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If assuming this basic presupposition, or axiom of a realist type position concerning the Good and an anti-realist position of the Bad/Evil in relation to the Good in a negative existence or absence of the existence of goodness sense,

is it logically possible for a free agent (who is capable of moral reasoning; a moral agent and responsible towards the duty and obligation of acting morally in an objective sense) to love evil or to hate good?

I'm tempted to use the analogy of the mathematic relationship between positives and negatives, but the acts of loving and hating don't appear to be mutually exclusive to the Good or Bad/Evil, and have more to do with desired approval or disapproval towards things relative to different things and different relationships.

But I maybe wrong and love is mutually exclusive to only goodness and hate exclusive to bad/evil, although hating evil does seem like a virtue, but I wouldn't know if that would just be an empty anthropomorphic expression if evil in the sense I'm discussing (antirealist) isn't concretely real.

I wanted to take this question even further, and discuss a popular theological example (not necessarily sticking to a thomist or traditionalist or palamas or other metaphysical theological denominational positions), not necessarily to make this a theological or Christian or apologetic topic, since I'm only interested in the logical and metaphysical aspect of this question and not the denominational details.

If we assume that we're all Christians that believe in this personal God that is the source of free will, and his free will property is an extension of his more basic property/principle which is himself as being being itself so his free will is undescribably higher / perfect as always being and acting at the same time for all eternity so his immutability doesn't necessarily contradict his personalism and free will, just that it's different from our experiences of having imperfect free will abilities.

Assuming all of these issues just for the sake of argument and to get to the main point of this example, is it logically possible for God who is the Good ontologically personified, to will himself to love evil? Or even for that fact of the matter, for him to hate Evil? Are hate and love interchangeable relative terms so that God doesn't need to posses in him (logically contradictory) the properties of evil or any lackness of the Good in order for him to express hatred in time if he were to enter into our universe in time?

This God example is a good one and reminds me of the questions that me and my friends would ask when we were kids, such as can God love the Devil, or hate/love evil, or can God even hate anything at all?

I'm aware that I'm not asking specifically a Christian philosophy group, but assuming all of these points were granted for the sake of the example, I'm very interested to learn more insight about love/ hate and good/evil with these logical examples so that I can further develop the logical aspects of my ethical perspectives, for the sake of consistency and to me asking logicians this is the best place to start, if not to find the answer to this question, I may be pointed in the right direction by those who study and are informed in these topics!

Mauro ALLEGRANZA
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12345shushi
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  • Nothing "logical" here. Do you think that there are persons loving evil ? Maybe... If there are some, this means that there is nothing that is "logically impossible" in the related concept. – Mauro ALLEGRANZA Oct 05 '20 at 11:13
  • Is it because there is no logical property of consistency between good, evil, love and hatred in relation to each other? – 12345shushi Oct 05 '20 at 11:17
  • I guess it could depend if love and hatred are purely relative/preference terms with no properties at all of Good and Evil, but I do think that there is something intrinsically good about love in of itself independent of anything else or intrinsically bad or evil in hatred by itself, although they do seem to change when one talks about hating evil as being a good thing or loving evil as a bad thing. Perhaps semantics is an insurmountable impass for this question in regards to logic? Maybe there are both properties of absolute (intrinsically) and relative (extrinsically) to these terms? – 12345shushi Oct 05 '20 at 11:22
  • Maybe the question must be rephrased avoiding "logic camouflage"... Are there Intrinsic Values Is "Good" one of this ? If so, are we "forced" to adopt behaviors that aim at achieving it ? – Mauro ALLEGRANZA Oct 05 '20 at 11:26
  • Hmm.. your suggestion sounds to me like asking about objective moral duties, if they are truly obligatory towards us, if we are moral agents if ontologically and objectively speaking there is such a thing as moral values such as goodness? Sounds related, but this question sort of assumes this presupposition and asks, "if this were the case, does logical consistency apply to being obligated to love everything if we are obligated to be good ourselves, where we cannot act contrary to love or goodness since hatred intrinsically appears to be bad, so do we have to love evil if we want to be consist – 12345shushi Oct 05 '20 at 11:37
  • For interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_schools_of_thought#Egoist_anarchism – christo183 Oct 05 '20 at 13:01
  • Those assumptions you make about God and good are non-logical, so it is logically possible to reject them, which is why the question is uninteresting as is. A more interesting question is whether a rational person can love evil. This depends on the nature of good and evil, whether what they are is determined by something other than reason. Moral rationalists say no. As for God, this leads to the Euthyphro dilemma: is something good because God wills it, or does he will it because it is good? – Conifold Oct 05 '20 at 21:38
  • @Conifold this assumption about my question focuses on a specific view of God (one which incorporates specific ontological, epistemological axioms like thomism, scotism, palamas, classical, traditional christianity, or even monistic theism or panentheism; forget modern conceptions of christianity) so this question looks at good and evil as defined by the nature of God as an extension or part of his nature rather than it being intrinsic or arbitrary and random property that he makes up rather than emerging from his nature – 12345shushi Oct 05 '20 at 22:36
  • @Conifold so as to not confuse this example with an apologetic argument, you can replace God with The Platonic Good that has a will of self determination and a property similar to a center of consciousness, or even the Logos from Philo of Alexandria. The main idea of this question is still rational, and for the sake of argument assumes a type of realist conception of the value of Goodness (from any of the above views or Idealism, etc.). So not going into the debate of realism or christianity, if we assume for the sake of argument these propositions, would the act of loving or hating in of – 12345shushi Oct 05 '20 at 22:42
  • Themselves be morally right or wrong, and if that would entail us to ignore extrinsic rather than their intrinsic worth when determining whether or not we should love/hate anything, or to put it in a different way, is it logically consistent that in order to be morally Good, that we have to love everything including evil (a moral agent) or is there a rational logical way in which we can describe love and hatred where both properties of intrinsic and extrinsic values are incorporated that isn't unintelligible and consistent with logic, where a moral agent can hate evil logically? – 12345shushi Oct 05 '20 at 22:47
  • What your comments describe does not match the title, it should be something like "is love of evil consistent with monotheistic morality?" I do not follow what intrinsic/extrinsic mean here, but your good precedes God, it seems. Is it possible for God (on your conception) to love evil? No, by definition, he is omnibenevolent by nature. Is it possible for "moral agent" (on your conception) to love evil? No again, by definition, since good is the root of morality. Your assumptions trivialize the question, only the other way. It is not moral, perhaps, to hate evil, but lack of love isn't hate. – Conifold Oct 06 '20 at 07:32
  • I appreciate your input here and I'm not attempting to defend christianity, but rather this is a thought experiment that is more easier to use as an idea to get to the main point of my question, as I would have to in an atheistic sense present a sort of platonic or Logos type of metaphysics that is equivalent to this type of Christian monotheism, but it's simpler imo sense God is easier to understand in a personification level about absolute goodness being able to hate or love evil. I bring this question up sense I was discussing this with a thomist about God being being and perfection itself – 12345shushi Oct 06 '20 at 08:13
  • And seeing whether or not it was logically consistent for one who is either an absolutely moral agent or just a moral agent to logically being able to hate anything, which also applied to my non-christian perspective that if I wanted to hate evil, which makes sense as you described, how can I logically justify this truth which also applied to the thomist conception of God. I see your point here, I just want to prove in mathematical formal logic language that what you said is logically true whether we are talking about God in the view above or for a moral rational agent in general like us – 12345shushi Oct 06 '20 at 08:18
  • To consider good & evil has inherent to things, rather than relational, there has to be a transcendentally object view, or person, who they are good and evil as seen from/by. – CriglCragl Nov 05 '20 at 00:16

2 Answers2

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is it logically possible for a free agent (who is capable of moral reasoning; a moral agent and responsible towards the duty and obligation of acting morally in an objective sense) to love evil?

In The Science of Logic Hegel defines evil as a totally self-centred point of view.

Remark: The unity of the One and the Many

§ 356

Self-subsistence pushed to the point of the one as a being-for-self is abstract, formal, and destroys itself. It is the supreme, most stubborn error, which takes itself for the highest truth, manifesting in more concrete forms as abstract freedom, pure ego and, further, as Evil. ...

As such, an affinity for evil is absolutely incompatible with being a moral agent. (Obvious, since morality is concerned with proper behaviour in society, and total self-centeredness doesn't involve itself with society at all.)

In a more nuanced reading: Godhead and the Nothing, Thomas Altizer writes "when philosophy first deeply engages the question of evil in German Idealism, this is precisely the point at which philosophy fully becomes theology". So continuing with theology:

Christian theology knows that “evil” is transfigured in redemption, is absolutely transformed, and even if it is thereby reduced to a pure and final nothingness, such a transformation is a genuine act, and is the eternal act of redemption. (page 76)

In Altizer's theology, evil is a inevitable stage in both life and metaphorical creation, and its redemptive transfiguration is the ultimate act. (of love?) On the human scale, this is where the selfish person has an epiphany and joins society, (joins the Mitsein).

Chris Degnen
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  • Good and evil are purely relative and completely subjective experiences. Spinoza explain that, ' We do not choose something because it is good, but rather consider something good because we choose it.' So yes, someone can and often does desire evil, thinking that it will have a satisfactory effect in their life. This would be equivalent to 'loving evil'. –  Oct 05 '20 at 17:29
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    @CharlesMSaunders It appears Spinoza and Hegel have different ideas of what constitutes evil. The relative merits of these views warrants consideration. – Chris Degnen Oct 05 '20 at 17:53
  • @CharlesMSaunders FYI https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217313000243 – Chris Degnen Oct 13 '20 at 06:13
  • @ChrisDegmen Did read the Hegel abstract. Any theory that claims a natural dialectical antimony between good and evil seems to bear too much of the anthropomorphic theism residue to sound natural and ring true. Hegel merely proved Spinoza's assertion that humans subjectively decide what is good or evil. –  Oct 13 '20 at 17:45
  • @CharlesMSaunders -- I bet my Christmas that you misunderstood Spinoza. The concepts Good and Evil are as absolute as they can possibly be. Yes, they depend on what we find painful or pleasant, those feelings are, in practical terms, objective as well. – Yuri Zavorotny Nov 04 '20 at 14:15
  • .... and if you think about it, the only subjective side you would find in anyone is their stupidity. And that's why stupidity was the only reason behind every evil act in human history. – Yuri Zavorotny Nov 04 '20 at 14:26
  • Well after publishing 4 books on Spinoza's Ethics, I will just have to take your objective view of good and evil as gospel. And my understanding of Spinoza's 'imaginitive affective' and his depiction of good and evil as purely personal subjective as just plain 'stupid'. Regards, –  Nov 04 '20 at 18:15
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First, some agreements about the language.

  • Good and evil are relative. If I want to die, poison is good. If I want to live, poison is bad. Death is good for the hunter, bad for the prey. There's no absolute good or evil.

  • In order to simplify the problem (the problem of good and evil is quite complex), we'll assume that everything that is good is related with life, survival, wellness, love (in fact, all behaviors that are constructive on the long term) and everything that is bad is related to death, perenniality, suffering, hate (all behaviors that are destructive on the long term). In short, good is what is constructive and vice versa.

  • Love is essentially two things:

    • the passion that a person feels that raises because something is received (e.g. my wife gives me joy, so she creates a passion on me). Love as a passion is always the result of receiving something, otherwise.
    • the will to do good to another person, which is expressed by giving something (e.g. I love my wife, so I prepare her favorite breakfast on sundays).

  • "Loving evil" is quite subjective. It cannot be the "will to do good to evil". Perhaps it can be associated for the passion for evil. A person that loves, in the passionate sense, evil, would be a person that prefers destroying instead of constructing himself.

According to that, yes, you can feel love for evil, and that can be logical. Of course, the logical consequence is immediate self-destruction, with some degree of collateral destruction.

A lot of natural mutations of living entities perish easily. The reason for that can be interpreted to be its tendency to destruction, to have something bad (negative, destructive, wrong), or perhaps what you call "love for evil". That's completely normal in nature and regulated by natural selection. For example, if an animal gives birth to a mutated young that gets pleasure by stop breathing, or by being aggressive to his mother (what can be considered 'evil', according to our previous definition), it will soon perish. Dying is the logical consequence.

RodolfoAP
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