Image by Paul Brennan from Pixabay

This story originated in a comment responding to one of my old stories on Medium. The commenter in question stated that my talent was wasted on the syncretic way I’ve been approaching religion and that I should turn my attention to some more challenging problems, such as the nature of and reason for evil. I’m entirely happy with the work I’ve been doing; I believe it’s important and necessary, and I’m confident that I’ve been making every effort to live up to what is required of me in this endeavor. But the question of evil is one that’s been rolling around in my head for a few years now; it seems like one of those things that’s too big for me to ever be able to properly write about. But like Bataille said, “a philosophy is never a house; it is a construction site” (Theory of Religion, 1973, Hurley’s translation). I have to start somewhere, and I start by writing.

My own initial position on morality is that there are no moral facts. Nothing is inherently good, and neither is good some objective thing, and the same applies to evil. “Good” and “evil” can still be spoken of conventionally as a property of events or actions relative to individuals or groups. I use these words in regular discourse without difficulty, but I use them carefully and try to make my own understanding of these things clear, because I know that these words mean different things to different people (as they must, having no absolute referents). But as to whether there’s some objective fact of the matter as to whether some event or action or thing or whatever is good or evil? I just don’t think that there is one.

As to how morality works in a subjective, relative sense, I think that the utilitarian argument is at least a good start. To sum up utilitarianism, as established by Jeremy Bentham and William Paley and refined by John Stuart Mill, “good” is that which provides the most happiness for the most people. Happiness is intrinsically valuable (according to utilitarianism), and therefore, generally speaking, more happiness is better. Utilitarianism isn’t perfect, and it’s also not especially practical. We’ve had some good outcomes in trying to make large scale predictions for what is best for humanity; we’ve also had some catastrophically bad ones (although at least some of our great catastrophes resulted from a deliberate disregard for what is best for humanity in general). We don’t know what is best for us. At our best, I can at least say that we have very good guesses most of the time.

The reason for our uncertainty is that the problem is very complex. If we’re to take human happiness alone (which we need not), then we’re talking about 7.7 billion people as of the time of this writing. Between any two people there may exist one or more relationships, such as “married to,” “friends with,” “works for,” “goes to church with,” “had a discussion with on the internet,” and there’s a huge number of these potential relationships. Most of these relationships can be considered trivial (“drove past on the freeway once”) and can be ignored, but there remains a huge number of significant relationships (which we might define as having a measurable impact on one’s happiness), of varying degrees of significance, for every person. If we start with a minimal solution where everyone has at least one significant relationship with every other person (“lives on the same planet with,” for example, which, as recent environmental concerns have shown, is non-trivial), we end up with an incomprehensible minimum of 2.9645×1019 relationships (this is basically a Handshake Problem).

Policy at a given level will interact not only with individuals directly but also indirectly via their relationships. For example, take a person and two of their relationships: “is a subject of some government” and “is an employee of some company” (I’m already generalizing individuals into organizations to which they belong; more on this in a bit). A change in tax laws might influence the first relationship positively with regards to the individual (they don’t have to pay as much in taxes to the government) but the second relationship negatively (the company has to pay more in taxes to the government and makes up for the loss by laying off the individual). Any given policy will have direct effects and likely several levels of indirect effects as well, propagating across part or all of the human relationship network. Thus, even for very minor and localized segments of the network, the policy-population system is one of immeasurable complexity.

The problem would be completely intractable if we didn’t have some heuristics, which take the form of superstructures which can be treated as their own nodes in simplified models. These mega-nodes are, for example, companies and corporations, political organizations, nations or states, cities, counties, towns, neighborhoods, ethnicities, sexual and gender identities, sports clubs, religions and religious organizations, and so forth, all overlapping on multiple levels.

At the highest (and most simplified) level of organization, we’re all human, and we all have human bodies that function in stochastically predictable ways, so we can make broad predictions based on that. Humans need food to live, and we have to be alive to be happy, so “good” is, in that sense, humans having enough food. But the systems for food production and distribution are complex enough that we can’t just make that happen, and, historically, some attempts to provide more food to those who need it have ended up causing effects that were certainly not “good” (such as the attempts by the U.S. to supply food to starving Somalis in the early 90’s; the warlords took control of the food shipments, thus bolstering their power while doing little or nothing to remedy the widespread famine). So we see that heuristic simplifications can mask vital complicating factors.

I think that this complexity is reflected in our ethics and morality being, in essence, aesthetic. Those familiar with my work will be entirely unsurprised to find that I’ve drawn this idea largely from Nietzsche:

Only artists, and especially those of the theater, have given men eyes and ears to see and hear with some pleasure what each man is himself, experiences himself, desires himself; only they have taught us to esteem the hero that is concealed in everyday characters; only they have taught us the art of viewing ourselves as heroes — from a distance and, as it were, simplified and transfigured — the art of staging and watching ourselves. Only in this way can we deal with some base details in ourselves. Without this art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself. The Gay Science, 1882, §78, Kaufmann’s translation

And we see this again throughout The Gay Science (§107, 290, 299, 301) and throughout Nietzsche’s work, going back as far as The Birth of Tragedy (1872, §5: “For it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified”). Nietzsche also presented a famous and interesting account of the origin of the more traditional moral understanding in Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), which I’ll take up in another essay (and those last three links all go to the same collection of Nietzsche’s work, making it an excellent selection if one wants to explore Nietzsche’s morality in particular).

What does this mean for us and for our aspirations to morality? As Richard Dawkins, drawing from Harvard biologist Marc Hauser, explicates in The God Delusion (2006), we share general moral intuitions:

From the present point of view, the interesting thing is that most people come to the same decision when faced with [moral] dilemmas, and their agreement over the decisions themselves is stronger than their ability to articulate their reasons. This is what we should expect if we have a moral sense which is built into our brains, like our sexual instinct or our fear of heights or, as Hauser himself prefers to say, like our capacity for language.

This is very similar to our aesthetic sensibilities. There is often broad consensus as to which paintings or statues or symphonies are especially beautiful, but we often find ourselves entirely unable to understand why. This is not to say that our intuitions are baseless (in This Is Your Brain on Music, from 2006, for example, American-Canadian cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin explains some of the possible underlying reasons behind our appreciation of music), only that we are not entirely consciously aware of their reasons, which is exactly what makes them intuitions.

And indeed, we see our morality explored and portrayed directly in our art, and in particular our narrative art: theater, novels, film, and television shows. I think that in many ways these works do a better job of moralizing than many of the philosophers have, as art appeals to our intuitions rather than applying prescriptive rules which are either too simple to be effective across such a complex system or too complex to be applied by our relatively simple minds. We still labor under the illusion that human action is perfectible; we may as well try to completely control global weather with a network of large, strategically placed electric fans.

Let’s take as a case study a television show that directly wrestles with ethical and moral questions: Breaking Bad (2008-2013). For those who may be unfamiliar, the premise of the show is that a high school chemistry teacher living in New Mexico is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Unable to pay for his health care or provide for his family, he turns to the production and sale of methamphetamine. The very title of the show demonstrates its intent to address moral questions: “to break bad” is a colloquial verb phrase meaning to suddenly turn away from moral behavior and towards immoral behavior. The arc of the series portrays the main character, Walter White, transforming from a fairly meek individual into a deliberate, villainous mastermind. Early on, he’s an antihero, defying the system and dealing violence only to fellow criminals, but as the series progresses, it becomes more and more difficult to root for his behavior even while we remain empathetic to him.

Asking ethical questions of the show demonstrates the complexity and difficulty of asking ethical questions in general. Were Walter White’s actions ethical? Well, he took many different actions throughout the show’s 62 episodes and five seasons, all based on different intentions. He had different levels of knowledge of the potential consequences of these actions and was accurate in this knowledge to varying degrees, and his actions had many different outcomes. But overall, our intuitions tell us that Walter White’s actions were not moral (i.e. they were evil) and largely not ethical as well (i.e. he should not have done the things he did).

And yet Breaking Bad is an aesthetically interesting work, so let us distinguish here between what is aesthetically interesting and what is aesthetically ethical and moral. That Walter White’s actions were immoral or unethical is the aesthetic judgement of the series, and thus the moral judgement of the series, and in that sense we see that what is aesthetically immoral may still be aesthetically interesting. In other words, to say that something is aesthetically interesting does not imply that it is ethical or moral (though it may), but may indeed mean the exact opposite. We might say only that the interesting is only an indication that moral questions are being answered in a way that concords with but also develops our intuitions. (And I’ll note here, and perhaps explore further in another piece, that the final season of Game of Thrones was not only an aesthetic failure but also, being that, a moral failure; “The Bells” and “The Iron Throne” are not only bad but also immoral, not because they portray immoral action, but because they fail to comprehend morality at all).

Similarly, Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), which reports on the trial of Holocaust participant Adolf Eichmann, made an aesthetic judgement about the nature of evil, one that she included in the very title of her book. Evil is, at least in some manifestations, banal. It’s dull, boring, stupid, and reveals the ethical forays of Breaking Bad as a moral idealization. We mustn’t forget the role that real-world supervillains like Adolf Hitler played in enacting the worst events in human history, and so idealizations like Breaking Bad remain entirely valuable and necessary, but it is far more important to remember that Hitler’s vision was only realizable in a world in which tens or hundreds of thousands of banal little Eichmanns were available to carry out his orders (or, at the least, comply with or ignore the orders being carried out by others) as casually as a mail clerk files a postcard.

Given all of this, the question of why is there evil doesn’t seem all that difficult to me, any more than the question of why is there ugliness (and indeed, I see those as being two different ways of framing the same question). Morality and aesthetics are human judgements in a world that was not made for us; there is no reason to believe the world should be pre-conformed to our standards when we haven’t even been around to apply them for most of cosmic history. In that sense, I think it’s remarkable that things like altruism exist at all, but I also think the only reason that altruism exists is because it makes sense, because it works. It’s what the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett would call a “Good Trick” (a term that he uses in Breaking the Spell from 2006 and Intuition Pumps from 2013 and I believe in many other places as well), something that arises without intentional design but which works well and so self-perpetuates or arises again. Personally, I don’t hold to altruism as an end in itself, which I think is a kind of moral fetishism, but rather see it as a potential means to an end, which is, I believe, it’s original nature.

I also think that, to some degree, our entire concern over morality and ethics is unnecessary, because, often, unethical actions are based not so much on mistaken morals as on mistaken facts. As an example, those who support capital punishment would still agree that it is wrong to execute an innocent person. If someone were accused of a crime that they didn’t commit and were then executed on this basis, what does it benefit us to say that the execution was morally wrong when we already know that it was carried out based on falsehoods? One might counter that, given that someone did commit a crime, we still have to know that the crime is wrong in order to execute or otherwise punish someone for it, but I disagree there as well. In this case we need only say that the crime is something for which society needs to punish people in order for it to function. This is also a better basis from which to construct a just society: if one posits that an action is harmful to society and needs to be prevented by threat of punishment, someone else can demonstrate empirically that that is not the case (either that the action is not harmful to society, or that punishment won’t deter it, or that better deterrences are available, or that the societal consequences of punishment are worse than those of the action itself). But if one declares an action to be “wrong,” what recourse is there? If the reason for one’s positing of that action as “wrong” is consequentialist in any way, then once again, it becomes a factual matter, so when one says, “This action causes negative consequences and is therefore morally wrong,” that second clause seems entirely superfluous. If, on the other hand, the reason is deontological, meaning based on an ethical rule or maxim, either the rule itself is the result of generalized consequentialist thinking (as in Kant), in which case the above argument applies, or it has a theological origin, in which case it is irrational and no rational argument can be made against it. Or, it is entirely arbitrary, which is likewise irrational and likewise immune to rational refutation.

But there is another sense in discourse in which “evil” is used, and that is the sense that is used by the doctrinal authorities of religion: the Catholic Church, ultraconservative Protestant church organizations in the southern United States, the ulema of the Saudi Arabian theocracy… the list is extensive, and I only have room to provide a few examples. Under their proclamation, “good” is obedience to presumed authority, subservience to ignorance, abasement of humanity, acceptance of weakness, sexual repression, moral hypocrisy, tyranny, and passive acceptance of oppression. These are the values of the Hegemon, or at least the values that they hold for others; they would not have come so far and risen so high if they did not hold different values for themselves. This is the very reason that I have chosen the Satanic as the iconography of my religion: the values that I hold — that I have created — stand opposed to the values of these institutions. It is only fitting, then, that the religion and religious symbolism that have arisen from my values stand opposed as well.

Satan, in the archetype of Lucifer, whom I call Satan the Adversary, represents the pursuit of knowledge, as it was Lucifer who (according to one narrative) persuaded the first humans to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, and who has stood opposed to the Old Testament God who sought to frustrate and limit our knowledge and achievement (as in the story of The Tower of Babel). So in this sense, for me, the truest evils are stupidity and ignorance, and indeed, as in Arendt’s book, we see the worst atrocities of humankind arising from exactly these factors.

Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil. Amos Elon in the introduction to Eichmann in Jerusalem

Thus, the only moral maxim I create for myself is: act in accordance with what is true. When I set a moral path for myself I must first ask myself what it is that I want to accomplish; I must not only act based on what I believe to be the truth of the world as I have come to understand it through the best use of my faculties, but must have some forward drive as well, a truth of my own being that gives me some reason to act at all. In this sense, what is “good” for me is what is instrumentally rational. Speaking in the most general terms, what I want is security and prosperity for myself and those I care about, and I am aware at the same time that most others want this as well and that the resources available for us to accomplish these goals are limited. This becomes a game theory problem, and ethics becomes a matter of strategy. “A Game Theory Analysis of Satanic Ethics” is just too good a title to pass up, and this one has already run long, so I’ll continue the story there.

Thanks much for reading. I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and to sign up for my mailing list (form on the sidebar) so you can stay current on my latest work. And if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content. I’ll be publishing new work every Friday evening. I also have a reading list, which contains links to the books I used to research this and all of my other stories. Clicking through and buying books is a great, easy way to support my work.