You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I must confess that I am always faced with a difficulty when I discuss [the subject of good and evil] with philosophers or theologians. I have the impression that they are not talking about the subject-matter itself but only about words, about the concepts that mean or indicate it. We allow ourselves so easily to be dazzled by words, we substitute words for the whole of reality. People talk to me about evil or about good and presume that I know what it is. But I don't. When we speak of good or evil we are speaking about what men call good or evil, about what they perceive as good or evil. They then speak about it with great assurance without knowing whether it really is so and whether what they call good or evil really corresponds to the fact. But perhaps the view which the speaker has of the world does not agree with the real facts at all, so that an inner, subjective picture is substituted for objectivity.
If we want to agree about so complex a question as good and evil we must start with the following proposition: good and evil are in themselves principles, and we must bear in mind that a principle exists long before us and extends far beyond us.
Yet when we speak of good or evil we are speaking concretely of something whose deepest qualities are in reality unknown to us. Whether it is experienced as evil and guilty depends, furthermore, on subjective judgement, as also does the extent of the burden of the guilt.
You probably know the joke about the father confessor in Texas, to whom a young man comes with an awfully long face. “What's the matter?” he inquires. “Something terrible has happened.” “But what has happened?” “I've committed murder.” “How many?” This shows how differently two people can feel the same fact, the same reality. I call a certain fact evil, often without being sure that it is evil in reality. Some things seem to me evil,