To claim that theft or adultery or lying are "evil" simply reflects our degraded idea of good-—that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity.
Interpretation
The quote challenges traditional views on morality, suggesting that labeling actions as 'evil' reflects a flawed understanding of goodness.
Simone Weil's quote critiques the conventional moral judgments that categorize theft, adultery, and lying as inherently evil. She argues that this perspective indicates a shallow understanding of what it means to be 'good,' as it overly emphasizes societal constructs like property rights and outward respectability, rather than the deeper essence of morality that concerns human dignity and authenticity.
In practice
In a debate about ethics, this quote can illustrate the pitfalls of conventional moral reasoning.
The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.
The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility opening before him and does not try to grasp it, even at the risk of destroying himself and his country, is either
As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles.
Evil is license, and that is why it is monotonous: everything has to be drawn from ourselves. One is condemned to false infinity. That is hell itself.
I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.
How many people have been thus led, through lack of self-confidence, to stifle their most justified doubts?
Everything that touches YOUR life, must be an instrument of YOUR liberation or tossed into the trash cans of HISTORY
I’m me, and at the same time not me. That’s what it felt like. A very still, quiet feeling.
Though all afflictions are evils in themselves, yet they are good for us, because they discover to us our disease and tend to our cure.
Power is domination, control, and therefore a very selective form of truth which is a lie.
But you see, our society is still trapped in this binary, black/white logic and that has had some very positive implications for our generation. It's had some very negative ones as well and one of the negative ones is that it creates enormous identity problems for people who have one black ancestor and all white ancestors for example.
The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest-for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both-must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story.
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