Is Goodness Triumphant Over Evil?

Question

Is Goodness Triumphant Over Evil?

Apparently not. Goodness is honest and plays with open cards, while evil hides its hand until the very last moment. Goodness can hardly compete with evil unless it distances itself from its own nature and steps into evil's territory.

But where does the problem lie? And before that, is this claim even valid?

Classically, experiments have been conducted to examine the vulnerability of goodness. For instance, the book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil describes a well-known yet dangerous experiment called The Lucifer Effect.

Based on the experiment's results, we can accept this much: goodness is vulnerable to evil—very vulnerable.

So, the question isn't why goodness doesn't always triumph over evil. The golden question is: why, after thousands of years, has goodness not been completely obliterated by evil? What sustains goodness through the ages?

One scientifically accepted explanation is: "Altruistic behaviors may have biological roots. Empathy and the willingness to help others might have evolved in humans to promote the survival and advancement of the group." In simpler terms, survival led to evolution, and evolution—albeit in a complex manner—gave rise to goodness.

From another perspective, while goodness is more easily defeated in physical confrontations, it often has the upper hand in moral battles. In such battles, fought under the spotlight of public scrutiny, the stage is set for a clash between genuine morality on the side of goodness and hypocritical morality on the side of evil. Here, evil cannot attack recklessly: "The boundaries of evil's actions are the boundaries of its hypocrisy."

But what exactly was The Lucifer Effect?

The Lucifer Effect, also known as the Stanford Prison Experiment, was led by Professor Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University. It studied the behavior of several psychologically healthy students who were assigned, as part of an experiment, the roles of prisoners and guards. The results were astonishing. Within just a few days, many of the students playing the role of guards began to exhibit real, extreme sadistic behaviors. The experiment started to resemble a real prison uprising, and after only six days, it was halted.

Answer 1

@keshlam noted, we are pack animals, but flawed ones. Humans live in something like a Nash equilibrium between pro-social and anti-social drives. This struggle almost defines the human condition.

However, both drives can be understood in the context of maximizing gene survival probability - we need access to violence, anger, self-interest/selfishness. Any creature that cannot access these would be destroyed and not survive by those who do have access. However, there is also a huge survival advantage to living as a group; but this only holds if there is some minimum of trust and stability to allow it to function as more than a collection of selfish individuals.

Thus, it makes sense that neither impulse would be weeded out -- the emotionally unsatisfying blend of the two will dominate either "pure" strategy in terms of survival.

Answer 2

I feel that Augustine's theory, that evil is parasitic upon good, might hint at an answer to this question. Generally by good, we mean pro-social and pro-human (which are more or less equivalent, as humans are social creatures and require a society to live full human lives). Within a pro-social group you can have free riders who take advantage of the social behaviours and conventions without fully reciprocating. We could call that evil. In this context, there can only be a certain amount of "evil" before the group collapses which would in historic times likely mean everybody dies, good and evil alike. Evil in that sense would be self-limiting, the exception rather than the rule, and of course the "good" would have an incentive to keep it that way by weeding out the "evil" where they find them. But the "evil" would not have the same incentive, because if they do weed out all the "good" then it's game over.

Consider a simplified scenario: once humans start using language, there is the possibility of telling lies. When people gain benefits by communicating information, there is a potential benefit in communicating false information. But the liar can only benefit as long as nearly everyone else tells the truth. If everyone lies, then people will just stop communicating and so lying as a behaviour would be extinguished. But if everyone tells the truth, truth telling will not be extinguished.

In other words, anti-social behaviour (evil) stands in dependency to pro-social behaviour (good), but pro-social behaviour is not dependent in this way. It's an assymetric relationship.

Edit: to directly answer the question, if good = pro-social and evil = anti-social then there can't ever be a final triumph of evil over good any more than there can be a final triumph of wolves over sheep. Once the sheep are all gone, the wolves will die too. The wolves need the sheep. But the sheep don't need the wolves. Conceivably, the sheep could eliminate all wolves, but short of this, equilibrium would be reached when sheep outnumber wolves by a large ratio.

Answer 3

Goodness and Evil are both levers of control over the game's characters. They are well-balanced, so it would be useless to look for triumph here.