Darkness

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Believe in a thing called 'love' (see Bands)

Alternatively.
Consider these ways of looking at life:

To the best of your ability, harm no-one. Everyone is responsible for everyone else. If we all do things for each other, no-one will be in need. What goes around, comes around.

If you don't do things for yourself, who will? Put yourself first. Realise that everyone else is putting themselves first, and you're not omnipotent, so you'll need to deal with other people; realise that tit-for-tat works, as do favours. By all means do things to please others if their reaction pleases you; but you are at the centre.

How well, if at all, would these concepts serve to generalise people's thoughts on what good and Evil mean?

: Actually I think these would be extremely misleading generalisations. (Ignoring the first) The main contrast that springs to my mind when reading these is passive vs active rather than good against evil. IMHO, putting yourself first in a sane way (as described) is not a bad way to live. In fact, you are left with greyscale instead of black or white since, depending on how much emphasis you put onto tit-for-tat, you can actually make the two agree. --Kazuhiko

PeterTaylor clicked on the link in RecentChanges expecting this to be a page about a pop group.

Kazuhiko is wondering how this page is at all related to its title.

: SergeiLukjanenko reference - he decided he wanted to critique fantasy based on conflict between good and evil, so wrote a novel where he called the two sides light and darkness, defined them as above and explored the implications :) I decided I was curious to see what people made of the concepts in relative isolation. - MoonShadow

I think the main problem with this is that under each bullet point are lumped a bunch of concepts which don't necessarily imply each other (for instance, 'Everyone is responsible for everyone else' doesn't follow from 'To the best of your ability, harm no-one', nor vice versa; it's easy to adopt positions where you hold one of thse but not the other). So if it's meant to provide a clear idea of 'good' and a clear idea of 'evil' and a clear distinction between the two, it utterly fails, because it's far too vague.

Looking at what it's trying to say, it seems to be attempting to communicate the dichotomy 'selfishness/selflessness' as 'good/evil', so it's a kind of pared-down virtue theory with only one virtue, selflessness (or, if you want to get Christian, 'charity'). As such it's propably in accord with most people's intuitive reactions, as long as it's taken in isolation. However in the real world it quickly becomes clear that something so simplistic is too vague as to be of much use: when we come to apply the principle of unselfishness to difficult moral questions like, say, environmentalism, abortion, it reveals its limitations, often either seeming to be totally inapplicable or to counsel in both directions (for instance, is it more selfless of me to kill a chronically ill person who wants to die or to refuse to kill them?).

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