The end of good and evil | Slavoj Žižek, Rowan Williams, Maria Balaska, Richard Wrangham

here I'm crazy the fall opens up the space for the [Music] good should we give up on the idea of humans being either inherently good or evil yes well there we go you are saying this as a chrisan we'll get there we'll get there Sor this is the pitch this is just the pitch I'm saying we should give up on the idea that human beings are essentially good or essentially evil because I can't give any sense to that question to be honest human beings are damaged changeable vulnerable capable incapable where along that Spectrum we place ourselves or anyone else is one of the biggest cultural and ethical issues we could possibly be concerned with but we're always reaching for apparently simple answers to questions about human nature which almost any available answer is going to be not just unhelpful with but possibly destructive so the short answer is no we should not think of human beings as essentially this or that we shouldn't give up on the categories of Good and Evil more on that later we should think what it might be to look at ourselves and one another as well sites places where very different things on fold and I hope the unfolding will be part of this conversation thank you very much um Ria uh should we give up on the idea of human beings either being inherently good or evil I agree I think um we should give up on that idea because if we were inherently one or the other then the idea that there is such a thing as um improvement in our moral lives would make no sense and yet we do strive we often fail but also we often succeed in becoming better as individuals and so if there is such a thing as moral progress then that means that there is no inherent um good or evil in humans and um what I want to contribute today to the debate as a philosopher is to instead of trying to categorize all humans in such a generalized manner whether they're good or evil is to think of good and evil as conceptual Frameworks and um think of what these Concepts do for our lives and for the way we understand morality thank you so much Richard over to you well I'm not sure if I agree or disagree um with so far so um I I guess what I I think is that um we need to Define evil uh as something like acts of intentional violence or which we disapprove uh in other words evil is not a a natural category it is a category that is uh brought to us through social action uh we need to have a social decision about what is evil and what is what is is not evil and uh in this um I'm I'm bound to bring up the fact that almost all killing is done in the name of morality yeah uh somebody thinks that it is a moral thing to do and someone on the other side thinks it's not a moral thing to do whether it's you're talking about honor killings or or War uh in defense of your uh your country so I just want you know emphasize that that evil is relative but having said that it seems to me that we should definitely think of both goodness and evil as things that are inherently associated with our species uh I think that it would be uh burying our heads in the sand to think that evil is not a characteristic of the human species as a whole I think also it's characteristic of some individuals some Psychopaths but uh not all individuals at all and it's certainly characteristic of some uh ideologies so we have to unpack it in in sightly complex ways but uh but I want to insist that uh that humans are uh have an inherent potential for evil uh from the perspective of the people who we might find ourselves killing thank you very much slavo should we give up on the ideas of human either being inherently good or evil I it looks as me who is usually dismissed as a vulgar materialist I'm here tempted to Advocate a more fundamentalist even Christian St I'm an atheist Christian which would say what we understand as evil basically is I would like to connect with what ran said how human beings are basically damaged vulnerable and so on and so on so for me the only consistent answer a very materialist one uh to how did we become human is that at our level of animal life something went terribly wrong and then as a reaction to this to patch up this leg we culture emerged so what I would have uh what I have said is that I also deeply agree with your point that uh that uh uh evil fundamental and you know what's my point uh my materialist heelan reading of evil in Christian terms the fall I think here I'm crazy the fall opens up the space for the good before the fall there is no good because fall is more for me not simply fall into sin fall is uh fall from some organic immediate Unity into this vulnerable open State and it's incidentally to make Hegel actual in a wonderful very materialist way heel in his anthropology the beginning of third part of Encyclopedia pedia is more intelligent than Michelle Fuko where he says that the first stage of being human is madness we are animals which got lost no instinctual compass and so on and then to control this potential evil we built civilization so I think that yes I totally agree cultur is contingent socially and so on and so on but you have to presuppose that this is always against a background of a certain fundamental disorientation loss which defines human species so no no good without evil and I think if you think you can have good without po evil potential you end up doing real evil what you brought out this is absolutely crucial that no Nazi killers and so on they are not this demoniac romantic evil no they are guys who simply think they are doing the the greatest self saiz good for their own narrow group and so on and so on sorry thank you very much we are definitely coming back to that um in fact our first theme that we are going to explore is are good and evil objective are they objective categories or are they categories that we've made up to make sense of ourselves and I'm going to throw to you Richard to open up for us on that well uh pursuing my my previous comments I absolutely do not think that they are objective com uh categories at all they are moral categories uh and so the origin of good and evil can be seen as um the origin of the sense of right and wrong uh the origin of morality and and humans have a morality of right and wrong that no other species does we are unique in that respect there's a kind of morality of sympathy that uh that some some animals can have for each other uh but a morality that says this is right and this is wrong that doesn't exist outside US and and I actually think that uh there's a pretty persuasive argument that we can work out when the morality uh of fairness that humans are characterized by began uh and uh if we had longer I would say it is 300,000 years ago that you know there's there's a some point at which coincides with the origin of homo sapiens uh that um our lives changed and we developed a sense of right and wrong and why was that it was because Society changed changed in such a way that there became a dominant Alliance in society made up I think of males uh who were able to impose what they considered right and wrong and at that point good became a category of things that are in line with conform to the um the motivations and wishes of the dominant Alliance they were able to impose this because they had had the power of executing anybody in the group and evil became things that are not in line with the dominant power in the group so a very uh relativistic subjective concept of Good and Evil thank you Richard I I think that might be a good place to bring you in ran on um I'm I'm I'm guessing maybe you don't agree that good and evil don't exist outside of ourselves but yes going out on a limb yeah but that's a very accurate yes um I think there's a possible confusion here there's there's certainly a story to be told of how concepts of Good and Evil emerge how concepts of right and wrong emerge but I think that what Richard has just outlined is to my mind reductive in that good and evil are not simply about power as those Concepts have evolved over the Millennia and I don't think we can now reduce them simply to contests of power if they were all just about who has the right to the power of life and death then I don't think it would ever be imaginable that people could say it is good to resist but it is good to resist is one of the things that's been associated with an ethical standpoint ever since people have started talking about ethics whether you go back to classical tragedy or to Hebrew Christian scripture or whatever it is good to resist where's that from now that's just one of the things I I would find awkward about the a deep resentment about the power exerted at their expense but if you say it is good to resist not simply it is um imperative I feel I must resist but there is something to which the powerful should be accountable which is not currently at work oh well I mean the way I would think about it is that uh those who are saying it's good to resist are shifting their moral framework from the dominant power in the group to the group of resistors so the dominant power in the overall group does not in fact have an absolute control of the notion of good that's right absolutely well I oh yeah it's a contest let's bring contest among power groups uh let's bring re in on this maybe you can help us understand these categories constructed categories useful categories I I think that the this distinction between subjective and objective should be approached with great caution and I think is problematic because it suggests that moral categories are not as real or as binding because they originate in our practices or language but the fact I think that moral judgments are not objective in the way that truths of physics are are held to be does not make them subjective uh nor does it diminish the authority of those judgments so I think good and evil are indeed human categories that we made uh to make sense of ourselves and they are objective and by objective I mean that they are something that we canot offer definitions for good or bad definitions and something we can reason about um but objectivity cannot be detached from you know our history and our practices I want however to add something which I hope can kind of cut through this problematic distinction and that's an idea that I'm very fond of the idea that goodness has a special link to realism or to reality and that's an idea that has recently become more prominent thanks to work the works of uh philosophers like Simon ve Iris Murdoch and more recently cor Diamond who link goodness to successful perception Vil calls it attention and she says that love is the highest form of attention and Murdo argues that being good allows us to look at reality more objectively so this is a view we already find in Plato uh when he Likens the good to the Sun that is something very Illuminating so how how can we think of this connection between being good and seeing clearly or or in a way that is realistic I think there are many ways but one way I want to suggest is that when we try and perceive a situation clearly uh what we need to do is give our full attention to the situation and often especially when there are certain vices involved like for example Envy or vanity our focus is too much on our own selves and that way you can't see the situation clearly so that's a way to understand how being good can actually give you it's not just objective but it gives you access to reality in a kind of privileged way and I find that very interesting thank you very much SL uh my God uh it's complex because I agree and disagree with almost all of you my uh my problem is first I agree with this that today it's put as in the conflict between those advocates for whom sex is natural and LGBT and so on first I don't think that this distinction is clear between to put it vulgarly nature and culture let's take sexual identity how you identify I agree with uh LGBT people and so on that it's not immediately given you can culturally identify as a woman man trans and it cannot be deduced from your biological identity but at the same time I don't think as sometimes they put it that it's simply a matter of personal choice I feel a woman I feel a man or whatever I think that there is and the same goes for me then with the problem good in evil it's not if we say it's socially determined and it is it doesn't simply mean it's arbitrary and subjective in this narrow sense I would like to Advocate this Paradox that fundamental decisions are unconscious I repeat always this part I'm sorry in the sense of yes it is contingent but you are never in a position external position to choose it's like you mentioned love falling in love you never look at it okay I want to fall in love you are beautiful you you let me compare your features no falling in love means and here I don't see clearly your point on Clarity falling in love means for me something a great exclusion you not only see things clearly but my cynical mind to see something things clearly there are many other things that unconsciously you choose not to see clearly like we as a civilization only now we're becoming whereare we decided what happens to pigs to chicken and so on an immense amount of suffering we were taught to really to Simply uh ignore that or again falling in love you never fall in love all of a sudden you realize that you are in love and I think it's the same with religious identity it's an obscenity as kagar knew it clearly to say I was reading Jewish text Christian text and whatever Buddhist text and my God I found the uh the the arguments for Christianity the best now kagar answers to see the arguments for Christianity you already have to believe at some level to continue watching this video click the link in the top left or in the description below or visit I a.tv for more debates and talks from the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas

Channel: The Institute of Art and Ideas

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Keywords: learning, education, debate, lecture, IAItv, institute of art and ideas, IAI, philosophy, zizek, slavoj zizek, rowan williams, myriam cfrancois, myriam francois slavoj zizek, slavoj zizek rowan williams, slavoj zizek good and evil, richard wrangham, richard wrangham goodness paradox, richard wrangham rowan williams, maria balaska, morality, morality debate, what is good, what is evil, what is good and evill, is evil real, zizek is evil real, zizek end of good and evil, end of good

Id: sEoPDfuycrE

Length: 17min 25sec (1045 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 08 2024