HKB

← all topics

Good versus evil

2 passages · search this phrase →

Often appears with: duty, conscience, and obligation · truthfulness and lying · stoic attitude to pain · pleasure, pain, and the good life · pleasure and pain in ethics · pleasure and pain · morality and sensation · means-end reasoning · justice as a virtue · justice and corporal punishment · hypocrisy and the appearance of virtue · heteronomy and useful ends

Usually: reflection (2) · censure (1) · curiosity (1)

The Critique of Practical Reason secondary

Immanuel Kant · 1788
BOOK*1|CHAPTER*1 > CHAPTER II. Of the Concept of an Object of Pure Practical Reason. (2/10)

Kant argues that calling something “good” means it is desired on rational principles, not simply linked to pleasure by sensation, and that focusing on the pleasant reduces morality to mere usefulness.

evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason; by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle of reason. If the notion of good is not to be derived from an antecedent practical law, but, on the contrary, is to serve as its foundation, it can only be the notion of something whose existence promises pleasure, and thus determines the causality of…

The Critique of Practical Reason secondary

Immanuel Kant · 1788
BOOK*1|CHAPTER*1 > CHAPTER II. Of the Concept of an Object of Pure Practical Reason. (3/10)

He uses German word distinctions to separate “well/ill” as conditions of feeling from “good/evil” as rational determinations of the will, illustrating this with Stoic pain and legal punishment examples.

{BOOK*1|CHAPTER*2 ^paragraph 5} The German language has the good fortune to possess expressions which do not allow this difference to be overlooked. It possesses two very distinct concepts and especially distinct expressions for that which the Latins express by a single word, bonum. For bonum it has das Gute [good], and das Wohl [well, weal], for malum das Bose [evil], and das Ubel [ill, bad], or das Well [woe]. So …