Everything Good

In religion, ethics, and philosophy, the phrase, good and evil refers to the evaluation of objects, desires, and behaviors across a dualistic spectrum, wherein in one direction are those aspects which are morally positive, and the other are morally negative. The good is sometimes viewed as whatever entails reverence towards either life, continuity, happiness, or human flourishing, while evil is given to be the support for their opposites. Depending on the context, good and evil may represent personal judgments, societal norms, or claims of absolute value related to human nature or to transcendent religious standards.

There is no consensus over whether either goodness or evil are intrinsic to human nature. The nature of goodness has been given many treatments; one is that the good is based on the natural love, bonding, and affection that begins at the earliest stages of personal development; another is that goodness is a product of knowing truth. Differing views also exist as to why evil might arise. Many religious and philosophical traditions claim that evil behavior is an aberration that results from the imperfect human condition (eg. "The Fall of Man"). Sometimes, evil is attributed to the existence of free will and human agency. Some argue that evil itself is ultimately based in an ignorance of truth (i.e., human value, sanctity, divinity). A variety of Enlightenment thinkers have alleged the opposite, by suggesting that evil is learned as a consequence of tyrannical social structures, good is good evil is bad. And by a rationalist or evolutionary perspective, humans are biologically adapted to carry out a variety of game theory strategies, some of which may promote individual utility at the expense of group utility, which, if the disparity is extreme enough, would be termed evil. Goodness in mathematics has also been related to entropy and information theory, as well as how well a statistical model will reflect a set of observations (known of as goodness of fit).

Although goodness is generally not considered to be a real or well-established property under the laws of physics, each person's highly individual concept of the perfect good has profound psychological significance. Agreement is divided over the extent to which this with the real world, but there is little disagreement that one's concept motivates one's actions in the real world.

Theories of moral goodness inquire into