Good and Bad

OK, I'm going to start tackling this one. I didn't want to start this as I felt a lot of it had been said in the initial talk we were given about it. Unlike creativity, good and bad can't really be researched very easily, so this is going to have to mostly be my own thoughts. I'm ususally pretty wary of writing down purely my own thoughts with no backup when it comes to factual matters, a mindset impressed on me by taking history A level I fear.

The first thing I think I should tackle is what good and bad even mean. I looked both up and they each have about 30 different uses each, amusingly the first definition for bad was 'not good in any manner or degree'- very helpful. But it basically breaks down to good always meaning positive and bad always meaning negative.
These words express the way humans feel the need to simplify the world around them. Right and wrong. Heaven and Hell. But it is important to keep in mind that these are entirely false constructs. All ideas of good and bad are learnt. Growing up, we rely on others to teach us what is right and what is wrong, and we absorb this information instinctively because it makes evolutionary sense to learn from the mistakes of those who have gone before us.

When you think about it, we take a lot of what we are told for granted. We simply don't have the time to test everything we are told for ourselves, so we weigh it up with what we know from our own personal experiences, and make a judgement on how likely it is to be correct. As Newton put it "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Do you know from your own personal experience that the Earth revolves around the Sun? I highly doubt it. But you have heard from enough reputable sources that it does, and so far no one has come to you with any evidence saying otherwise.

So, back to good and bad. We are learning all the time, and our collective idea of what is good and what is bad in terms of anything must be changing all the time as human knowledge and experimentation changes. The impressionists were widely slated when they first exhibited their work - a clear sign that the wider world thought of them as "bad". But in the present day their work is highly respected and seen as aesthetically pleasing, signs of it being thought of as "good". So good and bad are transient concepts, and we can only really assess anything as being good or bad in relation to today's current values of them.