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 is as good or bad as our opinion makes it.
When air conditioning, escalators, and advertising appeared, shopping expanded its scale, but also limited its spontaneity. And it became much more predictable, almost scientific. What had once been the most surprising became the most manipulated.
Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.
No matter what a woman's appearance may be, it will be used to undermine what she is saying and taken to individualize - as her personal problem - observations she makes about the beauty myth in society.
Put three grains of sand inside a vast cathedral, and the cathedral will be more closely packed with sand than space is with stars.
It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed...I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives, such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.
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