Essay: "The Problem of Good"

The "Problem of Evil" is the question of how evil can exist in the world if there is an all-knowing and all-powerful God who is good. It's a doozy. But evil also seems to be problem for secular folks, as well. Whenever anything terrible happens, when someone absconds with the trust funds or when a woman drowns her kids in the bathtub, it always seems like people just can't believe it (as satirized in this Onion article) and search desperately for a reason.





But to me, it alway seems like there's a "reason" for behaving abominably. Whether it's bullying, or childhood abuse, or drug addiction, we can always explain away atrocious actions, for reasons which are usually sordid and banal. It never seems all that difficult to me to explain why someone did something terrible. They wanted to. That's all.

In our society, even the lack of reason has become a reason. "Psychopathy" is defined as "a personality disorder characterized by an abnormal lack of empathy combined with strongly amoral conduct but masked by an ability to appear outwardly normal."  In other words, doing evil things without a medical condition is a medical condition.

I think we've got so good at explaining evil, even evil which by definition cannot be explained, that we've taken some of the fun out of it.  Evil is obvious. Evil is boring. The more interesting issue, in my opinion, is why people are good.

Take, for example, Oscar Schindler. This man lived in a country which, for twelve years, went completely insane. There were plenty of excuses for all sorts of evil behaviour. Just following orders, everyone else was doing it, the propaganda warped my brain, etc. And yet in this environment we find a man named Schindler, who before and after the war was a failure at business and marriage, but during the war, in which he ran a successful factory staffed by human slaves and had the strongest excuses for behaving in an immoral fashion, risked his life to save 1,200 Jews.


Another, less dramatic example. is the baseball player Harold Henry "Pee Wee" Reese.  Pee Wee was born in 1918 and grew up in the racially segregated South, a poor white boy.  He was the starting shortstop for the Los Angeles Dodgers when Jackie Robinson joined the team, becoming the first African American in Major League Baseball. Notwithstanding that Robinson also played shortstop, Reese refused to sign a petition that threated a boycott if Robinson joined the team, and famously threw his arm over Robinson's shoudler when he was being heckled by racist fans in Cincinnati.

To me, these problems of good are more interesting than the problems of evil. Why was it that Schindler and Reese were apparently able to overcome the forces that their contemporaries used to excuse their behaviour?  There's nothing particularly remarkable about either of them.

The explanations for evil just make acts of heroism mysterious and sublime. Heroism strikes close to who we are. For all the artistic and journalist hand-wringing about the dark side of human nature. Because for all of our flaws we're still here, we haven't blown up the planet or slid back into slavery, we've always built more than we destroyed.


And, of course, the problem of good is, in the end, more subversive and challenging than the problem of evil. Focusing on the evil that men do makes excuses for us and our failures. Focusing on the good, interogating it, asking why, challenges us to do more. Perhaps the real reason that so much art and media focuses on sociopaths and serial killers is not because we find it disturbing but because we find it reassuring. Perhaps what really disturbs us, as much as it inspires us, is that image of Pee Wee Reese standing in Cincinnati with his arm around the man who he'd been trained to hate and who might steal his job, silencing the fans, and there being no reason for it, no reason at all.