The Dialectics of Good and Evil as the Main Problem of Philosophical-Ethical Cognition

Abstract

Good and evil are the most general ethical categories from which we can get our bearings in the fundamental philosophical and normative problems of ethics. In the contemporary scholarly literature the interpretation of the good is multifunctional. Good is regarded as a model (at its preeminent level, as an ideal) of morality, as the most general moral requirement or most general moral evaluation, and finally as a practical norm, i.e., a requirement embodied in moral experience, as a unity of the objective and subjective in moral actions. The history of ethical thought was bound to reach this broad, all-embracing conception of the good, indeed, that was the way it went, mastering the content of the category of the good, bit by bit, focusing attention now on one, now on another of its aspects. Hence the most general explanation of the good as a synonym for morality (even taking into account the variations in its historically specific sense) has not at all been the same throughout the different stages in the...