Not for nothing that in several major world religions, the sin mankind committed that doomed it forever was to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Such knowledge would certainly be handy, and may even make the need for a God moot. Similarly, Buddha sought to identify the source of all human suffering and put it down to desire – after first concluding that life itself was pretty much suffering (the first of his Four Noble Truths). Throughout history, all human civilizations and cultures struggled to identify the source of human suffering and to codify definitions of good and evil.
Simply identifying evil actions was difficult for ancient man, just as it is for some modern humans. Theft, assault and murder were outlawed most anywhere that was considered civilized; yet even then, slavery and rape were commonplace. Even in the ages of antiquity, humans were able to excuse monstrous actions if they were first deemed “legal” by the ruling lord – a disgusting tradition that continued on for ages and followed Europeans to the New World with the slave trade.
If something as hideous as slavery could have been legal as recently as a century-and-a-half ago in the “Land of the Free,” then clearly the legal status of an action is a poor metric by which to measure whether or not it’s objectively good or evil.
A far better factor to consider is the intent of the person committing the action. What specific outcome was he or she trying to bring about? Almost always, an evil action is one committed out of irrational greed.
A murderer shoots a romantic rival because he irrationally and greedily wants the woman in question – who’s already chosen the victim over the shooter – to love him instead. A man shoots an armed intruder in self-defense because he’s broken into his home and tried to kill him for loving the same woman the intruder wants.
Both scenarios above involve someone getting badly wounded or killed by another. Yet we can see that one action is objectively evil and the other is at least morally neutral if not objectively good because the self-defense action saved an innocent person from harm or death. The difference is intent. The murderer intended to take the victim’s life, which he has no right to. The man fired in self-defense to ward off an attack he did nothing to deserve. It was the shooter’s irrational greed led him to commit an evil act, that of attacking another.
Echoes of this notion can be found throughout history; we hear them in the aforementioned Four Noble Truths of the Buddha, namely the second, that desire is the cause of suffering. The Old Testament warns us not to covet thy neighbor’s wife or goods. The late Stoics cautioned repeatedly against irrational desire and ambition while urging people to learn to recognize what is within their power to change and what isn’t.
Evil then, is a deliberate eschewing of these basic truths. History is populated by men most everyone agrees are evil and they are so because they acted upon irrational greed. Is there a more irrationally greedy notion on Earth than the desire to rule even one other human, let alone entire other nations? The 20th Century’s world wars were fought over this very desire; and then the Cold War that followed was itself just a standoff between two superpowers that irrationally wanted to greedily exert influence far beyond their own borders.
The knowledge of good and evil cannot be gained from eating a piece of fruit, clearly. To suss out that knowledge is to first be mindful of intent and desire. If what a person wants can only be had by intentionally harming the person or property of an innocent victim, then that desire is itself irrationally greedy and acting upon it is objectively evil.
This is just as true in the example of the romantic rivals above as it was in 2007 when bankers and traders were blowing up a housing bubble when they knew the inevitable “pop” would hurt a lot of the people they’d hoodwinked while earning themselves a nice little payday – and their companies a taxpayer bailout.
It’s not irrational, greedy or evil to desire money or love. It is irrational and greedy to desire money that you must hurt someone else to get, or to desire a lover whom doesn’t return your affections. It’s evil to take actions that seek to bring about the realization of those irrational desires when those actions harm the person or property of another.
Apply this judgment – that of intent – to government laws, policies and actions. You’ll soon find that much of what our government does today is motivated purely by the irrational greed of the very powerful men who pull the strings. It’s not irrational or greedy, for example, to want to sell pills to Americans. It is irrationally greedy – and therefore evil – for a company to have the state lock people into cages for treating ailments with a plant rather than the government-approved pill everyone must buy from them, however. Not surprisingly, the strongest lobbying against legalizing marijuana comes from drug companies.
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