Good and Bad

Pointless. I am coming to believe and understand that it is pointless to attempt to define what is meant by good and bad. There are only vague concepts, and these things are usually so personal that it barely matters. What is good? Is there a difference between this question and: what is the good? What is bad? What is the bad?
What I see as the major problem here is that both of these terms are temporalized without anybody being immediately aware of it. Good and bad imply the past and the future. If something seems good in the present, it is either because there was some pre-existing condition that makes the whateveritis seem so, or, likewise, a view that the whateveritis will afford us some kind of benefit in the future. The same can be said for something that is bad. Either there was some pre-existing condition that makes some present situation seem bad, or, when observing something there is an overwhelming sense of dread, the future seems bleak. There is never a condition wherein NOW something erupts as either good or bad.
The next major issue with dealing with terms like good and bad is that they are also culturally different. Take the example of women in different areas of the world. A Muslim woman might be keeping herself covered because she is sincere in her belief, and, for her, it seems like a good thing to do. Those women in the modern age who would consider themselves as sexually liberated will have no problem going out and having intercourse with many anonymous partners while at the same time experimenting with mind expanding drugs, and that will be good. In Korea it is good to live at home until you get married. There are a number of thirty-somethings still living with their parents, perhaps sharing a bed with their younger siblings, and this is a good thing. Imagine getting an American man of thirty-something years old to A) live with his parents B) share a bed with a younger sibling. It might be a bit difficult. There are the Mallrat Brodies of the world out there that might not have trouble living at home, but as long as they have their space.
But lets take a step back for a second and see that with these two fairly simply understandings, we can say that good and bad are terms that involve terms that are intimately intertwined with the space-time continuum. What was good in the Incan culture (i.e. sacrificing children to gods, eating guinea pigs, and rejecting gold for the true worth of having a lot of followers) would be somewhat frowned upon in the modern age by most cultures.
(Let’s call this a bit of an aside and a cultural criticism: who’s to say that human sacrifices aren’t made to this very day in the metaphorical sense? Just about everybody everywhere has been brainwashed by culture or advertising or family or religion or economics or whatever, and this could be a sacrifice of the human character in its own way. What is purely human any more? What is not derived from custom and culture? What is not pushed on us by fat cat businessmen attempting to make a buck? What vaguely talented sixteen-year-old girl with a pert rack hasn’t been exploited when given the opportunity? Can we even be said to be human if we don’t think for ourselves?)
Heap on top of this the fact that the discussion of good and bad is a distinctly human distinction. There is no good and bad in nature. Think about a hunt: lionesses head out into the Serengeti. They hunt. They plot their attack on a group of gazelles. They wait. They’re patient. They know what needs to be done. They fail. They don’t bring down any food. Good for the gazelles, right? Now imagine that this situation repeats itself over and over. The lions start to die. The hunting pack shrinks. Food becomes even harder to acquire for the lions. Eventually, they all die. Good things are locked into time and space. In nature, if we can be allowed to use this term, it is actually “good” for the lion to catch the gazelle—perhaps not for the individual gazelle (which is probably the lamest, slowest one of the group anyway). Not only are good and bad terms of spacial and temporal significance, but they are also distinctly human, and beyond all of this they must be constantly qualified by the individual which is experiencing them—what’s bad for one is good for others.
Well… then what’s the point? What’s the point of ever delving into an investigation of something that will necessarily reveal something that can only point the time, place, and individual human that is investigating it?
Sometimes the answers to questions are in the questions themselves, and you should investigate good, the good, bad, and the bad because it will point out the time your in, it will tell you about the place you are in, and it will tell you about yourself. What greater good can there be? When you look honestly at what is good and bad, with the most careful attempt (although fruitless) at objectivity, you will reveal things about your time that you can’t understand in the present, but individuals in the future will be curious; you will reveal things about your place that might seem unimpressive or unimportant to you, but those who come after will be interested; you will reveal things to yourself about yourself, your place in society, your place in your existence, and your reality that you would never have been able to come to an understanding about otherwise.
I’m going to put it here in print that I am convinced that when people stop investigating these things that seem utterly fruitless (what is good? What is bad? What is truth? What is the nature of the human character?) we almost automatically stop advancing as creatures. Humans have been given the faculty to go about their day reasoning, even if only to themselves, and it seems to me that the most appropriate venue for these cogitations is in precisely the place you’d least likely expect it to be: the arena of impossible to answer. The most obvious reason for this is that questions with answers have a tendency to put the search to an end, whereas questions that cannot satisfactorily be answered keep the investigation in motion. Questions without answers pose more questions, and these questions keep the quest going. As a matter of fact, if there is a universal truth or a universal good, it might be in the form of the eternal quest to understand that which is impossible to understand. Religion claims to have answers to impossible questions, be wary; however, it simultaneously poses a question about which it is impossible to know with certainty, and it can therefore not be completely written off. The path of the good, the path of the just, is the path that travels toward the perpetual advancement of the self while causing as little harm (bad) as possible because causing no harm (bad) is impossible (read: failure is inevitable, and, in the words of Epictetus: Pursue the good ardently. But if your efforts fall short, accept the result and move on.)