Beyond Good and Evil
Analyzing the world through the concepts of Good and Evil - or equivalently Right and Wrong - is a very weak and relative process: History has shown us that Good and Evil are temporally and spatially variable. In any conflict, both parties are sincerely convinced of acting according to what is Good, and what is Right. More, when listening to each party’s arguments, it often turns out that both are actually acting Right, according to their set of values and vision of the situation. Has it never happened to you to be successively convinced by two actors of a conflict ?
As soon as the complexity of a proposition grows past a simple mathematical statement, it is virtually impossible to qualify it as Right, or Wrong.
Good and Evil have even less absolute discrimination power: take any action, which is unanimously considered as condemnable in your circle. In another group, society, location, you can be sure this behaviour will be postively appreciated. Aside from the famous examples of Spartan male children who were taught how to steal food, many more contemporary examples can be quoted.
What if you had the information that, unless earth population significantly decreased, the human race was bound to get extinct, and you also had the possibility to eradicate billions of individuals. Would you press the red button ? Would you be considered as humanity’s saviour, or as the ultimate mass killer ?
Moral dillemas, difference in values, history, perpesctives, everything makes our visions of Good and Evil diverge. Consequently, any philosophicl analysis based on this duality is of limited reach.
But there is a duo that reaches much further.
In the ocean of relativity we live in, where “ The reality flows, and we flow with it” (H. Bergson), one thing emerges as universally shared by human beings. It is called suffering.
Origins of suffering are eminently subective, and individual. Yet, someone coming to you and saying ”I am suffering” is an indisputable statement, independently the observer’s moral standards. It goes down to a basic feeling of the biological body. It would be meaningless to assert “no, you are not suffering”.
Analyzing the environment according to the suffering indcator is far more relevant, as shared by all. Are my actions increasing or decreasing suffering ? Individually, in my group, among other groups ? The suffering-based moral can be built.
Based on this well-shared moral, humans can finally hope to build a functional society, where individual and collective interests, if not identical, could be compatible.
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