4 Answers

  1. Evil grows out of misunderstanding. It is lack of understanding that makes people greedy, cruel, vicious, and self-centered. If Good tries to understand this world and make a person better, then evil returns him to the state of the beast. Man is a wolf to man, most importantly I am a favorite and so on. The killer just doesn't understand what he's taking from a person. If he had heard his first cry, his first step, experienced the first love of his victim, he would not have raised the hand to commit murder. The easiest way to commit a misdemeanor is if you don't think about what you're doing. Because it is a misunderstanding.

  2. Evil is the absence of good.

    Similarly, we can answer the question about the nature of darkness, darkness – the absence of light.

    Just because the world is quite polar, let's say. If not one, then the other, in most cases, and the concepts as such “golden mean” does not exist: either one or the other.

  3. Look at the excellent lecture by A. Markov “The Evolutionary roots of good and evil”, where everything is described about intraspecific “good” – recessive altruism and “evil” – egoism:

    We publish a transcript of a lecture delivered by Alexander Markov, Doctor of Biological Sciences, senior researcher at the Laboratory of Higher Invertebrates of the Institute of Paleontology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, creator and author of the project “Problems of Evolution”, delivered on April 29, 2010 at the Polytechnic Museum as part of the project “<url> Public Lectures”.

    In short, cooperation is a prerequisite for multicellular organisms. But as a result of mutations, mutant cells regularly appear with a damaged function of working for the common good (egoistic), which therefore have more resources for reproduction. Therefore, one of the main functions of multicellular organisms and communities is to fight such selfishness.

    If you go a little wider, to the level of the ecosystem, then evil is parasitism, and good is cooperation, symbiosis, synergy.

    As an example, we can consider domestic meat and dairy animals – a vivid example of symbiosis. Unlike wild (unrestricted) hunting, which can lead to the complete extermination of the population, animal breeding is an additional ecological niche for them, which allows them to preserve the population in the event of disasters in the wild (environmental damage to the wild population is not a consequence of animal breeding and therefore is not part of the task).

    Mathematically, the exact difference between good and evil for fully rational players is described in non-cooperative game theory (see the somewhat ill-fated Theory of games).The prisoner's dilemma, even though we are talking about a huge class of situations-from economics (imperfect markets) to politics (an arms race), ecology, ethics, and a host of others. It is proved that under certain conditions that are quite common, completely rational, but selfish and distrustful of each other players come to a completely irrational overall and even to the worst result for everyone.

    The same conclusion about the evil of selfishness and parasitism was reached by the theory of systems, in which the optimum of a subsystem optimizes a super-system only if it is a bottleneck. This is clearly seen when lawyers, accountants, or IT people gain power in the company and start making “improvements” purely for themselves. There is even an anecdote that “the office reaches its perfection just in time for the company's bankruptcy.”

    Thus, evil is parasitism, selfishness. The nature of evil is that in any community, it is beneficial for each participant to be selfish separately, despite the fact that it is beneficial for all of them to cooperate together.

  4. There is no evil or good in the world – everything that happens is neutral and only we give our assessment of what is happening an emotional color.

    What for one is an obvious evil, for another can be a benefit…

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