To me, the idea that good cannot be defined without evil is somewhat ludicrous… if anything, I think the opposite is true. It’s been said that evil is like cold: scientifically speaking, “cold” is nothing but the absence of heat. To try and have a “balance of heat and cold,” you’re abstracting what heat and cold actually are, and to approximate such a “balance” leaves things literally lukewarm. You can’t have both heat and cold, you can only have a lesser amount of heat.
I think good and evil are like that: things like mercy, joy, justice, kindness, generosity, honesty–these things are good, and they’ll be recognized as such even without the contrast evil provides. Anyone who’s given generously to a friend whose needs are already met just to show love, or told the truth when they really didn’t have to just because it “felt right” knows what I’m talking about.
Greed is defined by a lack of generosity.
Lies are things devoid of truth.
Cruelty is nothing more than an absence of kimdness.
And what is the opposite of justice? Injustice, of course. “Not justice.”
Therefore, I hold that good can exist without evil, but not the other way around; just as “darkness,” “cold,” “emptiness,” etc., are only terms to describe the absence of something else, so too is “evil” a meaningless concept without good.
prguitarman
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