve found a principle of evil we can inverse it and have a principle of good.
Principles of Good and Evil 1.) Good or Evil is determined by the amount of happiness that will result from an action.
Creating life gives many people happiness; the parents, the family, and lastly the person whose life was created. This means that the action of goodness is increasing the happiness, thus more happiness equals more good. Inversely, because we all agree that evil is the opposite of good, less happiness equals more evil.
Principles of Good and Evil 2.) Good brings more happiness; Evil brings less happiness.
Just these rules the way they are allows for many deeds that could be considered as evil. For example, A boy kicking another student down the stairs. First, to keep children from kicking others down stairs I would like to state that this action is a very evil action. To understand why I must use a bit of math.
Since Evil brings less happiness it will be thought of as a negative number or -X; again as opposites this means that good is a positive number or X. So to determine whether an action is good or not we must add these numbers together. The action of a boy kicking anotheer down stairs, means that one person is happy and one person is not or -1+1. Anybody with basic math skills can determine that this equals zero and zero will be classified as our neutral action, an action that is neither good nor bad. This disproves what I said above about the action being very evil, however. Lets look more into the scenario to get a better view of what happened.
Sad boy kicks a happy boy down the stairs (-1+1). Happy boy breaks his leg and is sent to the hospital. His mother and father must pay for the hospital bill which will not make them happy, also they will be angry toward the boy that kicked theirs down the stairs and will probably inform the parents of their dislike((-1-2)+1). The parents of the boy will not be happy that their boy has done something wrong and will probably punish him which will leave him unhappy.
(-1-2)+((1-2)-1)=-6
Since we determined that a negative number is evil that makes this action evil. This also means that we need to reevaluate our principles above.
Principles of Good and Evil 1.) Good or Evil is determined by the amount of universal happiness that will result from an action.
Principles of Good and Evil 2.) Good brings more universal happiness; Evil brings less universal happiness.
Universal happiness is a term I use to describe multiple instances of someone being happy. Using these method makes it very easy to determine whether an action is Good or Evil and it puts right into the heart of the fight between good and Evil.
Humans are not born evil. Humans are born good and we all, as long as we’re mentally sane, attempt to do good. However, in our own personal fight between good and evil we may get confused and miss some of the obvious evils we commit everyday.
