Some expressions of Christianity are what is termed dualist: they are concerned with the adversarial nature of a divine Lord of good, in the form of God (and the Trinity), and a diabolical lord of evil, in the form of the devil, Satan, Lucifer, or the adversary, to give it a few of the more common names it is known by. All, or almost all are dualist in at least a purely moral sense – there is good and evil, even if there is not a personification of evil in opposition to a personification of good.
Quaker non-theists take a range of positions on the nature of that which our theistic Friends generally (and some non-theists) call ‘God’. Generally speaking, those who consider themselves non-theists (or who might be analytically classified as such) do not accept the idea of God as an entity with personality or personhood, but we recognise something in ourselves which we identify to some extent with what others call ‘God’.
Likewise, theistic Christian Quakers (neither Christianity nor theism inevitably follows from the other in practice, among Quakers) have a range of views about the devil, though among liberal Friends the identification of it as an adversarial persona with true power in opposition to God is relatively unusual. Yet we all recognise the concept of evil, that there are acts that are evil, that we all have the potential for evil within us – just as we all have the potential for good, and that we all have ‘that of God’ within us. We, Quakers, tend to be dualists to that extent, even if the degree of Christian dualism found in some other churches is (in my experience) extremely rare.
What, then, might we see as non-theist expressions or responses to the idea of dualism, the opposition and eternal battle of good versus evil, where we lack the idea of a divine personification of good?
Well, it obviously depends on the non-theist, what other spiritual or philosophical traditions they find useful or subscribe to, and it depends a lot on how you look at it. For those who are non-theist but find gods-as-archetypes a useful mental tool, there may be an element of good vs evil within their use of those archetypes (though most gods in most pantheons lack a clear good/evil division). I would not even be terribly surprised if some non-theist Friends viewed the idea of good and evil as unhelpful reductive abstractions that obscure a more analytical form of ethics, be they hedonistic, utilitarian or deontological (look them up if you want, a digression into philosophical ethics wouldn’t be helpful here).
Sometimes I can give an overview of a range of example views of non-theist Quakers. This time, I can’t. All I can do is talk about how I see things.
To me, good and evil are real things, at least in as far as social constructs are real (which, given that money, property and law are social constructs, is pretty real). They are not precisely the same as right and wrong, as moral/ethical terminology, but they are related. Good is, in part, the impulse to do what is right, which we may broadly define as acting in the general best interests of all involved, and in disputes favouring those whose cause is correct. It is right to avoid doing harm, and to promote things that benefit people. There might be a lot of debate about precisely what a lot of those terms mean and what actions cause harm or provide benefit. There are certainly situations where it is impossible to avoid harm, to have only benefit. But goodness is what makes us wish to optimise benefit, and to apportion harm and benefit in a just way.
Evil is not a desire to do the opposite. Wishing simply to bring harm to as many as possible and restrict benefit as much as possible is not evil, it can only be a manifestation of mental illness – and a particularly rare form of mental illness, given that mentally ill people have a vastly increased probability of being victims of crime, not of being perpetrators. Wishing to simply harm others is a cartoonish, absurd depiction of evil found plentifully in fiction, but less than seldom in reality.
Nor is it precisely evil to have a deviant idea of what constitutes benefit and harm, or how they should be apportioned when that is necessary. There is great room for disagreement on that score.
What then is evil? It’s hard to pin down. It’s not something one can define, but I can share a few thoughts. Evil comes in a few flavours. First, and most obviously, are those who enjoy causing harm. Such people do not wish to maximise harm – that would not be satisfying to them. They usually wish to cause harm in a personal, even artistic way. This is not necessarily indicative of any real mental illness. All of us have an inherent enjoyment of feeling power; I am quite sure that it is an inherent part of human nature, given how widespread it is. Some try to control that desire, and I consider that good up to a point; where one has power rightfully, and uses it justly, then there is nothing wrong with enjoying it. The other side of that coin is that anyone with power, using it justly, will sometimes wish they did not have to use it. That is the price of the enjoyment.
Sometimes, though, someone realises that they can get that enjoyment of power by tormenting others in some way. It might be a minor way, making someone’s life difficult for no good reason, or it may mean bullying someone, or it may mean causing serious physical harm. Those who feel most powerless in the rest of their life may express it in meanness to those close to them, without even realising they are doing it. The urge to do this is evil – even as it is natural.
Another form of evil comes from deciding that harm to some people, or some category of people, does not matter. Nationalistic wars might come from selfishness of those in power manipulating others, but not always. Sometimes they come from a genuine desire to bring benefit to one’s own people. It is wrong because it sees benefit to one’s own people as more important than that of other people. It is evil when harm to the ‘other’ becomes irrelevant, or desirable in itself.
It also extends beyond nationalism and ‘people like me’ and ‘other’. There are other ways of dividing people, and being careless of harm to any group – never mind desirous of harm to them – is just as evil as a nationalistic or us-and-them based division. And intent or motivation are not the only things that determine good and evil; a great many people doing evil think they are doing good, because they don’t realise that they have become insensitive to harm to some category of people, or because they overvalue the benefit of their acts compared to their harm.
I do not think that a person who does those things is evil – people are not evil. Acts and modes of thought are. And not all evils are equal. Some are greater than others. But that is how I see the essence of evil.
We’d all like to be able to easily say what is good and what is evil – we would like clear, sharp, dividing lines. Often we think we can see them in any given case, though we may struggle to articulate what makes something so clearly good or, more especially, evil. The world just doesn’t work that way. Most things people do are neither wholly good nor precisely evil. We have to live with that lack of clarity, not attempt to impose a nonexistent clarity for our own comfort.
Good and evil are not precisely opposites. They are both part of the human condition. All of us have an inherent (or for the cynical, socialised) desire to optimise benefit and minimise harm, and all of us have a tendency to overvalue benefit to ourselves or to those with whom we identify as an in-group. All of us have the potential to see harm to an out-group as less important. All of us have the potential to be selfish, and that can rise to the level of evil. That is the battle of good versus evil – in each of us, whether we choose to follow the impulses to justice and benefit to all, or whether we choose to follow the impulses to optimise benefit to ourselves, and those we see as extensions of ourselves.
That battle takes a wider stage – a battle of good versus evil in the world, not just in ourselves – in different ways. The most visible is when there is greater evil at work, when evil choices drive a society, when they move part of a society in an evil direction. Then it is necessary for good to oppose that evil, for there to be those who stand against the evil course, even at the risk of their own (though, being a pacifist, preferably not others’) lives.
The less visible is the quiet battle to prevent the more visible battle ever taking place. To spread a message of right conduct, to teach people to listen to the Divine within – even if you don’t use those terms, and don’t make it seem like a religious thing. As Quakers we have a method, principles to listen to that voice, but listening to it doesn’t depend on belief. Of course, you don’t have to rely on getting people to listen to the still, small voice – you can also appeal to things like enlightened self-interest. Philosophers may talk about the different ethical bases, such as judging the ethics of an act based on its motivation or its outcome. I don’t know which is right – I don’t think any of them are able to capture the whole of ethics, certainly not the whole of good and evil. Ultimately, though, we tend to have an idea of what is good, even if we do not always agree with it.
This is an important point when one considers good and evil in a non-theist context. We do not need a holy text to tell us what is right and wrong. If you identify that inward sense, that I believe exists (and not all non-theists do) and can help tell right from wrong, as God, then okay, you need God to help tell right from wrong. To me, it is something divine, but also something wholly human. Its metaphysical aspects are in how it connects and how it behaves in interaction with that sense in others.
However, even as a non-theist, I don’t think we can rely on something analytical, some objective standard for right and wrong, and hence good and evil. We cannot define what is the most right thing to do in any universally acceptable, or even close to universally acceptable, analytical framework. In the end we rely on a sense that is innate, or perhaps, socialised. If it is socialised – learned through our early social interactions – then it had to originate somewhere, and you might believe that is divine inspiration. If so, I have no argument with you, even if I don’t agree.
I believe that, if I am wrong and the sense is not innate – if it is socialised – then it will have originally developed through a form of social evolution. Early societies that developed a social sense of ethics that effectively optimised benefits and harms in a (relatively) just way will have benefited from an advantage in selection – they will have out-performed other communities. I can’t prove this, it is my belief, but I think it makes sense. We know that early societies were quite unjust by modern standards – our ideas around this have changed over the years. However, they could clearly have been more unjust. I believe that selection pressure on societies, by and large, favours justice. That means that, just as biological characteristics emerge seemingly-spontaneously in response to selection pressure, a sense of good and evil can emerge socially in the same way.
Once again, this is just me. Don’t take it as the or even a proposal of the best non-theist conception of good and evil. It’s me. You might find it helpful, you might not; you might agree with it, you might not. It’s just what I think – what do you think?
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