| Good and evil are too overcharged with meaning and presumption to be useful concepts for understanding anything. A more fruitful way to approach it is benefit and harm. One then realizes that in many cases in life if one benefits from an event it is likely that something or someone else will be harmed by it. That benefit and harm are very much dependent on the point of view. This view gets more complicated when you realize that humans are social animals that operate within several levels of groupings, such as family, clan, village, nation, species, planet and so on. So the determinations of benefit and harm change. Such groupings allow the notion of self sacrifice to be considered a noble act. But if we were not so social then self sacrifice would be considered to be self destructive and maladaptive.
Starboy |