In Our Time - Good and Evil

Episode Date: April 1, 1999

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss whether religion can still be seen as a way of interpreting and judging good and evil in modern western civilisation and examines what the discoveries of Darwin and our knowledge of the true physiological nature and history of man has done for us in terms understanding our concepts of good and evil. As we entered the 20th century Nietzsche announced that God is dead. Was his hatred of Christianity a natural consequence of his belief in the unlimited possibility of mankind’s self creation? If we have enough basic self confidence in our own selves, do we need God?Leszek Kolakowski and Galen Strawson map the current terrain of morality as perceived through philosophy, politics and Darwin and Christ.With Leszek Kolakowski, author and Professor of Philosophy, Oxford University; Galen Strawson, author and Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy, Jesus College, Oxford.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, the nature of good and evil is a subject which has continued to tease and trouble the greatest minds in the 20th century, whether in medicine, philosophy, politics or the arts. In the century that has seen one of the greatest atrocities is known to mankind,

the Holocaust, and with continual wars in the former Yugoslavia, the question as to what is good and evil is as resonant. as ever. Is good and evil in our genes as medicine is currently seeking, or are they a product of society? Where does responsibility for good and evil lie? And is a belief in God essential to any argument about good and evil. Joining me is Lezek Kolokovsky. Born in Poland, he was a prominent Marxist there in the 50s and was exiled in the 60s. Since then, he's lectured widely at Yale, the University of Chicago and Oxford University where he's professor of philosophy. He's the author of over 30 books, including main currents on Marxism. In his latest book,

freedom, fame, lying and betrayal, essays in everyday life. He wrote in one essay, If God is dead, nothing remains but an indifferent void which engulfs and annihilates us. I'm also joined by Gailen Strausson, one of the new generation of philosophers and one of this country's rising stars in the field. A committed atheist who marries Darwin with his philosophy,

he's a fellow and tutor in philosophy at Jesus College Oxford and the author of books on free will, causation and the philosophy of mind. He's currently working on a book on the self. Professor Krakowski, is good and evil best understood in terms of religion? Best in the sense that within religious intellectual, mental framework, we know what we can rely upon. We get some irrefutable, so to say, rules. It doesn't mean, however, that people who do not believe in God

or have no religious convictions, are unable to use this concepts, good and evil, or that there is something wrong with them if they use them? No. But do you think yourself that the ideas of good and evil are dependent on the idea of there being a God? Logically, not necessarily, because, as I've said,

there is no imperative need to think of God when we say something is good, or evil. It's possible that we have a direct intuition of good and evil and this intuition can be there without God, even though religious people would say that this intuition itself results from God having once

implanted in us a kind of natural law. It's like with other truths. We might believe in some axioms of mathematics without thinking of God, even though possibly it was God who made us sing this way. Gailens Strasson, what do you think of this idea

which has been put forward by others that good and evil cannot only be best understood, but can only be understood in terms of religion? Well, there's a sense in which I agree. When Leschak says that evil can be identified only through the sacred, I agree insofar as I think it's a supernatural

notion. But then I don't really believe in evil. You don't believe in evil? No, I think it may just be the word that rings wrongly to me. And I think people can be stupid and selfish and pig-headed and thoughtless, weak, insane. And they can do terrible and appalling things. But the notion of evil seems to almost to dignify all these rather unobtractive things. But perhaps that's just my response to the word evil. Do you perhaps... I mean good and bad. The evil one.

Yes, I think if the devil came along, he'd say to us, you know, you think you can be evil? Forget it. You don't even know. You don't know the first thing about evil. Well, as you know, in the Lord's Prayer, there is this expression. Yes.

Alariza and Hamas, Apotuponero. Deliver us from evil. From evil. In the authorized version, you will find from evil. But in the new English Bible, there is from the evil one, it is to say from the devil, as it was usually read in antiquity,

because it is just grammatical accident that Apatuponero could be from Hoponero's personal or Topon around abstract evil. Therefore, there is confusion. Do you think that is such a thing as evil? Very much so. So how would you convince Gailen Strasen? I cannot convince him if he refuses to believe.

I have no argument. If he says, well, people might be cruel, of course. There's a lot of cruelty of things people do each to other. So he obviously accepts that, purely empirical. But he has something against calling it evil, perhaps, because it is too much associated with the idea of personal devil. Let me just go to something else. You, in this book, talk about Hitler and Mother Teresa,

and you say they're both equally deserving of human dignity. And you're obviously putting forward someone thought to be very good and someone thought in your words to be very evil. Now, can you tell us why you have chosen that example and why you want to tell us that they're equally deserving of human dignity? Precisely because they are two extremes.

It was in an essay on equality. Yes. I said that the traditional, well, traditional in our time, One is accepted today since the French Revolution is that all people are equal. And what does it mean? Not that identical or there are equally endowed with all sorts of abilities or not. They differ.

Everybody knows that people differ from each other in many ways. It's undenial. So in what sense may we say all human beings are equal? Only in the sense they are endowed with dignity. And dignity is something that's very difficult to define. It's easy to say when it is violated, but what it is in itself is rather difficult. Nevertheless, it is good enough to argue that slavery is a bad thing.

If we do not believe that there is such a thing as human dignity, we might say, well, slavery and freedom are both... acceptable or not according to our whims. That's the difference between American mind and the German mind. American mind says there's a consensus about the evil of slavery and we don't need more. But the German mind doesn't want to be satisfied with this simple explanation. The German mind says, no, we want to know whether slavery in itself is evil, because otherwise we must say, well, now there's a consensus about slavery being evil,

but not long time ago slavery was considered normal, and therefore it was actually good in any conceivable sense. But people who fought against slavery, they fought on moral grounds, precisely because they believed it is evil in itself, apart from consensus. And you think that too. Yes, yes, I do. I think I understood Leshek's argument. He took Mother Teresa and Hitler because they were opposites.

And the argument goes, well, they're equal as human beings because they're equal in human dignity. I think you said that the foundation of their dignity was their ability to choose between good and bad, or good and evil, as you'd say. and that it was that that you identified as being what made them worthy of respect. So there's a kind of chain that our dignity is founded in our ability to choose between good and evil.

Yes. I mean, I've got a problem with the word dignity just as I have a problem with the word evil because to me it seems to connect to the idea of pomposity and I think it's an inadequate word but I think again this is just semantic. And I actually have the trouble with the word respect is better but the word, it's been trashed that word,

Now it just means, you know, it's on the street. And it's become a kind of monkey morality word, you know. Respect is not the same. It's been ruined. It's our attitude to other people. It has a high attractive philosophical use which connects with Kantian Achtung, which is sometimes translated as reverence. But the word respect now is just a kind of threat or host.

So how would you follow through your response to Lejech's argument? Well, people often talk about. there being something sacred or immeasurably valuable about the human individual. And actually I find this hard to understand because I certainly don't think there's anything sacred or immeasurably valuable about myself. Certainly unique. But it seems that my, but then so is any seagull, actually. But actually when I think about other people, I find,

then it does seem to have force for me, but it doesn't seem to have force for me when I consider myself. And I wonder whether that's true of each of us, that we. We don't, the ideas of the sacredness of human life, we may be more inclined to apply them to others than to ourselves. How does Darwin help to explain, as it were, of Mother Teresa and Hitler? Oh, by giving a general explanation of the kinds of psychological traits that are good for survival,

and that's the first fact. The second fact is that they come in various mixes. There's lots of studies in game theory, which shows that if you've got a society of rather good, cooperative people, then there'll always be a place for someone who cheats and lies to survive just as well and have just as many children. You can actually work out the percentage of the honest people and the dishonest people as soon as you've worked out what the payoff values are.

So Darwin's theory can give an account of all human characteristics that we know and then general principles of combination. How would you explain therefore someone's... The altruism, let's just accept this for the moment, the goodness of Mother Teresa. Well, that is seen to be a problem for the theory of evolution because it's all about how nature is read in tooth and claw and how there's a struggle for survival.

And the phrase for selfish gene has become very popular and well known. And the first thought is that if Darwin is right, then we all ought to be selfish out for ourselves all the time. But there is an explanation of how our more attractive human characteristics come to be, things like loyalty, friendship, trustfulness, and on the other side, trustworthiness, which is simply that very often the best thing for you to do, if you want to do well in life and survive and reproduce, is to cooperate with someone else.

So you need to be an attractive proposition for other human beings to cooperate with. The first reply to that is, well, maybe the thing to do is to cooperate when you can benefit and then to cheat as soon as the other person stands to benefit. But the trouble with that is that then the other people will get rather good at detecting cheats. So you'll have to get better at deceiving them. And the argument goes that in the end, the best way to deceive others efficiently is to deceive yourself. But what that means is that you actually become nice. You become naturally trustworthy.

You have impulses of loyalty. And then you do well in forming cooperative bonds with others. So I think you can see how good human characteristics evolved. Ultimately, the explanation is in terms of them doing better and them surviving well. But it doesn't follow from that that these characteristics aren't real, that they aren't exactly what they see. We really do have feelings of loyalty, friendship, trust, affection, sympathy. It's just that they can be explained in terms of Darwin's theory.

Lejeck, what's your response to that? Well, Nietzsche precisely took the opposite view on the basis of Darwin theory. I think that was enormous Nietzsche's biggest mistake. He didn't think through Darwin properly. That's possible, but to him it is natural that big fish swallows small fish. So it's natural for the Third Reich to exterminate smaller nations that might be harmful to them. The idea that ultimately it pays to be truthful and loyal to other people, of course, well, that Kantian, you remember Kant's essay on lying. He says if people lie whenever it suits them, their behavior will turn against themselves because nobody would believe anybody and the liars would defeat his own purpose.

It's not true because I can say, no, I want all people be always truthful and loyal except for me. I will lie whenever it suits me, but I want other people positively to say always truth. There's nothing illogical in that. It is only my survival device. And indeed, some people who are not religious at all argue that religions are good invention of evolution. which is again doubtful for two reasons. For two reasons. First, how can you argue that it is good for survival of mankind or of society

to believe like Jesus that no earthly goods have any value whatsoever that one should only wait for the apocalypse and don't care about our food or dwelling or whatever? or like a Buddhist, greatest religion of the world, universal religion, to believe like Buddhists that life cannot be but misery. And you should only wish to escape from it as soon as possible. So it's difficult to imagine how those great religions can be good for survival of mankind. That one reason. Can you go ahead and take that up first?

I think the trouble with that argument is it's too direct. It suggests that you can get an explanation of the existence of religion straight from Darwin's theory of evolution. But actually, it has to go through an intermediate stage, which is human psychology. Darwin's theory of evolution gives rise to human psychology, and that gives rise to all sorts of quite surprising and possibly very unexpected effects that can no longer be explained straightforwardly or immediately in terms of survival value for the individual. In other words, that evolution is fallible. If you think of it as a kind of machine for designing super-efficient survival machines, yes, totally fallible.

Yes, yes. Because it gives rise to things like affection. What went wrong with evolution? Nothing went wrong with it. Nothing can go wrong with it. It just does what it does. It selects out the people who just happen to have the... And the other reason.

And the other reason is that if people who are not... religious, take this view, that religion is very good after all for social reasons, then they essentially think in the same terms as 17th century libertines, enlightened atheism for the elite, but religious superstition for the masses. Yes. Actually, there are all sorts of other explanations. That's a little bit dangerous view. view in our time. Well, quite, but that actually gives you another possible

evolutionary explanation. You could say someone designed the Christian religion, the ideal of self-denial, for reasons of power. Somebody wanted to be in power and to repress everybody else by making them believe in renouncing worldly goods. That's a Nietzsche. You repeat, of course, Nietzsche's extremely unlikely.

Extremely unlikely. Yes, I... It is, but once it got going, it did in fact get exploited in that way. People used it as an instrument of control and repression. Sometimes. You've written a lot about Marxism. How far was Marxism an attempt to secularize notions of good and evil in your view? There is no such concept of good and evil in Marxism.

Marx never uses such concept, neither does he use the concept of justice for that matter. Marxism is not about justice. It's about alleged historical laws which lead us towards, well, what would be ultimate salvation, even though he doesn't use this concept. But he is ambiguous about it. On the one hand, he believes in the loss of history. On the other hand, he believes that for some strange reason, this loss of history lead us towards the ultimate liberation, whatever it might mean. So there is a hidden moral agenda in his writing. He really believed that once we make everything state property,

then it will be ultimate hilarity in the world. So is it a fundamentally utilitarian outlook? No, I don't think... Is it in maximizing human well-being? He doesn't use such a concept of all-value judgments are based on the ideas of maximizing general happiness. For instance,

I eat a good I go into a restaurant and eat a good dinner. I made a morally glorious act because I increased the general happiness of mankind. The goal is

human well-being. What else are we doing? Human liberation. A liberation. Whatever That's meant to be in... In fact, individual beings, real human beings, will coincide with the idea of humanity.

So you're absolving him from the charge that he rejected morality. You're saying he has a hidden moral agenda. Hidden, hidden. Yeah, what about his seeming hatred of the words justice and rights? Precisely because he pretended to be a scientist. Again, Bogus, of course. He was a wise, very highly educated, very learned man, no doubt about that, and very interesting. Nevertheless, his all predictions proved to be false, one after another, and his idea of liberation, we know how it ended.

And it was not just a mistake, no, in the 19th century a number of people predicted that socialism based on Marxist principle will be horrible despotism. Bakunin said it. Benjamin Tucker's anarchist, American anarchist. Abramowski, Polish, theorists. It was a mistake about human nature. It was a mistake.

It was a mistake about human nature. How would you say that Marxism was a mistaken about human nature, well, I suppose your, Lechek's may be thinking top-down that it would become, there would be despotism from above. I was just thinking about, there's a fact I think about the productivity of the Soviet Union that 3% of the total land value, or was it even less, produced 33% of all the vegetables, because that 3% was privately owned. It was a little section of the Chornazimlias, what it's called,

that was allowed to remain in private ownership. So that sort of simple point about how people work for themselves. But it was marks, and not start. who said that the entire idea of communism can be summed up in one single phrase, abolition of private property. Yes. If so, that was the mistake about human nature. If so, then Stalinist system was socialism in the sense of Marx.

There's nothing wrong with it because private property has been really abolished. And, well, we know what happened. I think he was a good and interesting man in many respects, but he wasn't entirely consistent. There's a place in the Communist Manifesto, which he wrote with Engels, where he says, I've got it here, that the free development of each one

is the condition for the free development of all. And that seems to suggest that there's an asymmetry that people need independence and some kind of rights in order for the community to develop. He might have said the free development of all is the condition for the free development of each. But he didn't. They said it the other way around.

In the contrary, he believed that human rights is a concept specifically designed to defend the bourgeois society. Right, that's right. I'd like to read another quotation from your book, Modernity on Endless Trial. You write, there is no such thing as absolute good in politics and there's nothing we can do about it. This in turn may lead us to suspect there is no such thing as absolute evil in politics. That, however, is more doubtful. Why do you want to make that distinction? In some political phenomena, we are tempted, at least, to speak about the absolute evil.

Whereas absolute good certainly doesn't exist because in politics we have to make choices, none of which is free from bad results. Can you get us some examples of this? Well, I think that's something we can observe every day, the budget which has been... It's obviously bound to have some results which were not pleasant to many people. We are always in the world of finite amount of goods. The distribution is never absolutely just, if we know at all what justice might mean.

People have chosen to bomb Yugoslavia. Why didn't they bomb Sierra Leone, which is much worse than you? Yugoslavia. Much, much worse. So what's wrong with it? Something is wrong. Well, obviously. Why didn't they bomb Russia because of the war in Chechnya?

They didn't. And of course we know why. But the point is that in such matters, invoke moral reasons, it's always doubtful, because the characteristic of moral reasons that they have to be outside of utilitarian considerations.

Yeah, I think it's not hard to make the case that there's no such thing as absolute good in politics. But I just wondered what you actually had in mind when you said that maybe there was such a thing as absolute evil in politics. I mean, there are obvious cases. Well, absolutely evil systems. Right.

You presumably had in mind the Third Reich. Well, we have so many examples of murder of genocidal regimes that there's no need to dwell on it. I'd like to come back to these ideas about good. Galen, when you're writing about the late Iris Murdoch, you said Irish Murdoch made claims that almost suggested that, quote, good is as real as rock when she said that good represents the reality of which God is the dream.

Could you develop that? I mean, I think it distracts attention from the thought of good to tangay it up with, vaguely personified figures like God. I mean, I think she herself says in that same book, God does not and cannot exist. There is no responsive super thou, as she puts in. Of course I can see what's attractive about religion. By the way, I don't think I'm a committed atheist full stop.

I'm a committed atheist with respect to the Christian religion, but I'm only an agnostic with respect to the idea that there might be some very large mental presence. in the universe or that the universe might indeed be such a presence. So it's really that the way it gets tangled up with these sorts of personifications and with

dogma that I find makes it worse than a dream, makes it a melodrama and actually a rather appalling one, especially when it involves notions of heaven and hell and so on. Do you think that it is an appalling dream? No. Appalling?

No. No, not at least. All I had in mind there was heaven and hell and the story of eternal damnation. Eternal damnation has become more and more doubtful in Christianity recently. I know that there are some expressions in the New Testament which seem to confirm it. Yes, everybody knows that. Nevertheless, some scholars argue that if you look closer, you will see that some nuance in the Greek texts are lost.

in the Latin translations. And there are people who argue that there is no eternal damnation. Catholic theologians. There are such people. And mind you, the church has never said of anybody that it has been

damned. It said on thousands people that they were saved, of course, all the saints. But never of anybody that has been damned, not even Judas. Interesting. And well, it is true that original theory,

that the hell will be destroyed and the devil will be restored to glory, once condemned by the church. Can I finish with Galen Strausson's notion about God, which is opposed to yours? It's in the Columbia Dictionary of quotations from your review of the Darwin biography, Galen. I think what I said there was that it's,

I suggested that it's an insult to God to believe in God, because on the one hand, it's to suppose that he's perpetrated acts of incalculable cruelty. And on the other hand, it's to suppose that he's given us an instrument, which is our mind, which must lead us, if we think hard, to conclude that he didn't exist. So my suspicion is that the people he really loves best now in the 20th century are probably the atheists and the agnostics, because they're the only ones who've ever really taken him seriously. I'm going to stop there. Thank you very much, Karen. Thanks, Rulcher.

Thank you, Leisure, Kolokovsky. Ian, thank you very much for listening. The trouble is I have a religious temperament, but I don't have the belief. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.