THE SPECTRUM OF GOOD AND EVIL

          Most of us may have asked this question at least once in our lifetime, and that question is, what makes an act to be considered correct or incorrect? Which acts fall under the category of good and evil? The answers to those sorts of questions are various. You could approach those questions from a Kantian standpoint. You could even say that the concept of good and evil is a social construct in which its values and definitions depend on how society has built it. There is more than just one fixed answer to those questions. However, in this article, we are going to approach it from a more utilitarian perspective, or utilitarianism, to make it simple.

          So, what is utilitarianism? Utilitarianism is a concept that was introduced by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham and was later modified by John Stuart Mill. As a concept, the single thing that it values is happiness. Jeremy Bentham defines happiness as a state in which pleasure is present and pain is absent. He concluded that an act is considered right when it increases pain and decreases pleasure. The theory that he proposed is seen as hedonistic as it views pain and pleasure as its only variables and is then called “utilitarianism.” This is because it applies directly to actions, therefore a utility. Bethan’s views of utilitarianism were based on an action’s consequences. He emphasized that the community’s happiness is the top priority because it makes up the sum of the happiness of the individuals within it. For him, the quantity of happiness was more important than the quality of happiness.

          To give an example, let us say that you were given a choice to punish a criminal. You could either just lock the criminal in a cell and call it a day, or you could torture the criminal to death and give them a taste of the many atrocities that they have done. At first glance, this seemed like a simple choice, right? Although the criminal has done horrible things, just locking them up may seem to be the more ethical and better choice to make. Nevertheless, when you put the happiness of the community first and say that the community would be happier if the criminal got what was coming to them, things would escalate pretty quickly. On the one hand, if you were to please the community you live in, you would have to choose torture as the criminal’s punishment because it produces the most sum of happiness. On the other hand, if you do that, you would be giving that person insufferable pain, which from an individual standpoint is quite gruesome indeed.

          For that reason, which choice is considered good or evil according to utilitarianism? Yes, the correct choice from a utilitarian perspective is the first choice, which is torturing the criminal to their last breath as it would bring the most sum of happiness for the community. In essence, from this short essay about the concepts of good and evil or correct and incorrect, it needs to be understood that the world we live in is not as black and white as good and evil. The world we live in is a spectrum of colors with endless possibilities and how we see it depends on which lens we see it through.

References

Kleinman, P. (2013). Utilitarianism. In P. Kleinman, Philosophy 101 (pp. 93-97). 2013: Adams Media.