Are Good and Evil Relative? Can Violence be Justified?

Good morning!

I had an experience two nights ago that was thought-provoking. I was walking my dog who is a 50-60 lb shepherd-type. A neighbor's dog, who is a larger hunting-type came tearing across the yard and attacked my dog. I think it was more of a territorial action than a murder attempt, because despite all the noise and yips from mine (who was thoroughly trounced), I didn't find any injuries on him after the fact.

I was carrying a retractable leash with a solid plastic housing and a grip. I circled the dogs, striking at the neighbor's dog. I whiffed a couple times, kept circling the dogs as mine continued to yip and shriek, landed one blow on the attacking dog's hip, then landed a really solid, cracking strike to his head in a hammer-type action. He immediately stopped his attack and retreated.

Having been compelled to use violence, I felt a little guilty. I was a vegetarian for years for ethical reasons. And of course a dog's behavior, like a child's, is reflective of the training it has received. The hunting dog bears little responsibility for its actions. In Catholicism, one would say that the dog lacks "Free Will."

One of the points that Joseph Campbell raises in "The Power of Myth" ebook is that there is a Zoroastrian idea that good and evil are "relative to where you're standing." For the hunting dog, my shepherd is an invader (evil) who must be repelled (good). For me, the hunting dog is an aggressor (evil) and my dog must be defended (good). I believe Campbell goes on to say that the Buddhist challenge, once one recognizes that life feeds on death, and moral absolutes do not exist, is to then choose to "Say Yes" to life, and continue to participate in the world (that world being the Zoroastrian world that is a combination of good and evil).

Yoda says "A Jedi uses the Force only for knowledge and defense, never for attack."

Given this situation, what do you think? Are good and evil relative positions? Can violence be justified?

Yes "good" and "evil" are relative. Take a look at all the different cultures and how some things are A OK in some and absolutely the worst insult you can offer in another.

To some people, killing is the most evil thing that one person can do to another. I chose a career that that's ultimately what we do to achieve our goals. If I don't do it directly, I facilitate it. But I believe those goals are worth fighting for. I really think the guys we're fighting believe in what they are fighting for too. As they say, war isn't about who is right, it's about who is left.

As far as dogs go, it is the responsibility of the owners to maintain control of their animals within the guidelines of local laws and common sense. I have been prepared to boot dogs who charged us while they were off-leash. Luckily posturing caused them to back off so far. The one dog attack I encountered I helped pry the dog off of another. This didn't need violence more than getting a sturdy stick down the attacker's throat.

Violence of any kind is not my first go-to, however I am prepared to use it if I need it to protect me and mine and only to the point of necessity.

Proper application of violence.

I am a firm believer that there are two kinds of "good v. evil" axes. Human good and evil is relative, generally speaking. Cosmic good and evil are more absolute, but also nothing like their human-understood counterparts.

The one time violence is justified is when your attacker is free to use violence(and does). You can't have non-violent resistance against the Nazis in a concentration camp, to take an extreme case...

evil is often marked by its lack of necessity, the selfishness of the perpetrator, and the lack of acknowledgement of the value of the victim

evil is a matter of MOTIVE and INTENTION

we can all imagine a scenario where a starving person steals a loaf of bread and say this is not evil because of the circumstances

we can also imagine a clearly evil situation where a powerful person takes control of all the bread and forces people to starve

the simple act of violence is not evil - some would suggest that birth itself could be seen as a violent act (im not saying it is or isn't, only that the idea has been expressed)

certainly most every form of eating could be seen as violence against some other form of life - even plant life can be damaged to the point of death by being eaten (although it takes more than just eating all the oranges off the tree to kill the tree)

we have an experience (life) which by its nature demands some kinds of violence

do we decide that we are inherently evil?
imo, no

because we can see that the violence of being born or the violence of eating, even hunting, is not motivated the same way as the violence of, say, genocidal extermination, which we can agree is evil

this scenario with the dog - you did what seemed the most effective course of action (necessary) to protect your dog (in defense of something associated with the self, BUT NOT SELFISH in the strict sense) and while you have every right to take some pleasure in having stepped up and fought off a predator, I would guess that as a rule you don't go around attacking things simply because you can and you might like to, and that a part of the reason for not doing this is that you acknowledge the value of other living organisms

so if we want to put your case on the table, we can say that what you did was not evil, and we can also offer some RELATIVELY stable criteria for determining the level of evil within any given act

once we understand how influential the motives and intentions of the person commiting the act are to the idea of "evil" it becomes easy to see that evil itself is not entirely relative, but its expression certainly can be

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EDIT
to me the best argument for the relativity of evil would be in a discussion on torture

the usual example is a bad guy has a bomb in a school or something of this nature and he has been captured and wont talk

is it evil to torture him?
can the act of his torture be more evil if it is performed by one person than if it is performed by another?

not to hijack the thread, simply rambling

Hehe, I always respond the same way to this.... IMO good is to bad and compassion is to evil. And in that regard good and bad are relative but evil and compassion are functions of human health and intention. And good and evil are not duality in themselves, again only IMO.

So if evil is not relative then violence can be understood quite clearly in terms of awareness of someones suffering, and an intention/effort to increase it - contrasted with compassion being an awareness of someones suffering and an intention/effort to decrease it. Those are quite literally definitions of compassion and evil.

Then it comes down to how one defines violence, but you get my point :side:

Good and bad though are quite relative and need to exist within context of other things I guess :S

OB1Shinobi wrote: evil is often marked by its lack of necessity, the selfishness of the perpetrator, and the lack of acknowledgement of the value of the victim

evil is a matter of MOTIVE and INTENTION

So simply put and so true.

I don't believe in either. At least, not as objective constructs. They are made in the mind of the believer. Good and evil are entirely subjective.

There is Good and evil for ME..for YOU...but absolute, true good and evil? Laughable.

Hello !

I found very pertinent the use by Adder Obi1Shinobi of the words "evil" (and "compassion") for a feeling you can have. May be not everyone felt "evil", as other feelings like "compassion", "anguish", "passion", "fever", and so on... But it's not because some people never felt "evil" that it don't exist in a way more cruel than a transcendental "Absolute Evil" (whichcould be God or one of the gods may be ? :evil: ), as a real and true feeling which can be expressed by "(sexual ? :sick: ) satisfaction to make suffering other living creatures, and so on"...

And I agree these feelings are not in the same category than "bad" and "good", which depends of and refers to the context and the way of interpreting facts and things. I would provide extra arguments about the meaningless of "bad" and "good" as non-existing things (sadly not the case for "evil"... ) about the dogs...

Dogs are clever, but they are not in the same manner as Humans. Dogs never argue about which is "bad" or "good", as Humans do, because they can't talk and use "concepts" (ie "words" or "symbols" which don't design an existing "real" signified thing, as chair or umbrella...). But dogs "know the things" with an accuracy we can't understand (or may be women when they are pregnant ? :laugh: ) : they know if an other dog is a male or a female, and if it's a female the degree of it's period, far away and sometimes (with urine) after the other dog gone away. No "bad" nor "evil" in dogs fighting, no thinking nor philosophy, just "dogs knowledge" that Humans can't trully understand (even if they try :huh: )...

And may be, sometimes a good "dogs fighting" is usefull for Humans to bring them back into the fold of animal nature ("Nature" ? ) without philosophy, and no "bad" nor "good"... And make them more trully... ALIVED !

By the way, how was the fight ? Exciting ? How did you felt at this moment ? And just after ? And now ?...
I hope you don't feel guilty now, and you aren't feared to pass on the same path with your dog !!

May the Force be With You !!

Alan Watts says something about Good and Evil in his book Chapter Two; The Game of Black and White. Both are two sides of the same coin. We would not know one with out the other.
As for violence as long as you are using it as a last resort I believe it is okay. You were acting in self defense of your dog so a believe your attack was justified.

Boesen wrote: Alan Watts says something about Good and Evil in his book Chapter Two; The Game of Black and White. Both are two sides of the same coin. We would not know one with out the other.
As for violence as long as you are using it as a last resort I believe it is okay. You were acting in self defense of your dog so a believe your attack was justified.

Author: Scott Peck: what is evil? live spelled backwards.


Can violence be justified? I dunno, when the tree leaves are droopy from so many cloudy days, is the sun evil?

In my opinion the question is superfluous to the particular example, though surely it has its place elsewhere. See, you clarified your own and the neighbor's dog's position. What they need (security of territory/safety of pet) and what is in the way (an invader/an aggressor) of that. So both you and it reacted in what you immediately judged to be the most effective action at that time and we can go on discussing justification for either side for another three pages.

Now, why do you need to call anything in the given example good or evil? It serves not to make the situation at all clearer. At best, these labels draw an even sharper divide and serve to overly demonize one party while overly glorify the other. If anything, labels like good and evil would serve to justify even more violence than can possibly be required to resolve the situation.

As to the main questions you pose, I'd say the labels are not so much relative as they are subjective, as necessarily all labels are. A single isolated thing can at the same time be neither good nor evil but it cannot be both good and evil. In other words, there is only one side of the middle ground there, something we'd call a discontinuity. Now, can violence be justified? Probably. Depends on what we mean by violence, can and justify respectively. Saying it's either good or evil though doesn't do much to either justify or condemn it. It just makes the approach sound... simplistic, if we want to avoid calling it childish.

Am noticing that in discussions (not just this one) of good and evil joined with actions (self or others) . . .

there appears this association of feeling badly made equal to a conception of evil

am seeing two sets: 1) feelings 2) actions
how could the possibility of equality occur?

Boesen wrote: Alan Watts says something about Good and Evil in his book Chapter Two; The Game of Black and White. Both are two sides of the same coin. We would not know one with out the other.
As for violence as long as you are using it as a last resort I believe it is okay. You were acting in self defense of your dog so a believe your attack was justified.

The idea that one cannot exist without another is, in my opinion, a bit silly. (No, I'm not saying you are silly for agreeing or quoting it) I love Alan Watts and hesitate to diminish his belief. Still, this idea is like saying light and dark require one another to exist. Of course they exist. Light is light. Darkness is darkness. If there was only light in the universe it would still be observable. We might not call it "light," but it would still exist.

Mareeka wrote:

Boesen wrote: Can violence be justified? I dunno, when the tree leaves are droopy from so many cloudy days, is the sun evil?

Well, if you ask the tree after that many cloudy days, I think the tree would find the clouds to be evil!

putting people into ovens is evil
clouds are just water in the sky

I do not believe many of the people here feel that putting people into ovens because of their race or culture is on a par with clouds drifting overhead

Trees feel no pain. They have no opinion either. That's why we aren't concerned with their feelings but only care for their survival as far as it is useful to us or by extension the entirety of the biosphere.