Evil and Good, 3rd

I just realized I've made a terrible PC error - I've implied that strictly homosexual individuals are at least bad for the species and possibly evil. That is at least partly incorrect for several reasons. In most of human history and in most of human cultures, simply because of the relative strengths and social structures, the sexual orientation of female human has had little effect upon human reproduction. So that has not been a factor in what is good or bad. In just the last century or so, that has changed for a significant part of the world (mostly the European/western cultures), but remains (mostly) in effect for the majority of the human cultures. Even male homosexuality, historically and culturally, has been controlled and had little effect. But even without that, the lesson from evolution (where I'm trying to base ultimate good and evil) is that a homosexual individual who helps siblings, nieces, and nephews prosper is likely serving a positive good. The current social change where homosexual behavior is removed from the family connection is more dangerous, and I would argue that proselyting for a strictly homosexual lifestyle as a good in and of itself, without regard for family connections is likely an evil. Note that by this standard, homosexual marriage and adoption are not evil.

Not surprisingly, the basic evil of working against your our species survival gets complicated as you examine how to react or evaluate real world situations. Does that mean you should always have as many kids as you can? I think not, if also means that they will not survive to reproduce themselves, or that they will be in poor physical/mental condition due to scant resources and thus be less likely to be able to succeed at the complications of life themselves. Remember, in an evolutionary sense, it is not personal survival that counts, but the survival of offspring that can and will also reproduce successfully. In human cultures, especially more technical and dense (i.e., existing in high population densities), the complexity of the social "rules" take real effort and time to learn. Just look at how long it takes your average teenager to act like an adult for some hint of this. So having lots of children is often shortsighted, in a species survival sense. But by the same token, I can argue that choosing to have no children is generally a poor, and maybe even evil choice. If a biological evolutionary sense, you have become a zero. Indeed, by not allowing your genetic heritage to be spread into the future, you may very well be damaging the human species - a true evil. The problem with this logic is that it can lead to the political abuses of eugenics. I have no problem with eugenics as a personal choice, but a huge problem with eugenics as a government mandated program - or even something the government encourages. So, the only exceptions to doing evil by deciding not to have kids are 1) you determine that you are not fit, or 2) you determine that your value in a cultural/scientific/societal sense is so high that it more than negates the lack of offspring. The latter, of course, requires a very high opinion of not only yourself, but what you are accomplishing in life. And self evaluation is always suspect. The only true test of the second would be, I think, societal recognition.

Good and Evil

For some reason, I've been giving a fair amount of thought to the problem of good and evil. Not why they exist, but rather are there any absolutes when talking about good and evil, or are they just cultural constructs. We need to start with biology and evolution. To talk about good or evil in the context of an extinct species strikes me a silly at best - the concepts are irrelevant when the entity acting does not exist. So, maintaining survival is a necessary condition to even discuss good and evil. But it is a mistake to just focus upon individual survival. The indications from biology and evolution are that species survival is the true goal, so good will generally result from actions that improve species survival, while evil will generally decrease that chances for species survival. Once that standard is accepted, there are absolute goods and absolute evils that can be defined for a species. Since our species is Homo sapiens, let's discuss what those absolutes might be. They should be things that seem obvious, in fact, so obvious that they are hard to define, or even think of. The first one I could think of is that humans do not eat their own young. This is an absolute evil for the human species because of the pattern of reproduction human have - relatively few children, with long dependencies upon parents. Note this would not be an evil for a species with a different pattern. Guppies, for example, happily eat their own young, but they have relatively many young and basically no dependency upon their parents. What is good or evil for guppies many not represent what is good or evil for humans.