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Thus one and the same thing can be at the same time good, bad, and indifferent. For instance, music is good for him that is melancholy, bad for him that mourns; for him that is deaf, it is neither good nor bad. Nevertheless, though this be so, the terms should still be retained.
Evil may be said to exist in the same way the hole of a donut exists: the donut was created, but the hole itself was not made, it was just never filled in – it is an absence. [10] And just as the hole could not exist without the donut, evil is parasitic upon good, since it is the corruption of a good nature. "God is infinite, and the devil is ...
One standard of sufficient reason for allowing evil is by asserting that God allows an evil in order to prevent a greater evil or cause a greater good. [139] Pointless evil , then, is an evil that does not meet this standard; it is an evil God permitted where there is no outweighing good or greater evil.
Proposition 8 "Knowledge of good or evil is nothing but affect of joy or sorrow in so far as we are conscious of it." Proposition 30 "Nothing can be evil through that which it possesses in common with our nature, but in so far as a thing is evil to us it is contrary to us." Proposition 64 "The knowledge of evil is inadequate knowledge."
In Islamic thought, evil is considered to be movement away from good, and God created this possibility so that humans are able to recognize good. [43] In contrast, angels are unable to move away from good, therefore angels generally rank lower than humans as they have reached heaven because they lack the ability to perceive the world as humans do.
In the same line of thinking, St. Augustine also defined evil as an absence of good, as did the theologian and monk Thomas Aquinas, who stated "a man is called bad insofar as he lacks a virtue, and an eye is called bad insofar as it lacks the power of sight." [11]: 37 Bad as an absence of good resurfaces in Hegel, Heidegger and Barth.
An omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse. (Therefore) There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being. [2] Another by Paul Draper: Gratuitous evils exist.
The book was developed in the summer of the year 45 BC, and was written over the course of about one and a half months. Together with the Tusculanae Quaestiones written shortly afterwards and the Academica, De finibus bonorum et malorum is one of the most extensive philosophical works of Cicero. Cicero dedicated the book to Marcus Junius Brutus.