[ectoplasm]

The point is that what you consider evil, somebody else considers good, and vice versa. Furthermore, we define good in terms of evil and evil in terms of good. The existence of one necessitates the existence of the other, whether in the past, present, or future.

[MichaelGG]

That's weak. You can go down a definitional hole and say someone might consider anything good. Fact remains that things like, I dunno, torturing children and slaughtering villages are things that we'd be perfectly fine eliminating. We'd be A-OK without having people that have, as the near entirety of their existence, hunger and pain.

Even in nature, there isn't a real balance. Any perceived balance is simply the result of ongoing fighting and current stalemates. When things go "out of balance", groups or species go extinct and things move on. Absolutely nothing in nature is stopping a species from taking over the entire planet, consuming all resources, then going extinct.

And personally, I don't define good in terms of evil. Like a silly saying of defining light in terms of darkness (uh, no, I'll define it as certain energy bands or something, thanks).

Unless you meant this on a conceptual level, like, if we had never heard of the concept of insanity, it might be hard to say we value sanity since it'd just be an unquestioned state of affairs. I don't find that a very useful definition as far as a course for action goes; we'd be quite fine eliminating "evil".

[ectoplasm]

I mean at the conceptual level. So many things are defined in terms of their opposite. If we have no knowledge, understanding, definition, experience of evil, we don't have a benchmark against which to compare our actions and make sure they are different. Hopefully once understood, it stays remembered but in the past.

[JoshTriplett]

That much is true; we shouldn't forget what evil is, lest we painfully rediscover it, but even if we define good as its absence, there's no reason we can't maintain that absence. Much like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinctio... , we can talk about things without enacting them.

[MichaelGG]

But then why should we try to "preserve the balance"? We've got evil things recorded. Apart from that, it does not feel like we're at any risk at all of forgetting what evil is truly, let alone conceptually.

[JoshTriplett]

> We'd be A-OK without having people that have, as the near entirety of their existence, hunger and pain.

That's exactly the kind of thing I meant, yes. Some things are universally wrong no matter where or how they happen, who is doing them, or what "side" they're on.