Good and Evil

Intro

Good and evil is a conflicting concept to me. There are times it feels obvious, like these properties clearly exist in some real way. But the more I think about it the more it seems subjective. I try and conceptualize this because it feels important. We critique people and judge from our own understanding. We take life away from people who do not have a similar understanding of good and evil. Why do we feel so confident in good and evil that we can justify stripping someone of their livelihood? Imagine two people, one a theologian and one a moral relativist, witnessing the same act, a father stealing bread to feed his starving son. The theologian sees a clear violation of a law given by God, one that doesn't bend to circumstance or social context. The moral relativist sees it not as a violation at all, but as a justified act shaped by situation and culture. Both are educated, thoughtful, and serious about understanding right and wrong. And yet they arrive at completely different conclusions about the same moment. So who is correct, and how would either of them prove it?

This paper is my attempt to deepen my understanding of what good and evil actually are. Sharpening our view of good and evil improves society not because we will discover objective moral facts that were always there. It improves society because getting clearer about what the common intuitions are, where they come from, and where they have limits, makes us better at building the morality that functioning societies depend on.

I am going to explore the arguments for many different beliefs, highlighting moral philosophy, ethicists, and theologians, along with many other areas that attempt to understand these concepts. I first began to really care about this topic when I wrote a paper on piety. It made me realize how long this question has existed and that even through different cultures, there have always been conflicting beliefs about it.

I have grown up in Utah, an overwhelmingly religious location, so I have regularly heard religious views on good and evil. I have attempted to understand them, but in that attempt it has made me more unsure. Every time I try to answer the question from a religious perspective, it leads me to more questions and more uncertainty. It has been confusing how people believe what they believe with the assurance that they are the most correct. I will be writing this paper with the belief that good and evil are subjective with the understanding that my perspective is fluid and can change.

History

Before looking at whether good and evil are objective or subjective, we need to understand the source of the debate. This is not a new question. Human beings have been wrestling with the question of good and evil for over 2500 years and every major civilization has had to answer it in some form. Every position in this paper is a response to a problem that has never been fully solved.

Ancient Greece

The foundation of this debate comes from ancient Greece. The Sophists were among the first documented defenders of moral relativism - the belief that your view on good and evil is purely shaped by society and culture and that no culture has the full truth. This is still one of the most common views people hold today and it is still being defended by serious philosophers like Mackie who will be discussed later.

The philosopher Thrasymachus, in Plato's Republic, took this further in a direction Nietzsche would later develop. He argued that morality is not just shaped by society, but is specifically created by whoever is in power. What we call good is simply what those in power have decided to call good. A rational person can see through this construct and build their own values through their own reasoning.

The single most important philosophical moment for this paper is the Euthyphro dilemma. Socrates asked a question that has never been fully answered: is something good because God commands it or does God command it because it is good? This one question generated three major positions: Divine Command Theory says good is whatever God commands; Intellectualism says goodness is grounded in God's rational nature; and the Independence Theory says morality does not need God at all. The Euthyphro dilemma is 2400 years old and it is still the central unresolved problem in the theology section of this paper.

The Medieval Period

The medieval period brought Christianity to the center of this debate. The question became not just what good and evil are but how a perfectly good all powerful God fits into a world where evil clearly exists.

Augustine argued that evil is not a thing in itself, but an absence or corruption of good. Everything God created is good so evil cannot be its own positive property. It is a deficiency in something that should be good - like blindness which is not a type of sight but an absence of it. Evil entered the world through free will. God gave rational beings genuine freedom and evil is the result of turning away from God.

Thomas Aquinas is the most important figure of this period. He synthesized Aristotle's philosophy with Christian theology to produce natural law theory. The natural law theory states that God created human beings with a specific nature and purpose and what is morally good is whatever allows humans to fulfill that nature. Moral truths are built into human nature itself and discoverable through reason. This is the direct foundation of what Craig and Lewis are defending today.

The Enlightenment and 19th Century

Hume made two arguments that still shape this entire debate. First, "is ought gap" - you cannot derive what ought to be from what is. No amount of facts about human nature can by themselves tell you what you morally ought to do. Second, his sentiment theory - moral judgments are expressions of feeling not perceptions of fact. When you say something is wrong you are expressing disapproval not detecting a real property of the thing. This thinking leads directly to Blackburn and Ayer.

Kant responded by grounding morality in pure reason alone. His categorical imperative gives a rational test for moral claims without any appeal to God or consequences. This is the foundation Parfit builds on later.

Bentham and Mill then built utilitarianism - good equals whatever produces the most happiness, evil equals whatever causes unnecessary suffering. This makes morality objective in a grounded concrete way because suffering and wellbeing are real measurable things. But as Moore will later show, you can always ask whether pleasure is actually good and that question still makes sense which means Bentham has not fully solved the problem.

Nietzsche is the most radical voice of this period. His announcement that God is dead is not a celebration, it is a warning. Without the theological foundation Western civilization had relied on, the moral framework sitting on top of it loses its grounding. His genealogy of morality argues that good and evil are not discovered truths but weapons in a historical power struggle between the strong and the weak. Dostoevsky was writing at the same time and responding to the same crisis. Where Nietzsche saw the death of God as an opportunity, Dostoevsky saw it as a catastrophe and his famous novel "The Brothers Karamazov"" shows what that collapse looks like when a real human being lives through it.

The 20th Century

Moore showed in 1903 that good cannot be reduced to any natural property without a logical error. Ayer argued in 1936 that moral statements are not truth claims but emotional expressions. Mackie argued in 1977 that moral statements are truth claims that are all false because the moral facts they assume do not exist. Blackburn tried to find a middle ground. Then Shafer Landau and Parfit pushed back with the most planned defenses of moral realism we have. The debate is still live and unresolved. This is the conversation this paper is having.

Why This History Matters

Every source in this paper is part of this 2500 year conversation. When Mackie makes the queerness argument he is responding to Moore who is responding to Mill who is responding to Kant who is responding to Hume. When Craig defends intellectualism he is responding to Aquinas who is responding to Plato. These are not isolated opinions they are moves in a long ongoing debate.

The history also shows why this question matters beyond philosophy. When societies lose their grip on the idea that some things are genuinely and objectively wrong regardless of what the powerful decide, the consequences are human, not just philosophical. The twentieth century showed what happens when that grip is lost. The question of whether good and evil are real is not a puzzle for academics. It is one of the most important questions any civilization can answer.

Defining terms

Good, this is the point of the paper. It's also the hardest term to define. At the basic level good serves to provide some positive moral worth. Good is what should be done, What should be valued. But the moment you say what is good you will find disagreement in what another person's perception of Good is. Is something good because it brings happiness, or because God commands it, or human beings thrive from it. The whole point of this paper is to sharpen our understanding of this and go over the beliefs on what this Good is or to not be.

Using singer he explains: Evil seems to be the opposing thing of Good, Evil also being the other hardest term to define because "Evil" is the other center piece of this paper we are trying to Understand what makes something Evil and if things are Evil. In this paper Bad or wrong are not the same thing as Evil though those properties can be in evil. Evil doesn't have to be bad or wrong. Evil is something more of an intuitive understanding that holds so much natural distaste and intensity. The Holocaust, you can call the Holocaust Evil also bad or wrong but Also something with more Intense. It feels normal to think the holocaust as Evil but why? What properties does it hold to be evil and is evil an subjective thing or is it a universal truth that just is.

Moral Facts its a claim like saying torture is wrong, and viewing that claim like 2+2=4 is true or how the earth orbits the sun, it just is. Those claims are true but a belief of a moral fact is claiming moral claims have the same validity or Truth as a factual solid claim like 2+2=4. Moral facts are objective truths that exist independently of an individual or society and cultural view. The central point of this paper is asking: do moral facts exist in this sense? Are they like mathematical facts?

Moral Subjectivisum, This is the view that Good and evil depend on who and what is doing the evaluating. Morality is bendable to the individual, or the society and culture. The most basic way of showing this is saying murder is wrong. In a subjectivist view this is just an expression for the distaste in murder not some factual claim. Subjectivisum is more the feeling towards something, not the property itself.

When we say something is better we are making a comparative moral claim that one's position has more worth or value than another position in some positive property. When making this claim we run into the same problem that we do with good. Better according to what standard, when dealing with subjectivity, better is according to preference of personal or culture. If we have an objective view, then "better" is what is closer to good no matter the cultural belief.

For objectivity

G.E Moore, Good is its own thing

Moore's contribution to the argument for objectivity starts out looking like a simple observation but turns into one of the most powerful cases in moral philosophy. He notices many philosophers attempt to define good in things like pleasure, happiness or god's commands, but when grounding good in one of these properties, you have to answer whether pleasure is actually good. Moorre called this the open question argument, and the error in defining good in natural properties is a the naturalistic fallacy.

What Moore concludes from this is good is a real property but canno't be reduced to any naturalistic property, like biology or physical facts. You recognize good the way you recognize the color yellow - you don't see yellow in wavelengths or know yellow's wavelengths, you just recognize yellow. You don't break it down to what is yellow you just recognize it, According to Moore, that is the same way that "good" works. It's irreducible and real.

The problem Moore makes with this argument is one many people have recognized and addressed. If good is indefinable and can only be recognized through direct intuition, then we have no clear explanation about where it comes from or how we reliably access it. This is what Mackie recognizes and uses it as an argument against objectivity. We will go into his argument when we address subjectivity views. Even though there are problems with Moore's conclusion, the open question argument still needs to be addressed by those who attempt to define good in naturalistic properties.

Russ Shafer Landau, Moral facts are real and mind independent

Shafer takes Moore's non-naturalism and builds on it in one of the most systematic defenses of moral realism. His central claim is that moral facts exist independently of what anyone thinks or feels about them. They are independent in the same way mathematical facts are. Nobody invented the fact that 2+2=4. It the same way nobody invented the fact that torturing children is wrong. Both are just true regardless of what any individual, culture, or god thinks or feels about them.

His most important response to anti-realism is what he calls the "queerness objection." The argument Shafer is responding to is Mackie's belief that moral facts are too queer to exist, that there aren't properties out there that are what moral facts claim to be, so it would be illogical to reason for some strange and unique property like moral facts. Shafer's response is pointing out that mathematical facts are equally strange by the same standard. They are non-natural, not physically observable, and only accessed through rationality, intuition and reasoning. Since nobody denies the existence of mathematical facts on these grounds, Mackie's argument proves too much. If queerness is a reason to deny moral facts, it is equally a reason to deny mathematical facts and logic but almost nobody is willing to go that far.

Shafer also responds to Mackie's moral disagreement argument. This claims that widespread disagreement across cultures proves there are no objective moral facts. Shafer's response is that scientific disagreement does not undermine scientific facts. Scientists have disagreed about fundamental questions for centuries but we don't conclude from this that scientific facts don't exist. We conclude that some scientists are wrong. The same logic there applies to moral disagreement. People disagreeing about moral facts doesn't mean that they don't exist, it just shows some people are wrong and mistaken in their conclusion.

Anti-Realism

The Case Against Objectivity

As noted above, Parfit and Shafer Landau both compared moral facts to mathematical facts. But this comparison does not hold up. Math is testable. You run the calculation and get the same answer every time. Every person in every culture gets the same result. There is no debate about whether 2+2=4 because you can just test it and the answer is always exact.

Moral claims do not work like this. There is no test you can run to get a sure answer on whether something is good or evil. Different people and different cultures have disagreed about moral questions for thousands of years. If moral facts functioned the way math facts do, we would expect the same kind of testability and agreement. We do not get it. That is where the case against objectivity starts.

J.L. Mackie and Richard Joyce, Error Theory

Mackie's error theory is the most radical position within anti-realism. The core claim is simple - moral claims are genuine truth claims that are all false. Mackie does not deny that people make moral claims. What he denies is that those claims are ever true. He does not say moral language is just emotion or just opinion. He takes moral language completely seriously, as a real attempt to assert truth about the world. He just says that the objective moral facts that moral language is reaching for do not exist. So every moral claim fails. Not because the claims are confused. Because what they are pointing at is not there.

Joyce makes this point with the unicorn analogy. If you say a unicorn has one horn you are making a real genuine claim. It just happens to be false because unicorns do not exist. Moral claims work the same way. Torture is wrong is a real genuine claim. It is just false because wrongness as an objective property does not exist anywhere in the world. The claim is real. The fact it is pointing toat is not.

The Queerness Argument

Mackie defends this with the queerness argument. If objective moral facts existed, they would have to be a very strange kind of thing. They would have to be properties that carry their own unknown force just by being perceived. Meaning that, when you perceive that something is wrong, that perception alone would compel you to avoid it regardless of your desires. Nothing else in the world works like this. The fact that fire is hot does not by itself tell you not to touch it. You need a desire not to get burned for that to become a reason. But moral facts are supposed to tell you what to do just by existing. Mackie says nothing in the universe works that way and when a theory requires something so unlike anything else we know, the most reasonable conclusion is that it does not exist.

This also connects to math. Math is known through clear testable processes that produce universal agreement. Moral facts would require some kind of special moral intuition that we have no real proof of. We cannot test moral claims and get repeatable sure answers the way we can with math. That lack of any clear way to access moral truth is itself evidence that there is no universal moral truth to find.

The Argument From Relativity

Mackie's second argument is more straightforward. When scientists disagree, more investigation eventually brings them to agreement. That is just how science works. But when people disagree about moral questions, that conflict doesn't get resolved. Different cultures have disagreed about slavery, violence, and how to treat other people throughout all of human history and those disagreements do not get objectively resolved through more investigation. Mackie says the best explanation for this is not that everyone is wrong about the same objective facts. The best explanation is that there are no objective facts to converge on. The disagreement does not end, because there is nothing there to resolve it.

Nietzsche Good and Evil Are Invented

Nietzsche. He does not just argue that moral facts do not exist. He argues that the concepts of good and evil themselves are inventions with a specific history rooted in power, not truth. In the beginnings of Morality he traces where these concepts came from.

He identifies two types of morality. Master morality was created by the powerful. Good meant strong and excellent. Bad meant weak. It was a simple framework built by people who had the power to define the values.

Slave morality was created by the weak. Unable to beat the powerful through strength, they flipped the framework. They redefined the strength of the powerful as evil. They redefined their own weakness as good - calling humility, suffering, and meekness virtues. Nietzsche argues Christianity was the main way for spreading this reevaluation across Western civilization.

He thinks good and evil, as we use them, are not discoveries about reality. They are the product of a historical power struggle. According to Nietzsche, before you can even ask whether good and evil are objective, you have to ask whether the concepts themselves are worth keeping. Nietzsche seems to recognize different morality as more worthy, master morality is more valued because it brings in more life affirming values. But he recognizes morality as not being truthful, so neither holds the right position.

Simon Blackburn, The Middle Ground

Blackburn does not go as far as Mackie and Nietzsche. He argues that we project our emotional attitudes onto the world and then mistake those projections for objective properties. Murder has no wrongness built into it. The wrongness comes from our disapproval being projected outward. Like a projector casting color onto a blank wall, the color comes from the projector not from the wall.

But Blackburn says even if this is true we can still talk as if moral claims are true or false and treat some moral views as better than others - not because they match objective facts but because they survive critical reflection and observation. This is the most livable version of anti- realism. It does not force you to say genocide is just neutral. It lets you call things genuinely wrong while being honest that the wrongness comes from us not from the world.

Where This Leaves Us

Mackie shows moral facts would be unlike anything else in the universe. Joyce shows moral language is reaching for something that is not there. Nietzsche shows the concepts themselves came from power not truth. Blackburn shows we can keep everything useful in moral discourse without pretending moral facts exist.

But the anti-realist position has real costs. The intuition that some things are genuinely evil - not just disapproved of but categorically wrong - is hard to shake. Singer's argument that evil is its own distinct concept doing work that bad and wrong alone cannot do pushes back against every position in this section. And that tension is something this paper will address.

Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism sits between the two sides we have looked at so far. It is not full moral realism like Shafer Landau and Parfit, but it is also not full anti realism like Mackie. It tries to find a middle ground by grounding good and evil in something real and concrete, which is human suffering and human wellbeing.

Bentham

Bentham built his moral philosophy on a simple observation. Nature has placed human beings under two things, pain and pleasure. Good equals whatever produces the most pleasure. Evil equals whatever causes the most pain. There are no mysterious properties floating in the universe and there are no divine commands. There is just the real experience of pleasure and pain that human beings actually have.

To figure out which action is right Bentham developed the hedonic calculus (objective way to measure pleasure and pain). You measure the moral value of any action by looking at how intense the pleasure or pain is, how long it lasts, how certain it is to happen, and how many people are affected. The right action is always the one that produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. This makes morality feel objective in a real grounded way because suffering is real whether or not anyone recognizes it as morally significant.

But there is a serious problem here that connects directly back to Moore. Even after Bentham explains that good means pleasure you can still ask "but is pleasure actually good?" and that question still makes sense. If good and pleasure were actually the same thing that question would be pointless. The fact that it still makes sense proves they are not the same thing. Bentham has told us what produces good but not what good itself is.

There is also the counterintuitive results problem. If torturing one innocent person would prevent enormous suffering for a large number of people Bentham's calculus says torture is the right action. That answer feels deeply wrong to most people. Bentham would say our intuitions are unreliable but that raises the question of why we should trust a calculation over deep moral intuitions about are morality.

Mill

Mill inherited Bentham's framework but found it too simple. His most important addition is the distinction between higher and lower pleasures. Bentham treated all pleasures as the same kind. Mill said this was wrong, The pleasures of the mind like intellectual engagement and moral commitment are qualitatively better than purely physical pleasures.

Mill put it simply. It's better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. A life of mindless physical pleasure is not better than a life of intellectual struggle and moral commitment even if the raw amount of pleasure is technically higher.

But Mill still faces the same problem Moore raised. Even after distinguishing higher and lower pleasures you can still ask whether higher pleasures are actually good and that question still makes sense. It still does not fully answer what good itself is.

What Utilitarianism Gets Right and Wrong

Utilitarianism makes a real contribution to this paper. It shows that good and evil can be grounded in something real and concrete without requiring mysterious properties or divine commands. Suffering is real. Wellbeing is real. That gives morality real grounding and connects directly to the thesis. If good is connected to real human flourishing and evil is connected to real human suffering then sharpening our understanding of what good and evil are has real consequences for how people live and how societies treat each other.

But utilitarianism cannot fully account for the feel of evil that Singer identified. Some acts feel evil not just because they cause suffering but because of what they are. Torturing a child for amusement is not just bad because of the pain it causes, it feels like a violation of something that goes beyond any calculation. That is a real limitation.

Utilitarianism points toward something important but does not fully answer what good and evil ultimately are. That question still needs answering and the next section examines the most ambitious attempt to do so, which is the claim that good and evil are grounded in God.

Religion and Theology

The religious answer to this question is probably the most common one people actually hold. The idea that God is the foundation of good and evil, that without God there is no real morality, is deeply felt by a lot of people. Before getting into the specific thinkers it is worth laying out the three main positions that come out of the Euthyphro dilemma because every theological view in this section falls into one of them.

The Three Positions

Divine Command Theory is the belief that what God commands is what is good. What God wills is good. In this position God is omnibenevolent and omnipotent, all good and all powerful, and because He is perfectly good everything He commands must be good. The problem this creates is the arbitrariness issue from the Euthyphro dilemma. If something is good simply because God commands it then God could in principle have commanded murder and it would have been good. Morality becomes entirely dependent on divine preference rather than anything more known.

The Independence Theory takes the opposite position. God and good are separate things. Good does not need to follow God and if they happen to align it is coincidental. Morality is fully objective on its own terms without needing God as its foundation, the same way mathematical facts do not need God to be true. The problem it creates is that it raises the question of what exactly grounds moral facts if not God, which is the same grounding problem realism has been struggling with throughout this paper.

Intellectualism is the middle position and it is where Aquinas, Craig, and Lewis all land in different ways. Good is not good because God arbitrarily commands it. Rather goodness is inherently part of God's nature. God does not will what is good because He decided to, He wills what is good because that is simply what He is. His commands flow from His nature rather than His nature flowing from His commands. This avoids the arbitrariness problem while keeping God as the ultimate foundation of morality. That is controversial, it seems that it is pushing the arbitrariness problem back a step to his nature.

Augustine, Where Evil Came From

Getting into this topic it is worth understanding where the traditional form of evil has come from. Augustine's answer is original sin. God created everything good. Evil is not a thing in itself but an absence that we talked about earlier. Evil entered the world through the free choice of Adam and Eve to turn away from God who is the source of all good. Before that human nature was toward God and toward good. After this human nature became corrupted and towards self rather than God. This corruption is what Augustine calls original sin and it is the theological account of why human beings naturally tend toward evil despite being created good.

This connects directly to Singer's argument that evil is its own distinct category. Augustine would say Singer is right that evil feels categorically different from merely bad but wrong about what that means. Evil is not a positive property but the corruption of something that was genuinely good. The depth and intensity of evil reflects the depth of what has been corrupted.

Aquinas, Natural Law

Aquinas rejects pure Divine Command Theory and lands firmly in intellectualism. His argument is that God created human beings with a specific nature and purpose, and what is morally good is whatever allows human beings to fulfill that nature. The fundamental principle of natural law is that good is to be done and evil is to be avoided, and what counts as good is determined by what human nature actually requires to flourish.

This makes morality objective without making it arbitrary. Goodness is grounded in the rational nature of human beings as God created them and that nature is discoverable through reason alone. Aquinas thought you did not need scripture to figure out basic moral truths because natural law is written into human nature itself. Anyone with functioning reason can access it.

The criticism is that his whole framework depends on accepting that human beings were created by God with a specific nature and purpose. Without that premise the natural law collapses. If humans are just products of evolution with no designed purpose then there is no objective human nature to ground the moral law in.

Craig, The Moral Argument

Craig makes the claim if God does not exist then objective moral values and duties do not exist. He says simply objective moral values and duties do exist so therefore god must exist, That is the basis of the argument one of the most straightforward claims for objectivity.

Craig's first premise says that without God human beings are just a product of evolution and moral feelings are just the result of natural selection, that helps us survive and reproduce. If that were true there would be no truth value for morality. So on a purely naturalistic view there is no reason to think that feelings correspond to any real truth. On this level society would just fall to preferences like Nietzsche thinks.

Craig gets past this by appealing to moral familiarity and intuition. Across all cultures there are things that are looked down on. I think we need to specify more extremes to Evil not just bad because Bad is more of a flexible word but there are extremes that are recognized bad among all cultures. Like torturing children for fun is bad. It is not just social disapproval. Craig says these moral intuitions are so deep and so universal across all people and all cultures that denying them would be more unreasonable than accepting them. Almost every human being regardless of culture or belief recognizes that certain things are genuinely wrong, not just frowned upon.

Craig takes this further by saying we are more confident that the Holocaust was genuinely evil than we are confident in any philosophical argument that might be used to deny it. So if a philosophical argument leads to the conclusion that the Holocaust was not objectively evil the right response is not to accept that conclusion. The right response is to reject the argument. The intuition is more trustworthy than the argument that contradicts it.

Dostoevsky

Every person we have looked at made their point through argument. Dostoevsky does something different; he shows a story of what it is like when someone commits to the idea that without God everything is permitted. He isn't debating and arguing good and evil, he is painting a picture of one of the most strong representations against anti realism.

Ivan, The Rebellion

Ivan Karamazov is the intellectual brother, brilliant and serious about the question this paper is asking. He does not simply deny God exists. He accepts God probably exists but rejects Him on moral grounds.

Ivan collects newspaper clippings of children being tortured and abused and presents them to his brother Alyosha not as evidence against God's existence but as evidence against God's moral acceptability. No future harmony, no heaven, no ultimate redemption could ever justify the suffering of even one innocent child. He returns his ticket to God's world.

Then Ivan says the line that runs through this entire paper. If God does not exist everything is permitted. But he does not celebrate this. He recognizes it as a catastrophe. Without God there is no objective foundation for morality and without that foundation nothing is genuinely forbidden. This is the same conclusion Mackie and Nietzsche reached through philosophy. Ivan reaches it through human experience and he is horrified by it.

The Grand Inquisitor

Ivan tells Alyosha a story he wrote. Christ returns to earth during the Spanish Inquisition and is arrested by the Grand Inquisitor who tells Christ He made a mistake giving human beings freedom. People do not want freedom. They want comfort and certainty. The church corrected His mistake by taking freedom away and giving people security instead.

This connects directly to Plantinga's free will defense. Genuine moral goodness requires genuine freedom. The cost of that freedom is the real possibility of evil. A world where human beings always chose good would not be a world of free beings. Christ says nothing and kisses the Inquisitor. Dostoevsky leaves it open but the implication is that love and freedom cannot be separated even when freedom produces suffering.

Smerdyakov, The Consequence

Smerdyakov is the illegitimate brother who has been listening to Ivan's ideas. He takes the conclusion that without God everything is permitted and acts on it. He murders their father. When Ivan confronts him Smerdyakov tells him that Ivan taught him to think this way. This is Dostoevsky's most important point for this paper. Ideas have real consequences. A philosophy that leads to murder when actually lived out is not just philosophically wrong, it is humanity falling apart. Ivan breaks down completely and loses his mind. The anti realist conclusion that seemed so logical in the abstract destroys the person who lives by it.

Alyosha, The Counter

Alyosha cannot refute Ivan's argument. He has no philosophical answer to innocent suffering. Instead he responds by kissing Ivan the same way Christ kissed the Grand Inquisitor. His answer is not an argument. It is love. Active compassion in the face of suffering rather than intellectual rebellion against it. Dostoevsky is not saying Alyosha is philosophically right and Ivan is wrong. He is saying that Ivan's response to evil leads to destruction and Alyosha's response leads to genuine human good. The answer to the problem of evil is not a better argument. It is a better way of living.

What This Means for This Paper

Dostoevsky brings together almost every thread this paper has been following. Ivan's conclusion connects back to Mackie and Nietzsche. The Grand Inquisitor connects back to Plantinga. Smerdyakov shows that anti realist philosophy has real consequences beyond academic debate. But Dostoevsky also creates tension with this paper's thesis. The thesis argues that sharpening our view of good and evil will improve society. Alyosha's response suggests the answer might not be philosophical clarity at all. It might be active love. Dostoevsky does not resolve that tension, he just shows that it's truly there.

Problem Of Evil

The problem of evil, one of the most challenging problems to the idea of a perfectly good and all powerful god. If god is omnipotent he could prevent all evil. If God is omnibenevolent he wants to prevent all evil. There for god can not prevent evil which means he is not all powerful, or god will not prevent evil because he doesn't care, which means he is not all good. Craige and Aquinas did not respond to this problem and to the god they described he couldn't exist with this problem not having some other resolution. This problem seems to be the most understanding of them all, Its not some abstract intellectual problem that requires you to reach for it, It's simple which shows the prominents of it.

Mackie is another prominent figure in this problem as he is in anti realism. He thinks the existence of an omnibenevolent and omnipotent god isn't just unlikely or hard to explain its contradictory. Mackie says there is no way out of this contradiction without weakening one of the premises.

If the premises were changed to softer versions to avoid contradiction, And we couldn't show that God and Evil are logically incompatible The sheer amount of evil in this world seems to make God's existence highly unlikely. Not just moral evil but natural evil.

Plantinga, Free will Defense

God couldn't create genuine free will beings who never choose evil. Real freedom requires the real possibility of choosing wrong. So moral evil, The evil that comes from human choices is the cost for genuine freedom if we couldn't make choices it would just be programming. God is not responsible for evil because it results from are actions. The limitations to this defense is it only cover mortal evils, It doesnt cover the fact kids die from cancer and its out of there control or Earthquakes, tsunamis these are not the results of human nature.

Hick, Soul Making

God designed the world for moral and spiritual growth. Evil and suffering are necessary for genuine virtues to develop. The world isn't black or white it takes danger to develop courage, Without suffering there isn't compassion and empathy. Without moral struggle there is no genuine moral claim. The problem with this seems to be proportion. The amount of suffering in the world seems to be largely disproportionate for that to be the reason we face evil and for it to be genuine soul building.

In fact it seems to do the opposite of soul building if too much evil is put onto someone, to the point of breaking in character or death, how does that improve their morality. A child dying slowly to a painful disease doesn't seem to be a pure character development especially when facing death. Animals have suffered for millions of years before any humans existed to grow from it. Can animals really build their souls?

A deer will be caught in a wild fire going through excitation pain, what good does that bring to the world. they experience suffering and pleasure but do they have the rationality to improve their morality from pain. It doesn't seem like it does or applies to nearly any or all animals. Commonly people attempt to justify animal suffering by saying they will go to heaven while the view of animals going to heaven isn't really a traditional Christian view. If animals did go to heaven would that justify the pain, I don't think God can justify the pain an animal goes through if it is unknowingly guaranteed heaven, all the animal knows in that moment is pain the unknown future pleasure is not relevant to the animal. If God is omnipotent why couldn't he give animals the rationality for soulbuilding to attempt the justification of suffering.

Free Will

Evil is not a thing in itself but the corruption of something good through free choice. God created everything good. Evil entered through the Fall when rational beings turned away from God.

The limit is that this raises the question of why God created beings He knew would fall. If God is omniscient He knew Adam and Eve would choose evil. If He is omnipotent He could have created beings who would freely choose good. The fact that he did not seems to need explanation that has not been reasoned out side of faith.

Synthesis

This paper has worked through a lot of ground. Moore and Shafer-Landau argued that moral facts are real and mind-independent. Mackie and Joyce argued that every moral claim is false. Nietzsche argued the concepts themselves are invented. Blackburn found a middle ground. Bentham and Mill grounded good and evil in real human suffering and flourishing. Aquinas and Craig argued God is the only adequate foundation for objective morality. Dostoevsky showed what happens when someone actually lives out the anti realist conclusion. And the problem of evil pushed back hard against every theological answer.

None of these positions has the full answer on its own. But each of them captured something that is worth acknowledging before landing on a conclusion. The objectivists seem wright morality doesn't feel invented it seems more discovered, Ending slavery doesn't feel like a concept that was made up then was considered right, it feels like we discovered some truth. That intuitive feeling is powerful and common, that can't really be explained by any anti realism. The anti realists are right that the grounding problem hasn't really been solved purely because any answer leaves so much more questions and problems. We cannot point to moral facts the same as we do with objects. Mackie's queerness argument has not been fully answered by anyone in this paper.

The utilitarians are right that suffering and wellbeing are real and measurable. Whatever good and evil ultimately are they seem to track something genuine about human flourishing and human destruction.

Theists are right that objectivity needs grounding in something. The need for grounding does not disappear just because the theological answer is difficult. Dostoevsky is right that the answer has to be livable. A position that is logical in the abstract but catastrophic when actually lived out is missing something important.

Conclusion

On a societal level we act as if moral facts are true and that benefits the world. There are common enough intuitive beliefs shared across cultures and across history that we can treat them as real for the purpose of building stable functioning societies. The near universal recognition that certain things are wrong and that human beings have worth is not proven objective truth in the philosophical sense but it is real enough at the social level to act on and to build from.

The problem is that this does not extend cleanly to individual moral claims. On an individual level there is not enough grounding to claim truth value for a specific moral belief with certainty. The philosophical foundations this paper found do not support one person telling another that their particular moral view is objectively true. The grounding is not there at that level.

But this is not simple relativism. It is not saying anything goes or all views are equally valid. It is saying the common intuitions shared widely enough across humanity provide a real foundation for morality and for stable society. Beyond those widely shared intuitions the ability to claim objective truth value for individual moral beliefs is not supported.

Sharpening our view of good and evil improves society not because we will discover objective moral facts that were always there. It improves society because getting clearer about what the common intuitions are, where they come from, and where they have limits, makes us better at building the morality that functioning societies depend on. We do not need perfect metaphysical foundations for that. We just need to be honest about what we actually know and what we do not. I'm still unsure at the core of my conclusion but what I stated seems to be the most rational understanding I have.

References

• Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Benziger Bros., 1947, www.newadvent.org/summa/.
• Bentham, Jeremy. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Oxford University Press, 1907, www.utilitarianism.com/jeremy-bentham/index.html.
• Blackburn, Simon. Spreading the Word: Groundings in the Philosophy of Language. Oxford University Press, 1984.
• Craig, William Lane. "The Moral Argument." Reasonable Faith, Crossway, 2008, www.reasonablefaith.org/podcasts/defenders-podcast-series-1/s1-moral-argument/moral-argument-part-1.
• Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28054.
• Joyce, Richard. "Error Theory." International Encyclopedia of Ethics, edited by Hugh LaFollette, Wiley-Blackwell, 2024.
• Lander University. "Dostoevsky and the Problem of Evil." Lander University Philosophy Department, philosophy.lander.edu/intro/dostoevsky.html.
• Mackie, J.L. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Penguin Books, 1977, archive.org/details/ethicsinventingr00mack.
• Mill, John Stuart. Utilitarianism. Oxford University Press, 1998, www.utilitarianism.com/mill1.htm.
• Miller, Christian. "Review of Moral Realism: A Defence." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 69, no. 3, 2004, pp. 727-731.
• Moore, G.E. Principia Ethica. Cambridge University Press, 1903, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/53430.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil / On the Genealogy of Morality. Translated by Walter Kaufmann, Vintage Books, 1989, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4363.
• Parfit, Derek. On What Matters. Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Shafer-Landau, Russ. Moral Realism: A Defence. Oxford University Press, 2003.
• Singer, Marcus G. "The Concept of Evil." Philosophy, vol. 79, no. 308, 2004, pp. 185-214.
• Tooley, Michael. "The Problem of Evil." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, Stanford University, 2024, plato.stanford.edu/entries/evil/.