Objective good and evil?

[Sair]

The bolded sentence above can only be true if good and evil are distinct things. In Catholic theology evil is not a distinct thing, it is the absence of the good. Good can exist fully without anything missing. Evil is not necessary to good to exist.

There goes the argument that any degree of evil/suffering is an expected consequence of God’s creation of the universe through natural means.

 

[ColdComfort]

It seems that good and evil do not have objective existence, aside from human perceptions and experiences.

Imagine that there were no human beings in the universe. Could any actions or event (earthquake, explosion) be then qualified as good or evil? It would seem not. In the absence of humans, good and evil would seem to be meaningless.

Taking this a step further, if there was no life at all in the universe, it would be even more evident that the qualifications of good and evil were meaningless. A star might explode, ocean might dry- but without living things, it would all seem neither good nor evil.

So, good and evil seems to depend upon the existence and experience of human beings, or at least living things of some form.

Good and evil might be quasi-objective (i.e. common to the reality of ‘all’ people), and, as a result of this, a quasi-universal morality can be validly postulated.

But good and evil cannot be ABSOLUTELY objective, since, without living things being involved, they necessarily cease to make sense.

If God created a world with no human or other animal life it would be good. Being is good. In fact, such a universe did exist prior to the emergence of life. Nor does your conclusion follow from the premise. Add human life to a lifeless world: we now percieve the beauty in created things but that is because they are beautiful. So too with morality. The divine laws we know of either through Revelation or the natural law are based on how God created us. They are not arbitrary demands but objective truths that direct a being endowed with free will towards the final end for which he was created. I suppose that even before the existence of human beings such objective truths existed in the mind of God. Or some other intelligent entity, like an angel, could say ’ if a being like man existed certain moral truths would be objectively true’.

 

[davidv]

There goes the argument that any degree of evil/suffering is an expected consequence of God’s creation of the universe through natural means.

Non sequiteur.

 

[fred_conty]

When we talk about good and evil in this world, we are talking about man, right? If man is missing in the picture, then strictly speaking, nothing is moral or immoral, good or evil. Ergo animals which are not man do not do good and evil.

Animals don’t have a conscience therefore there is no moral good and evil. When it looks like they lie, cheat, and steal, it is merely a law of survival written in their heart which they are responding to, and there is no judgment on their part about it being moral or immoral. If this were not the case, then we would have to change the catholic faith to say that at the moment of death, all animals, including man, are judged and go to heaven or hell. How about spiders and ants?

Just a thought.