Our definition of this concept will, I think, serve to provide a new interpretation of the statement made previously, namely, that “evil always carries with it the presumption of standards or rules.” What, precisely, does this statement mean? It means that whenever we have lost our organic equilibrium in the presence of a situation described as evil, whatever we do to recover it ipso facto at that moment defines not only the standard and rule by which our conduct is regulated, but such behavior also reveals to others just what the “problem of evil” really means to us. For example, if we are vexed and become profane, profanity is patently an integral factor in our philosophy of compensation. If we lose our money, and steal another’s to make good our loss, theft is a cardinal principle in our doctrine of equalization. We may, to be sure, immediately thereafter lament the outburst by which we attempted to “set things to rights,” but we cannot retrieve the action by which we defined and exhibited our practical ethical philosophy. Our recent Emerson had this scientific truth in mind when he said, “What you are speaks so loud, I cannot hear what you say.” Examples of another sort are equally illuminating. If Socrates is condemned to death for corrupting the Athenian youth, and calmly drinks the hemlock in order to remain a law-abiding citizen to the end, this deed of probity defines the dominant action-pattern in his philosophy of retaliation. If Jesus is crucified for blasphemy and inciting to insurrection, and manifests an attitude of non-resistance and equanimity, these action-patterns once more exhibit his method of dealing with the problem of evil. In every such case the bodily habits which have long accumulated are automatically released by the appropriate stimulus into overt behavior. In physiological terms, what a man does in response to evil, shows what sort of reciprocal innervations his body has acquired. And while such a mechanistic interpretation of an ethical standard may seem astonishing, yet such a modus agendi is, unless we are greatly deceived, the one which human beings actually employ, and consequently it is the only one which has any place in an empirical science of conduct.
A Further Remark on the Opposites of “Good”
From our definition of “evil” as an intensification of “bad” in the positive sense of that term, it can at once be noted that these two words do not even together supply a thoroughgoing antonym to the word “good.” For they do not strictly imply action-patterns which in the minute and fine are opposed to those underlying all the valid uses of the word “good.” It is not to the point that “in general” (which can only mean here vaguely) these words are antithetical to each other; our analysis has produced knowledge that henceforth discounts all such remarks. And, if anyone says that for the purposes of morality, the traditional antithesis is still valid, the answer is that morality, after all, is only custom, while ethics is primarily a critical insight into that reality which the moralist has always sought to make obscure.
A more important conclusion, however, is still to be drawn from the foregoing analysis. Which is, that “evil” is not, as has usually been concluded, an opposite of “good.” Indeed, if we have described the situation fairly, when we say that ‘evil denotes that our wishes have been thwarted to such an extent as to call forth from us the most energetic, antagonistic reactions of which we are capable,’ we can only deduce from this that the antagonistic reactions are aroused for the purpose of replacing something that is “bad” by something that is “good.” But if this be the case, then the emphatic quality attaching to the word “evil” is really a sign that we have already started an outgoing reaction that shall furnish the desired compensation. This two-fold meaning of the word “evil” is worthy of more than a passing remark, but suffice it to say that in the light of what has gone before, the “problem of evil” now becomes the problem of educating a man how to replace the “bad” with the “good,” rather than a problem over which the metaphysician may dawdle or the moralist mope.
FOOTNOTES:
The Uses of the Word “Bad”
I. The Privative Significations of the Word “Bad.”
1. Bad air; vitiated, which cannot sustain healthy respiration.
2. Bad coin; debased, counterfeit.