Philosophy is like an onion.

Most people, on reading that, might think that I’m referring to layers… how you can peel away layers of both, seemingly forever, always finding more layers below. Some might mockingly take that analogy even further, pointing out that if you keep going long enough, both of them turn out have nothing at all at their core.

I mean it in a more gustatory fashion: onions are great in small doses when mixed with other foods, but when I go to the kitchen looking for a midnight snack, I’m not licking my lips for the raw and unaccompanied bulb of an Allium cepa plant. I prefer my philosophy in small doses, mixed with a generous portion of crisp leaves of humor, juicy diced examples, and crunchy croutons of straightforward thought, and you can keep those nasty little purple cabbagey bits of pretentiousness for yourself, thanks.

So please forgive this digression into raw philosophy. I promise to keep it short and to the point, and that there will be far more humor, examples, and other tasty treats in the later articles that refer to this one.

So, to dive right in: what is the definition of evil? A lot of computer geeks would immediately say “Microsoft,” but however true that might be, it’s not a definition. Wikipedia, among other web resources, has huge pages that attempt to define and explain the term in an all-inclusive fashion. Entire philosophic tomes have been written on the subject. But when you trim all of the religious fat off, it comes down to one thing: evil describes an act that is against life. Good is it’s opposite, describing an act that promotes life.

Murder is almost universally considered evil — almost, because sometimes killing a person is the only available way to prevent that person from killing other people. Cooperation is almost universally considered good — again only almost, because people who cooperate to do murder are generally considered evil by everyone else. It’s impossible to categorically say that any act is good or evil, you have to have context to judge it.

By the same token, whether something is good or evil may well depend on where you stand. A country that attacks another without provocation is generally doing something evil from the point of view of the people of the attacked country, but the leaders of the attacking country might well look at it as doing good by increasing the welfare of their own people in the long run. So when you get right down to it, you can’t even really say that an act is good or evil in context, unless you include the point of view as well.

To a modern Christian, the thought of ritually killing people several times a year is tremendously evil. To the Maya, such blood sacrifice was considered both good and necessary for the survival of their people.

To the Christian Crusaders, attacking the Muslim-held city of Jerusalem in the year 1099, killing 70,000 to 100,000 civilians was a good, right, and proper thing to do, ordered explicitly by God through Pope Urban the Second. To nearly everyone else, then and now, it is a purely evil act.

The moral? Don’t unthinkingly assume that your opinion of good and evil, right and wrong, is accurate or universal.

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires. Susan B. Anthony

A young couple, just married, were in their honeymoon suite on their wedding night. As they were undressing for bed, the husband who was a big burly man tossed his pants to his bride and said, “Here, put these on.”

She put them on and the waist was twice the size of her body. “I can’t wear your pants,” she said.

“That’s right,” said the husband, “and don’t you ever forget it. I’m the man and I wear the pants in this family.”

With that she flipped him her panties and said, “Try these on.” He tried them on and found he could only get them on as far as his kneecaps.

“Heck,” he said, “I can’t get into your panties!”

She replied, “That’s right, and that’s the way its going to be until your attitude changes!”