good and evil, what is greater?

[Mark Chance]

Of course I experience anger and disgust at man's inhumanity towards man. That is because I am not evil or at least I do not consider myself evil. But there is really very little we can do about it, except stay true to our own personal code of honor and morality.

But if all there is to morality is just a myriad different personal codes of honor, then there is no such thing as good or evil. There is just choice. Raw will against raw will. Might makes right. Nietzche's will to power. If such is the nature of morality, neither you nor I are any less evil than anyone else. Even the absolute worst person you can think of, in the final wash, is every bit of virtuous as you are.

We're getting into natural law and human nature. As you well know, most of the great philosophers described what man was like in a "state of nature" or what have you, and built their philosophy up around that assumption. Ulness you can prove that your interpretation of natural law is correct, your whole argument is resting on an assumption.

Ultimately, all arguments rest on an unproveable assumption, what Aristotle termed first principles. They cannot be demonstrated to be true, only reasonable.

Any system that requires its own rules to prove its own existance is fundamentally flawed. I mentioned this a while back, but if something existed that didn't obey logical rules, logic would be useless to describe it. You can't use logic to prove the existance of something illogical, even if that something exists. It's a narrowly bounded explanation of things that claims it can explain everything, but can't prove it can explain everything.

Ah, but I've never claimed logic can explain everything. I do, however, claim that logic is eminently reasonable for at least getting at the roots of things that appear contradictory. Science, which has been almost deified in the past century, is itself based on a system of rules that, like all systems of rules, cannot be used to verify itself. IOW, the scientific method cannot be used to prove the validity of the scientific method. This does point to limits about that which science is competent explain (for example, science cannot speak competently about the supernatural since the supernatural, by definition, transcends science), but this hardly invalidates all of science.

Likewise, logic has its limits. Logic cannot, for example, really judge value, but only whether or not the principles that back that value are coherent. Also, logic itself can be used to "prove" spurious conclusions, for a conclusion is only as solid as its premises. Never forget G. K. Chesterton's observation that the problem with insane people isn't that they're illogical but rather is that they are nothing but logical.