What are good and evil?

Good and evil?

They say that money is evil, but in reality money is just a measurement tool. Measuring the cost of effort spent on work, spent time, materials and other resources. Blaming money for evil is like blaming a dagger for murder.

An ax in the hands of a lumberjack is good. This is home, warmth, furniture. An ax in the hands of a criminal is evil. This is death or injury. The instrument itself is neutral. It is not the gun that is dangerous, but the person who pulls the trigger.

But what is evil and what is good?

In fact, this is not such a difficult question if you answer it honestly.

Children are often afraid of the dark. Therefore, let's imagine that absolute, total darkness, where not a single ray of light penetrates, darkness in which it is impossible to see your own fingers, is evil. And on the contrary, if it is light around, if you can see your fingers, the sun or a lamp is shining and you can safely read the book further, this is good.

In this thought experiment, we will see that light is the absence of darkness and darkness is the absence of light. So evil is simply the absence of good.

Let's check our assumption.

Death is what everyone fears. Murder is evil. This means that the absence of life is evil. Life is good.

Another example is hunger. If people suffer from hunger, then this is of course evil. And if people have food, then it's good.

It will be even easier to understand this using the example of cold. This example is just as convenient as light and dark.

In physics there is the concept of absolute zero, when the movement of all molecules stops, all living things die. There is no life. And this is absolute evil - everything is frozen. But what is cold is simply the absence of heat, life, movement of molecules.

Let's try to look at good and evil in a completely ordinary school fight situation. Just now, everything was peaceful, everything was kind, but part of the good disappeared, the good became less - a fight began.

And there are also thefts at school. Here lay a beautiful pen on the neighbor's table. And suddenly someone took it, stole it. The neighbor's pen disappeared. The neighbor had good - his property, a pen - and now the good disappeared. His place was immediately taken by evil.

But the pen did not disappear by itself. And in a fight, punches of arms and legs are inflicted not of their own free will. These are someone's hands, someone's legs. Someone's brain orders them: "Hit!" But the same brain can order: "Don't touch!" And the thief's brain can order the hands "take it", or it can order - "don't touch". And the child will not become a thief, will not commit evil, will not reduce the amount of good in this world.

Some inventors even have a special rule for testing their inventions. If an invention increases the amount of goodness in this world, then it is a good invention. If not, then it's better to invent something else.