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The Good, Bad and Evil Connundrum


Picture sourced from (www.gollner.ca)
Are human beings the only species in the universe capable of forming and voicing opinions? Possibly yes and also possibly not. The ability of human beings’ ability to think and voice to their thoughts is one of the things that sets us apart from other species and races that we currently know of. This ability to think independently and form opinions gives us our individuality. Conflicting ideologies also make for some very interesting and lively conversations, intense debates, furious arguments, and fights, battles and wars of varying magnitude. Religion, politics, whether money is the root of all evil, right to abortion, stem cell research, cloning, genetic modification of foods, climate change etc are a few topics that make for very strongly polarized viewpoints.


What makes this fight of ideologies even more interesting for a behavior analyst is the reaction of protagonists when confronted with diametrically opposing viewpoints. People sometimes get swayed by the force of someone’s passion or logic and sometimes people only pretend to agree without actually changing their viewpoints. At other occasions, people are convinced of the factual correctness of the other person’s viewpoint but prefer to stick to their guns and sometimes people do not change their viewpoints an iota even if the other person goes blue in the face talking. The last two categories of people are the ones that perhaps are more faithfully wedded to their beliefs than to their spouses.

What makes a viewpoint right for one person and wrong for the other? Are good, bad and evil just the figments of our imagination? Or is it that we’ve been fed a steady diet of our forefathers’ perception of right and wrong only to make us toe the line that they wanted us to? Why is it alright for a soldier to kill a man while defending his country and wrong for a person to murder a man for other reasons? Why is it so wrong to kill a human being when there are billions of them and not such a heinous crime when we kill a tiger, of which only 1400 are left? On the flip side, why is it ok for an animal to kill on instinct and wrong for a psychopath to kill on the same animalistic instinct?

Taking the point further, is there really a hell and a heaven? What do they really look like? Even if there is, who decides the rules for getting into them? For a moment, let us assume, for the sake of argument, that there is a hell and a heaven. When a few allegedly holy men of a religion advocate killing of non-believers and people from other religions as a path to heaven, the entire religion gets branded as terrorists. One conveniently forgets how in the middle ages, knights of a religion killed children, pillaged villages, raped women and killed enemy army combatants while they were sitting down for prayers, all in the name of the greater glory of God! Did these knights get admission into the kingdom of heaven or did they burn in hell? Who decided and how?

Another section of humans has quite another take on hell and heaven. According to them, hell and heaven are the consequences of one’s actions that one pays for or enjoys fruit of within this life itself. Such simplistic thinking, which believes in instant or delayed justice, within one’s life span fails to address two key points. The first one is carried forward from our discussion above- who decides what is right and what is wrong. The second fatal flaw in this reasoning is that frequently one sees a person or persons who do all bad or evil things and still live a life of luxury and even die peacefully! What about their retribution?

Which brings us back to our initial conundrum, what is the definition of right and wrong? Who decides? Or is it just one’s own personal benchmark of happiness/ satisfaction or unhappiness/ guilt that dictate the labeling of an act committed? In which case, the earlier example of psychopath killing because he finds pleasure in it would make it an act of goodness. Another contentious issue is, is an act absolute in its nature? Are acts to be classified as Black and White, or are there innumerable shades of Gray in between? There are a lot of questions, but no clear answers, or at least no answers that we all can agree upon. This is what makes us unique among the species/ races that we know of as yet.

(Image sourced from my.opera.com)




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