The leader should know how to enter into evil when necessity commands.
And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone or that's an evil one because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.
It is good insofar as it is not evil.
Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin.
They tend to be pretty abstract ones then, like doing what will have the best consequences; obviously you wouldn't specify what consequences are best, they may be different in some circumstances, so at a lower, more specific level, you may well get differences.
There is nothing wrong with violence in itself. In any particular case, whether violence is good or bad depends on how it is used and the purpose for which it is used.
From pacifist to terrorist, each person condemns violence - and then adds one cherished case in which it may be justified.
But all morality is of necessity shaped by context. I'm not talking relativism, no. To ignore the context of a decision is in fact immoral.
Change a virtue in its circumstances find it becomes a vice; change a vice in its circumstances, and it becomes a virtue. Regard the same quality from two sides; on one it is a fault, on the other a merit. The essential of a man is found concealed far below these moral badges.
Martyrs and persecutors are the same type of man. As to which is the persecutor and which the martyr, this is only a question of transient power.
Morality—like velocity—is relative. The determination of it depends on what the objects around you are doing. All one can do is measure one's position in relation to them; never can one measure one's velocity or morality in terms of absolutes.
It may be very generous in one person to offer what it would be ungenerous in another to accept.
If you have not been a villain at a certain point in time, you will never be a hero. And the day you are a hero, you may become a villain the next day.
The morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed.
I cannot imagine any crime worse than taking a life, can you? -It'd depend whose life.
We proclaim human intelligence to be morally valuable per se because we are human. If we were birds, we would proclaim the ability to fly as morally valuable per se. If we were fish, we would proclaim the ability to live underwater as morally valuable per se. But apart from our obviously self-interested proclamations, there is nothing morally valuable per se about human intelligence.
Virtue is too often merely local.
I am, as I have always been, of the opinion that while the niceties of normal moral constraints should be our guides, they must not be our masters.
There is hardly any deviancy, no matter how reprehensible in one context, which is not extolled as a virtue in another. There are no natural crimes, only legal ones.
Sometimes, whether a desire is excessive or negative depends on the circumstances or society in which you live in.
So you see, Good and Evil have the same face; it all depends on when they cross the path of each individual human being.
Good heavens, I suppose a man may eat his own muffins in his own garden." "But you have just said it was perfectly heartless to eat muffins!" "I said it was perfectly heartless of YOU under the circumstances. That is a very different thing." "That may be, but the muffins are the same!
Virtue, my pet, is an abstract idea, varying in its manifestations with the surroundings. Virtue in Provence, in Constantinople, in London, and in Paris bears very different fruit, but is none the less virtue.
Notions of Good and Evil depend entirely on social context. It is not that people are good or bad, they are raised in an aberrant or twisted environment.
Bad is not an absolute, but a relative term. Ask the robber who used the cash he stole to feed his infant; the rapist who was sexually abused as a child; the kidnapper who truly believed he was saving a life. And just because you break the law doesn't mean you have intentionally crossed the line into evil. Sometimes the line creeps up on you, and before you know it, you're standing on the other side.
