Moral evil

“ In order to find out the true origin of moral evil, it will be necessary, in the first place, to enquire into its nature and essence; or, what it is that constitutes one action evil, and another good. ”

“ Now of this evil impulse I do not say, looking at it objectively: “It is somehow a part of the universal good;” but, in the moment of moral action I make it, even in the very moment of its sinfulness, a part of my good consciousness, in overcoming it. The moral insight condemns the evil that it experiences; and in condemning and conquering this evil it forms and is, together with the evil, the organic total that constitutes the good will. Only through this inner victory over the evil that is experienced as a conquered tendency does the good will have its being. ”

“ But, as already pointed out, this latter form of evil—moral evil—grows out of, or results from, the former, which may be called non-moral evil. Any true account of the origin of moral evil must therefore begin with the disharmony between man and nature. ”

“ Not to return evil for good.—Here we rise, in some respect, a degree in the moral scale. The two inferior degrees, namely, ingratitude and cruelty, have always and everywhere been considered as crimes. Nowhere has it ever been considered allowable to do harm to those who have done us good. But in nearly all societies, at a certain degree of civilization, has it been considered allowable, and even praiseworthy, to return evil for evil. ”

“ How simple also the solution of the problem of evil! “If I want to do evil, I cannot,” said the objector; “for God the perfect one includes me with the rest, and so cannot in his perfection be hurt by me. Let me do what I will, my act can only seem bad, and cannot be bad. All evil is illusion, hence there is no moral difference in action possible.” ”

“ Man will then be restored to his moral perfections; and into what head can it enter, that, by this change, the universal system would be shaken, or the condition of any order of beings altered for the worse?
He comes, in the fifth letter, to political, and, in the sixth, to religious evils. Of political evil, if we suppose the origin of moral evil discovered, the account is by no means difficult; polity being only the conduct of immoral men in publick affairs. ”

“ That there is much moral evil in the world is undeniable. Are we therefore to predicate original depravity of man's heart and soul? But there is also much physical evil in the world,—pain, weakness, disease, decay, and death. ”

“ Where no great physical pain or distress is occasioned by what is evil, our sense of its ludicrousness will be exactly in proportion to the faintness of our sense of moral evil; or, in other words, to our want of being in earnest. ”

“ Having thus shown how moral evil came into the world, namely, by man's abuse of his own free-will, our poet comes to the point, the confirmation of his thesis, by showing how moral evil promotes good; and employs the same concessions of his adversaries, concerning natural evil, to illustrate it. ”

“ Moral evil consists in the crimes, whether of commission or omission, which men are guilty of—including under the latter head those sufferings which we endure from ill-regulated minds through want of fortitude or self-control. ”

“ Why should they not hold the key to the good impulses, the moral treasures of mankind as well as they wind themselves into the evil nature by enticing the susceptible, dealing out gratification to the willing, and dragging souls blindfolded into an irremediable eternity? ”

“ Both reason and revelation seem to assure us that such minds will be condemned to eternal death, but while on earth, these vicious instruments performed their part in the great mass of impressions, by the disgust and abhorrence which they excited. It seems highly probable that moral evil is absolutely necessary to the production of moral excellence. ”

“ There is an evident intrinsic irrationality, and thereby moral evil, in such sins as intemperance, peevishness, and vanity. But let us take an instance of an act, apparently harmless in itself, and evil solely because of the consequences. ”

“ This definition accounts for the otherwise extraordinary fact, that there is something in moral evil which, in some instances, affects the mind ludicrously. That is to say, if moral evil affects us with no pain; if we see in it nothing, so to speak, but its irregularity, its strange contrast with what is beautiful, its jarring with the harmony of the system around us ”

“ The bad desires, like a river which has been dammed, find some other outlet which has escaped the watchful eye of the will. The man who, in youth, would have liked to murder his father, finds satisfaction later on in flogging his son, under the impression that he is chastising “moral evil”. Theories which justify cruelty [44] almost always have their source in some desire diverted by the will from its natural channel, driven underground, and at last emerging unrecognized as hatred of sin or something equally respectable. ”

“ And of course, and we shall all confess it, if these notions are as false as he supposes them, and we have no power to be anything but what we are, there neither is nor can be such a thing as moral evil; and what we call crimes will no more involve a violation of the will of God, they will no more impair his moral attributes if we suppose him to have willed them, than the same actions, whether of lust, ferocity, or cruelty, in the inferior animals. ”

“ A few gifted individuals obtained sufficient light to see the moral evil in which men were involved, but they had neither wisdom to devise a remedy, nor power to arrest the progress of the moral pestilence that was corrupting the noble faculties of the human soul. ”

“ A considerate person must find difficulties in enquiring into the causes and reasons of that depravity of human nature which has produced these evils, and rendered the best institutions liable to be so corrupted. This enquiry is much the same with the enquiry into the origin of moral evil, which has in all ages puzzled human wisdom. ”

“ We appeal to the moral experience to illustrate how, when we do good, the evil will is present as a real fact in us, which yet does not make us as a whole bad, but just because it is present as an overcome element, is, even for that very reason, necessary to make us good. ”

“ From the highest to the lowest, there is no health or moral soundness. From the crown of the head to the soles of the feet, there is nothing but wounds, and bruises, and putrefying sores. The laws, and their violation, and the punishments everywhere invented for the suppression of vice, prove the universality of the evil. ”

“ If the good which men have and feel, penetrates into their speech, and leaves its deposit there, so does also the evil. Thus we may trace a constant tendency—in too many cases it has been a successful one—to empty words employed in the condemnation of evil, of the depth and earnestness of the moral reprobation which they once conveyed. ”

“ And the specifically moral emotion excited by the idea of a wrong action, seems to me to contain essentially a more or less vague cognition of the kind of intrinsic evils, which are usually caused by wrong actions, whether they would or would not be caused by the particular action in question. I am, in fact, unable to distinguish, in its main features, the moral sentiment excited by the idea of rightness and wrongness, wherever it is intense, from the total state constituted by a cognition of something intrinsically evil together with the emotion of hatred directed towards it. ”

“ How evil life must be if it were indeed necessary that such imploring cries, such cries of physical and moral wretchedness, should ever and ever ascend to Heaven! ”

“ The evil moral qualities of human nature, as natural to parties as to man, constitute the evidence in favour of restraining them by good moral principles, and evince the absurdity, in every case, of losing these principles in a career after names, to be equivalent to that of shutting the eyes for the sake of substituting confidence for seeing. ”

“ Others are evil because of the danger necessarily connected with their performance,—the danger of sin connected with them, or the unnecessary peril to life. An action to have the moral quality must be voluntary, deliberate ”

“ But such deterioration or degradation is not an isolated evil, or the mere negation of a better state; for it acts as a positive energy in developing moral evil, and brings in its train perverseness, destructiveness, loss of natural decency in habits, conversation and conduct, and many other ills which render their subjects painfully humiliating as human beings, and a source of trouble, annoyance, and expense to all those concerned with them. ”

“ Far be it from us to make light of the demerit of sin, and to remonstrate with the Supreme Judge against a severe chastisement, of whatever moral nature we may regard the infliction to be. But still, what is man? He comes into the world with a nature fatally corrupt, and powerfully tending to [pg 298] actual evil. He comes among a crowd of temptations adapted to his innate evil propensities. ”

“ It gains, at the same time, clearer and surer notions of moral order. It discerns evil where it did not at first suspect its existence; and no sooner does it perceive the evil than it seeks the means to suppress it. ”

“ Such is indeed the only present word for us finite minds about many of the shadows of seeming evil that we have to behold in the world of the apparently external facts. Such however is not the last word for us about the only evil that has any immediate moral significance, namely, the evil that we see, not as an external, shadowy mist, but as a present fact, experienced in us. ”

“ It is cause and effect. Evil exists on every hand; the well disposed, philanthropic, and generous, and the good seek relief from these evil influences by moral suasion, by self-denial, by religion, by politics, etc. ”

“ Is it possible, do you think, for it to exist, and in the virulent condition we find it, and not poison the blood of our whole community? Moral and spiritual laws are as unvarying in their action, out of natural sight though they be, as physical laws. Evil and good are as positive entities as fire, and destroy or consume as surely. ”

“ In both these cases the good—i.e., the worship of God—is desired for itself as good, and the evil that is simultaneously desired does not change this good object.
79. Bad Acts.-An act is called entirely evil when all its elements—its object, circumstances and purpose-are contrary to the moral norms. Thus, to steal, on a large scale, in order to drive the victim to desperation is an act that is entirely wrong. The wickedness of the circumstance and of the motive increases the wickedness of the object of the act. ”

“ And I say—that allowing the most powerful effects to spring from the first grounds of a moral system;—the worst or the best,—that mine, if the best is to be so judged by the good it does and the evil it prevents, must be ranked among the best. ”

“ The moral world has no grander spectacle than this: a troubled and uneasy conscience, which has arrived on the brink of an evil action, contemplating the slumber of the just. ”

“ We surely cannot abandon the unfortunate wretch who through moral impotence—whether it be the craven submissiveness of the coward, or the undaunted violence of the overbearing brute—commits an evil deed. ”

“ God knows them, if no human being does, and if harbored and cherished they will tell against the character in the day of Judgment as surely as will evil words and deeds.
Influence of Other Bad Habits.—Evil practices of any sort which lower the moral tone of an individual, which lessen his appreciation of and love for right and purity and true nobility of soul, encourage the development of vice. A boy who loves purity, who has a keen sense of what is true and right, can never become a vicious man. Profanity, falsehood, and deception of every sort, have a tendency in the direction of vice. ”

“ But it is not sufficient for a moral system to form a bulwark against vice, it must also be capable of admitting those extensions and refinements of moral sympathies which advancing civilisation produces, and the inflexibility of its antagonism to evil by no means implies its capacity of enlarging its conceptions of good. ”

“ Man doeth this, and doeth that from the good or evil of his heart; but he knoweth not to what end his moral sense doth prompt him; for when he striketh he is blind to where the blow shall fall, nor can he count the airy threads that weave the web of circumstance. Good and evil, love and hate, night and day, sweet and bitter, man and woman, heaven above and the earth beneath—all these things are necessary, one to the other, and who knows the end of each? ”

“ Almost all the moral good, which is left among us, is the apparent effect of physical evil. ”

“ Moral evils must be treated as the fruits of the imperfections of our nature, and not as the product of sin-punishing devils, who first originate and stimulate crimes, and then join with Cod in punishing the criminal with fiendish cruelty ”

“ For moral philosophy is nothing else but the science of what is good, and evil, in the conversation, and society of mankind. Good, and evil, are names that signify our appetites, and aversions; which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men, are different: and divers men, differ not only in their judgment, on the senses of what is pleasant, and unpleasant to the taste, smell, hearing, touch, and sight; ”

“ Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil: it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is. ”

“ Are we responsible for what we cannot help? I could not condemn any one but myself. The existence of evil is true, but how horrible! And how it spoils our lives.”
“Spoils our lives,” he repeated. “You are quite right! Tell me, can a man or a woman love two people at once? Is it possible to love evil and good?” ”

“ Restrain yourself, therefore, from all iniquity, and do that which is good." "What, sir," say I, "are the evil deeds from which we must restrain ourselves?" "Hear," says he: "from adultery and fornication, from unlawful revelling, from wicked luxury, from indulgence in many kinds of food and the extravagance of riches, and from boastfulness, and haughtiness, and insolence, and lies, and backbiting, and hypocrisy, from the remembrance of wrong, and from all slander. These are the deeds that are most wicked in the life of men. ”