Good and evil

[Ostrinski]

Where/when/why did the concepts of good and evil originate? Most societies developed some kind of understanding of good and evil, so what material conditions did these societies all have in common that facilitated the manifestation of these concepts? My guess was that it came about after human's primal material needs were met and they therefore had the capacity to address what they considered wrong with their methods of organization, and to question the characteristics of human relations that they deemed impractical. But I have no actual knowledge of the history of it. Thanks in advance for the help.

[Caj]

Well, obviously there are a number of causes, both societal (economic) and evolutionary, for our concepts of good and evil and the moral frameworks into which these concepts fit.

Regarding the economic bases of human morality and our concepts of good and evil, I think that Daniel De Leon presented a nice explanation in his January 26, 1896 speech at Boston’s Wells' Memorial Hall "Reform or Revolution?" (cited from Writings of Daniel DeLeon).

First, he remarks on the social and economic changes that brought about the transition from barbaric cannibalism to primitive slavery and the parallel transition from regarding cannibalism as morally neutral to regarding it as immoral:


[A]ll of our ancestors were cannibals at one time. The human race, in its necessity to seek food, often found it easier to make a raid and take from others the food they had gathered. In those olden, olden days of the barbarism of our ancestors, when they conquered a people and took away its property, they had no further use for the conquered; they killed them, spitted them over a good fire, roasted and ate them up. It was a simple and the only profitable way known of disposing of prisoners of war. . . . Our ancestors continued [to be] cannibals until their social system had developed sufficiently to enable them to keep their prisoners under control. From that moment they found it more profitable to keep their prisoners of war alive and turn them into slaves to work for them, than it was to kill them off and eat them. With that stage of material development, cannibalism was dropped. From the higher material plane on which our ancestors then stood, their moral vision enlarged and they presently realized that it was immoral to eat up a human being.

[page 12]

He then goes on to apply this materialist conception of morality to slavery in the United States:


In the North [United States], chattel slavery disappeared just as soon as the development of machinery rendered the institution unprofitable. The immorality of chattel slavery became clear to the North just as soon as, standing upon that higher plane that its higher material development raised it to, it acquired a better vision. The benighted South, on the contrary, that had no machinery, remained with eyes shut, and she stuck to slavery till the slave was knocked out of her fists.

[page 13]

He sums up this materialist conception of morality by saying:


Each . . . looks at morality from the standpoint of his individual or class interests. The man who owns a silver mine considers it the height of immorality to demonetize silver. The importer who can be benefited by free trade thinks it a heinous crime against good morals to set up a high tariff. The man whose wage slaves come on Monday somewhat boozy, so that he cannot squeeze, pilfer out of them as much wealth as he would like to, becomes a pietistic prohibitionist. . . . The higher the economic plane on which a class stands, and the sounder its understanding of material conditions, all the broader will its horizon be, and, consequently, all the purer and truer its morality. Hence it is that, today, the highest moral vision, and the truest withal, is found in the camp of the revolutionary proletariat.

[page 17]

Engels also remarks on the economic/class basis of morality in his "On Morality" (cited from The Marx-Engels Reader):


[W]hen we see that the three classes of modern society, the feudal aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, each have a morality of their own, we can only draw the one conclusion: that men, consciously or unconsciously, derive their ethical ideas in the last resort from the practical relations on which their class position is based--from the economic relations in which they carry on production and exchange. . . . [A]ll moral theories have been hitherto the product, in the last analysis, of the economic conditions of society obtaining at the time. And as society has hitherto moved in class antagonisms, morality has always been class morality; it has either justified the domination and the interests of the ruling class, or, ever since the oppressed class became powerful enough, it has represented its indignation against this domination and the future interests of the oppressed. . . . We have not yet passed beyond class morality. A really human morality which stands above class antagonisms and above any recollection of them becomes possible only at a stage of society which has not only overcome class antagonisms but has even forgotten them in practical life.

[pages 726-727]

Of course, this is only half of the story. There is also an evolutionary basis for human morality and, possibly, for our concepts of good and evil. Based on anthropological evidence regarding pre-agricultural human social groups, this prehistoric and evolutionary morality was probably much more egalitarian and altruistic than the class-based moral systems that have characterized all hitherto existing human society.

[Aloysius]

^Can't top that, but everyone knows "There is no good or evil; there is only power."

[Ostrinski]

Wow thanks, this helps a lot.


but everyone knows "There is no good or evil; there is only power."
Of course, the conception is what I am referring to.

[Ostrinski]

Anthropologist Tim White notes that cannibalism was common in many societies up until the upper paleolithic period. This then begs the question of, when did primitive slavery start developing?