Is there absolute good and evil?

The short answer to the question "Is there absolute good or bad?" is "no". The argument why absolute good or bad are untenable concepts is rather straight-forward with a twist in the tail. It goes like this.

Absolute good or bad requires a centre of good or bad. Traditionally, cultures entertained a concept of God, which served as a centre of good. God blesses, watches over his/her creation. Likewise, the antithesis of good is a centre of evil, such as the Devil. A post-modern framework of logic, leaving God aside, leaves one in a void as to the centre of absolute good or evil. The only plausible alternative is some intrinsic sense in humans of absolute good and evil. Again, no go. Enter Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins, his protagonist.

We are governed by our genes' singular motive to propagate unchanged, if one is to believe Dawkins. This fine gentleman convincingly argues that the evolution of a species is not driven by the survival of the group, but the survival of the gene in competing over resources. The human body, as a perfectly suitable example of a species, is a mere vessel to carry genes. Each of us is programmed by our genes to be selfish.

Humans evolved an elaborate brain with extraordinary intellectual capacity. Part of this capacity is used to develop frameworks of principles to govern groups of humans. The sole purpose of such frameworks is to improve the probability of the individual to survive and thrive, thereby enhancing the chances of the genes to propagate. There is no intrinsic good or evil at hand here. We merely depict as good such behaviour as conforms to the framework and as evil such behaviour as strikes out against the framework.

Substantiated by extensive practical observation, Steven Pinker argues that humans are hardly noble and to the contrary rather selfish. There is no evidence in history of a universal sense of goodness or evil. At best one can argue that humans have displayed some notion of the sanctity of human life, although there are many exceptions to this notion. Some exceptions are somewhat frivolous. In recent France, a man could flaunt the gauntlet over rather petty grievances to fight until death in a dual, with little consequence for the winner other than some battle scars for the less nimble.

The Incas had quite dire rituals of offering humans to appease their gods. More recently, some countries have cynically construed good vs evil for own political gains by vilifying a suitable candidate and mobilise the local population to go to war against that unfortunate candidate. Iraq springs to mind. In South Africa, the once evil resistance movement, the ANC, came good and to power in 1994 in the first elections under universal suffrage.

Good and evil require a context to exist. This context is drifting with the age of Mankind. We will have to concede that we are not so wise as to know the absolute of good and evil. Rather, good and evil are the folly of Man who has dared to stand upright.