> Behalf Of Marvin Long, Jr. > > Here's a question: was pre-ideological violence evil? Did evil as evil > even exist? >
Personally, I think evil can only exist when its opposite has been defined. That is, until you develop a philosophy that says "this is good, and this must be so" you cannot really have an evil. For example, is a cat playing with a half dead mouse evil? No, it is merely practicing skills that are needed for its own survival, that of being able to deal with an unpredictable prey. I'm about 2/3 through reading Robinson Crusoe for the first ever time, and there's a bit there where Crusoe, having discovered that his island is used for cannibal feasts at first determines to try and wipe out the next group of cannibals. But then he realises that for him to do that he would effectively be murdering them for something that they had no perception of, that cannibalism was bad. So who, in the long run, would be evil - him or them? We perceive evil because we follow from 2000 years of a Christian ethos, which itself follows from thousands of years of preceding religions that arose with civilisation. All societies develop their own taboos and beliefs - probably the first or second thing we ever did as a species - and many of these beliefs are similar, such as it is bad to kill your own family. So we can see that killing your own family becomes an evil, but really only after we define it so by saying, effectively, "letting your family live is good". We know that biologically that is good, but for much of the animal kingdom there are very good reasons when sometimes it is right, biologically, to kill some of your family - reduce competition for scarce resources, get rid of elderly or sick family members, sacrifice the young or old to a predator to save yourself, etc. Are these actions evil? Brett
