People tend to believe evil is something external to them, because they project their shadow onto others.

Proposition 68 'If men were born free, they would form no conception of good and evil so long as they were free.'Ĭarl Jung, in his book Answer to Job and elsewhere, depicted evil as the dark side of God.

Proposition 65 'According to the guidance of reason, of two things which are good, we shall follow the greater good, and of two evils, follow the less.'.

Corollary 'Hence it follows that if the human mind had none but adequate ideas, it would form no notion of evil.'.

Proposition 64 'The knowledge of evil is inadequate knowledge.'.

Proposition 30 'Nothing can be evil through that which it possesses in common with our nature, but in so far as a thing is evil to us it is contrary to us.'.

Proposition 8 'Knowledge of good or evil is nothing but affect of joy or sorrow in so far as we are conscious of it.'.

Spinoza assumes a quasi-mathematical style and states these further propositions which he purports to prove or demonstrate from the above definitions in part IV of his Ethics:

By evil, on the contrary, I understand that which we certainly know hinders us from possessing anything that is good.

By good, I understand that which we certainly know is useful to us.

The root meaning of the word is of obscure origin though shown to be akin to modern German übel (noun: Übel, although the noun evil is normally translated as 'das Böse') with the basic idea of social or religious transgression. Other later Germanic forms include Middle English evel, ifel, ufel, Old Frisian evel (adjective and noun), Old Saxon ubil, Old High German ubil, and Gothic ubils. The modern English word evil ( Old English yfel) and its cognates such as the German Übel and Dutch euvel are widely considered to come from a Proto-Germanic reconstructed form of *ubilaz, comparable to the Hittite huwapp- ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European form *wap- and suffixed zero-grade form *up-elo. While the term is applied to events and conditions without agency, the forms of evil addressed in this article presume one or more evildoers.

The ethical questions regarding good and evil are subsumed into three major areas of study: meta-ethics concerning the nature of good and evil, normative ethics concerning how we ought to behave, and applied ethics concerning particular moral issues. In cultures with Buddhist spiritual influence, both good and evil are perceived as part of an antagonistic duality that itself must be overcome through achieving Nirvana. In some forms of thought, evil is also sometimes perceived as the dualistic antagonistic binary opposite to good, in which good should prevail and evil should be defeated.

Elements that are commonly associated with personal forms of evil involve unbalanced behavior including anger, revenge, hatred, psychological trauma, expediency, selfishness, ignorance, destruction and neglect. Definitions of evil vary, as does the analysis of its motives. In certain religious contexts, evil has been described as a supernatural force. While some religions, world views, and philosophies focus on 'good versus evil', others deny evil's existence and usefulness in describing people.Įvil can denote profound immorality, but typically not without some basis in the understanding of the human condition, where strife and suffering ( cf. It is generally seen as taking multiple possible forms, such as the form of personal moral evil commonly associated with the word, or impersonal natural evil (as in the case of natural disasters or illnesses), and in religious thought, the form of the demonic or supernatural/eternal. It can be an extremely broad concept, although in everyday usage it is often more narrowly used to talk about profound wickedness and against common good. Sendan Kendatsuba, one of the eight guardians of Buddhist law, banishing evil in one of the five paintings of Extermination of Evil.Įvil, in a general sense, is defined as the opposite or absence of good. For other uses, see Evil (disambiguation).

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