Quote:
Originally Posted by boagie  The protest that they are not mutually dependent, as the latest post by Aedes indicates, is unfounded, one would not know what is good, if one did not know what was bad. |
This rationalization you (and others, including Thomas) make here is unfounded because there is no absolute standard for good, for bad, or for evil. There is cultural convention and personal convention, but they are all relativistic judgements. So even if I were to stipulate that one MUST know 'bad' to understand 'good', it would be meaningless -- because an individual in seeing something he held as good would judge it against his own conception of 'bad' -- not some ACTUAL bad standard.
While I do agree with you that good and bad are a better conceptual dichotomy than good vs evil, I still cannot agree that they can only be understood in relation to one another.
Our default judgement for ANY situation is neutral. Why? Because I don't assign some adjective or quality to a situation unless I see it. So if I watch a baseball game, I don't qualify any aspect of it as "evil" because it's just not a quality that is relevant to the situation. It's neutral. The extremes of judgement (i.e.
superlatively good, superlatively evil, superlatively bad) are counterposed to the default neutral judgement.
And because it's abundantly clear that we make snap visceral judgements about things and then back-rationalize them, I think it's fair to generalize that GOOD and EVIL and BAD are emotionally-derived judgements that consist in what is witnessed and in one's application of the idea -- they do NOT incorporate the contraposition of an opposing idea.