You are welcome to suggest that good is the absence of evil. But then you will have to explain what evil is. As it is, you have given no accounting of what either of these things are, and so I find it difficult to understand where any of your states about either of the two come from.
You have understood my point! It's pointless to define one over the other.
This doesn't really respond to what I said. You have repeatedly argued that actions themselves can be either good or bad. Under the Christian understanding, this is not so. Actions are good or bad insofar as they bring one closer to go or cause one to stray farther away.
No, I haven't. I've explicitly said action and intent matter both. "Closer to and farther away" is, on the other hand, a meaningless definition, because it provides no conclusions to what brings one close [to God, I suppose].
Does murder bring me closer to God? No?
Why?
[To avoid confusion, I don't think that you think it does, I just want you to tell me why.]
Please do not be condescending. I am trying to have a discussion with you in good faith. If you are not interested in having such a conversation, then perhaps you should talk to someone else.
Sorry, that wasn't meant to be condescending. It's just that the explanation that follows requires skirting around some difficulties to describe this kind of meta-level in unambiguous language, so I had hoped you got my point in the first attempt
A world where evil is impossible is completely different from a world where people choose not to do evil. You are approaching this from a very consequentialist standpoint: all that matters is how much suffering is wrought in the world.
Not only! I've mentioned multiple times that intent does matter, so it is not strictly consequentialist. But consequences can't simply be ignored.
Now in the scenario that we're talking about, intent cannot exist in one of the worlds, so we only have consequences to judge by.
That has never been the point for the Christian. Nor has the point been that there must be examples of evil to compare good to. The point is that man can be good only if he could choose not to. This is a very simple point but seems to be one that an awful lot of people are having trouble swallowing. I remain confused as to why. It seems self-evident to me that goodness must be chosen. And since no one else has offered any explanation for what goodness might actually be and has merely provided vague statements about it and its relationship with evil (whatever that is!), I find it difficult to understand either where you are coming from or why these vague statements could possibly be true.
So: what is good/evil? And what about the statement "virtue must be chosen" do you disagree with?
The whole statement!
You seem to think of the whole good/evil discussion as a question of what is laudable or condemnable. The word "virtue" implies the same. I don't care about which actions are laudable or condemnable (at least not mainly). Good actions are those who intend and lead to a better life for others, whatever that means, evil actions are those who intend and lead to a worse life for others, whatever that means. The question of morality is the "whatever that means" part. Good or evil actions [including their intent, before you come back at this] can only be characterized as such because of what they accomplish, and can then be condemned or lauded because of it. But if everyone already has the best possible life (or at least, the least bad life) because of the impossibility of evil actions, there's no need for good actions. You may now complain about that nobody can be lauded for their actions anymore, but to me that sounds more like a desirable state than a problem.
You are right that we should not care about linguistic truths. However, they are a convenient heuristic for trying to explain things like virtue ethics.
In my opinion, this goes beyond linguistics, though. It is about what people are able to conceive of at all (again, under the assumption that good and evil are dichotomic).
Can you please explain 1.) why good and evil are not a dichotomy and 2.) what these two things are?
1) Because that wouldn't answer what good and evil are at all. You would still have to define one, and if you've managed that (which is the hard part!), you could also do it for the other.
2) I'm sorry, but I can't answer one of the questions that is troubling philosophers for centuries in one forum post now! And that's not because of time and knowledge constraints, but because I think that a
general answer to this question cannot exist. I'm not arguing for a specific moral system here; I'm pointing out my perceived problems with the one you're presenting.
