The Defeat of Good and Evil

Looking for a topic that would be philosophically live, that would reflect my own interests, and that would be appropriate for the events of 1968, I kept coming back to the nature of evil. When the time came to submit a title, however, courage failed and I settled for Types of Intrinsic Goodness and Badness. Now I am able to compromise with Defeat of Good and Evil. I shall discuss a distinction that seems to me to be of first importance to the theory of value. The distinction was seen by such theodicists as St. Thomas and Hume's Demea. It was seen more dearly by Leibniz in his Theodicy and by G. E. Moore in the first and last chapters of Principia Ethica. And now, I think, we are able to see the distinction more cearly still as a result of recent work in the logic of preference-the logic of such concepts as and better. The distinction may be put by contrasting what I shall call balancing and defeating. It is one thing to say that the goodnessthe intrinsic goodness-of a certain situation is balanced off by means of some other situation; and it is quite another thing to say that the goodness of a certain situation is defeated by means of some other situation. Again, it is one thing to say that the evil-the intrinsic badness-of a certain situation is balanced off by means of some other situation; and it is quite another thing to say that the evil of a certain situation is defeated by means of some other situation. Before I try to define the distinction precisely, I shall make certain general points about the logic of the terms good, bad, and better, when these are used in connection with intrinsic value. I shall assume that we can know, with respect to some things, that those things are good in themselves; that we can know, with respect to other things, that those things are bad in themselves; that we can