Assignment 3 - Haley Drake

The concepts of good and evil are basically just that: concepts. Our society is built on the idea of a battle between good and evil, citizens vs criminals, democrats vs tyrants, light vs dark. Individually, we are raised to believe that arrogance is bad and helping others is good, yet instinctively we strive to care for ourselves and our livelihood first. Thus we obsess over the idea of being the epitome of goodness. We hope that upon making a decision between arrogance and selflessness we will be selfless, but we know that it will be difficult. However, what if that selfless decision was not the quintessential good deed you were hoping for?

Say that an old man on the bus drops his wallet. Your immediate thoughts are to return the wallet to the man, or to keep it and its contents to yourself. Obviously, you return the heavy wallet because that's the good thing to do. You feel good about yourself for a while - maybe tell your friends about this great thing you did. But was it really good?

What if the man was a burglar, and the money in the wallet was stolen from an innocent person? That's ridiculously unlikely, and you couldn't have possibly known that right? Well even if it was just a regular old man with a regular old wallet, who's to say he was the one who needed it the most? You could have picked up the wallet, taken the money, and given it to charity. Even then, will they use the money for the most good?  In reality, it's nearly impossible to make an Absolute Good decision, let alone be the absolute good, no evil whatsoever person. In my opinion, no person, creature, or being can really be good, nor can they be evil; only decisions can be good or evil, and even then most of the time there are grey areas that are somewhere in between.

While no one can ever really guarantee that their decisions result in goodness, we can at least do our best to think of others before ourselves, because we have to. Our individual struggles between the goodness and evil we create keeps us moving and working, and without that I do believe that our society would stop working the way it does now. We need these concepts of good and evil to keep moving forward as people and as a society.