Chapter 2

The Idea Of Being As The Supreme Rule
For Judging About Good In General.

43. All that has been said in the previous article also applies to the notion of evil, but it will help understanding if I add another observation.
We have seen that in all the possible constitutives of any being there is an order by which these constitutives are determined and distinguished from all others. There is a class of qualities and conditions that harmonise with every nature, and a class foreign or opposed to the nature. These possible constitutives or entities are necessary in different ways to the being and are considered its good according to its needs. Now, if both good and evil imply a relationship of harmony or disharmony with the principle of the being they effect, that is, with its essence, then to exist, the good and evil presuppose the subject of which they are predicated. I say both good and evil because, while we cannot doubt that good requires being, indeed is being itself, we could think that evil, as a negation or absence, does not presuppose being.

44. We have to remember that, although everything is good in so far as it is and has being, we cannot say that a total negation of being is an evil. A total negation leaves only nothingness. Nothingness is nothing, which is neither evil nor good. I have said that evil involves a relationship with a being, with the subject possessing it. Evil is a negation, not of the whole being, but of some part which is absent and needed by the being. We thus recognise that the absence is repugnant to the principle of the being. A human body, for example, missing an arm or leg, would suffer an evil because it lacked an integral part required by the intrinsic order of the essence of a human being. The absence indicates to our intelligence an imperfection in that nature, something contrary to its intrinsic, immutable order. For this reason the word 'privation' rather than 'negation' was used to mean evil. 'Negation' is too general and vague, expressing the removal not only of the parts but of the whole. 'Privation' expresses the removal of the parts but not of the whole being; it includes the idea of a being deprived of something, but not absolutely annihilated.