GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

450
ETHICS
space in the works of writers upon ethics. Ethical writers
have tended to look askance at evil; they have even produced,
treatises which have ignored it altogether. When
they have treated evil, they have generally sought to explain
it away, representing it as something negative, the absence
or deprivation of the good that there might be, or as
something illusory, an appearance due to the limitations
or defects of human vision.
Any such treatment seems to the present writer to falsify
the nature of our ethical experience. To me it seems clear
that evil is a fact as real, as definite and as recognizable
as good. The subject raises metaphysical issues and can
only here be treated in the most cursory way. I propose,
however, to offer a number of brief observations in support
of the view just expressed, that evil is a real and independent
factor in the universe. I shall also try to show why
the attempts to explain it away, or to analyse it in terms
of something else which is not evil, must necessarily fail.
If I am right in holding that evil no less than good,
disvalue no less than value, is a real and independent
factor in the universe, and that the idea of it like the idea
of good is simple, indefinable and unanalysable, it will
follow that any view which seeks to define evil in terms
of anything else, as being, for example, the deprivation of
good, or as a necessary condition for the manifestation of
good, or as pain, or as sin, must be rejected. To say that evil is
pain, or is a necessary condition for the manifestation of
good will be, if I am right, to make an affirmation about
the sort of things that aje evil but not to define evil. I
will try as briefly as I can to defend this view. First, I will
discuss its bearing upon the thcistic hypothesis.
The Reality of Evil and the Thcistic Hypothesis.
Owing to the difficulty of reconciling the reality of evil
with the existence of a creative deity who is both beneficent
and omnipotent, many writers try to show that evil is in
some sense unreal, or is an illusion.
The main reason for this endeavour is, it is obvious,