What is goodness? Can it really exist?

[Xorkoth]

But a lot of animals kill each other, of the same species I mean... it doesn't make them "bad" or evil however, it's just how they are. As humans, we evolved to work together to become stronger than we are individually, because of our intelligence and comparatively puny bodies. Over time that became something much more complex, with love evolving out of it and our sense of morality evolving, I believe, from love. It could be said that love is an evolutionary biochemical product used to help ensure our survival. But that doesn't mean it's not real and profound.

I go back and forth over whether love is a universal thing across all species/life forms, but it doesn't matter for practical purposes because we are humans and love is important to us.

 

[herbavore]

I think goodness is compassion. Compassion is kindness and empathy and connection. Your example of how the actions that stem from our feelings of compassion sometimes lead us into murky territory made me LOL because I have been waging my own version of war and peace with spiders and their prey since childhood. To make it even murkier I would find myself more prone to rescuing a honeybee than a fly. In other words my "compassion" not only did not extend to the hungry spider but only to the victim if the victim were deemed useful or good in my very human (limited and judgmental) evaluation of it.

I do believe though, that whenever we feel compassion we feed life (the eternal life force?), we feed the part of us that is struggling to evolve past the domination/subjugation paradigm that we have proven so capable of feeding thus far.

 

[AlphaMethylPhenyl]

There is no such thing as objective morality.

There is no universal right or wrong.

As a human being, though, you have a subjective view of what is right and what is wrong.. and as a species, there is a consensus as to what is right and wrong.

Believe me, there might be. Check out transcendentalism.