What Good and Evil Are by Baruch Spinoza
Good and evil are not real things in Nature but Entia Rationis, or things of thought, created by the understanding in order to distinguish things clearly. Like other relations, they exist only through comparison: a man is called bad compared with one who is better, and an apple is called bad compared with one judged better or more useful. Nothing can be called bad unless some better or good thing is taken as its standard. To call something good means only that it conforms to a general Idea formed of things of its kind. Yet real things agree with their particular Ideas, whose essences are perfect, rather than with such general Ideas. Since everything in Nature is either a thing or an action, and good and evil are neither, they do not exist in Nature. If they were things or actions, they would have definitions of their own. But the goodness of Peter and the wickedness of Judas cannot be defined apart from Peter’s or Judas’s essence, which alone exists in Nature. Good and evil therefore have no independent reality as things or actions.
By Baruch Spinoza · First published 1660 · Genre: Philosophy, Metaphysics, Ethics · 427 words
First lines
Some things are in our understanding and not in Nature, and so they are also only our own creation, and their purpose is to understand things distinctly: among these we include all relations, which have reference to different things, and these we call Entia Rationis [things of thought]. Now the question is, whether good and evil belong to the Entia Rationis or to the Entia Realia [real things]. But since good and evil are only relations, it is beyond doubt that they must be placed among the Entia Rationis; for we never say that something is good except with reference to something else which is not so good, or is not so useful to us as some other thing. Thus we say that a man is bad, only in comparison with one who is better, or also that an apple is bad, in comparison with another which is good or better.
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What Good and Evil Are is listed on Textopian as an essay by Baruch Spinoza, dated 1660 CE.
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- Work type: Essay
- Author: Baruch Spinoza
- Date: 1660 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: Philosophy, Metaphysics, Ethics, Moral Philosophy, Rationalist Philosophy
- Length: 427 words
- Structure: 1 section, 6 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Standard (8th-9th Grade)
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Genres
- Philosophy — The work is a concise philosophical inquiry into the ontological status of good and evil.
- Metaphysics — It distinguishes real entities from entities of thought and argues that moral qualities do not exist independently in Nature.
- Ethics — Its central subject is the meaning of moral terms such as good, bad, goodness, and wickedness.
- Moral Philosophy — The text challenges ordinary moral judgments by treating good and evil as relative comparisons rather than objective properties.
Tags
philosophy · ethics · metaphysics · rationalism · moral theory · good and evil · human nature · reason · emotions · virtue · freedom · determinism