Noah asked:

Without evil, how would we know what "good" was? Don't we need "evil" to achieve balance, just as
we need winter to appreciate the summer?

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In the Nichomachean Ethics— a document which is formative for Western culture — Aristotle noticed
that the desire for happiness was universal. It didn't matter who you were, what your background was
or what you did for a living, everyone seeks to be happy. Happiness is the good. He went on to
observe that false consciousness is almost a norm. This is when people seek happiness by ways and
means that will only lead in the opposite direction, towards unhappiness and even self-destruction.
He distinguished therefore between two types of good: the true good which will lead to happiness and
the false good, which glitters like the real thing, but which will lead us away from the happiness we
seek. Aristotle argued that happiness was to be sought for in oneself. Those who have found peace
of heart are happy. To find peace of heart there are the practical arrangements of our existence which
need taking care of first of all. Expensive food, fine houses, servants and possessions will not make
us happy in and of themselves. Happiness is a matter of the heart. Aristotle recommended
moderation with respect to our physical lot in life, else it distract us from the happiness we desire.
Once we have sufficient to meet our physical needs then the real search begins. Aristotle argued that
those who are happiest in themselves are the virtuous. Virtue is an aid to happiness. Our good lies in
our virtue.

The balance, Aristotle taught, was between different ways of finding the good. Good government
required balancing conflicting individual goods to find the common good.

You can see that we do not need 'evil' to know what good is. We know good naturally, we know ill by
default, Aristotle thought.

It was Christianity which moralised and polarised the concept of the good. Suddenly the good was
equated with God (and His earthly representatives) and evil with Godlessness or lack of faith. Classic
Christianity taught that evil is a privation (absence) of God's holy presence in our lives and in our
world. This presence alone is good. 'Evil' is not native to philosophy, it is a religious judgement. To
the extent to which, philosophically, the world is Christianised, we can hardly do without evil, as it
were. Yet evil is a thorn in the side of Christianism as well, since the question as to why a loving
all-knowing and all-powerful God allows evil to exist is unanswerable. Either God is not all-loving or
He is not all-knowing and all-powerful. Yet neither of these answers are acceptable to Christian
religion. To answer your question directly: good and evil are not a yin-yang thing. Good is native to
the human spirit, evil arises when virtue is wanting. Evil is good gone wrong, sometimes verywrong.

Matthew Del Nevo
www.sicetnon.com