Man the maker is a damned liar. He is a fabricator in both senses of the term. A little god and a little devil. Neither the Father of all nor the Father of lies, he is a chip off the old blocks. <\/span><\/p>\n This observation has a Manichean flavor. But if there are not two co-eternal and co-equal principles butting heads, then we get the problem of how the Good Itself can sire evil which is rather lamely viewed as a mere privatio boni<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n That it is a dubious doctrine I will argue later, but for now I will simply note that the evil-as-privation doctrine does seem to accommodate an intuition that many of us have, namely, that good and evil, though opposed, are not mutually independent. <\/span><\/p>\n Thus in one clear sense good and evil are polar opposites: what is good is not evil and what is evil is not good. And yet one hesitates to say that they are on an ontological par, that they are equally real. They are not opposed as two positivities. The evil of ignorance, for example, is not something positive in its own right: the evil of ignorance consists in its being an absence of something good, knowledge. Good is an ontological prius; evil has a merely derivative status as an absence of good.<\/span><\/p>\n Or so it seems. Until we think harder. More later. Old Sol is threatening to rise once again. The heat is back. The mountain bike beckons. The sun also rises, and so do I from the bench of blog to greet the day.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Man the maker is a damned liar. He is a fabricator in both senses of the term. A little god and a little devil. Neither the Father of all nor the Father of lies, he is a chip off the old blocks. This observation has a Manichean flavor. But if there are not two co-eternal … Continue reading “ Homo Faber, Homo Mendax<\/i>“<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,39,125],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-good-and-evil","category-human-predicament","category-truthfulness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}