Book Description

Good and evil are as old as ethics or morality itself. For without an understanding of religious or philosophical ethics, the moral existence of good and evil would be impossible to comprehend; the term good, for example, would be exclusively a matter of subjective personal likes and dislikes in other words, a mere matter of taste, differing from individual to individual with no real obligation to the public good or safety. As it currently stands in philosophy, for instance, the term good may be understood as engaging in righteous conduct; the term good may also be understood as an object that corresponds and fulfills natural needs inherent in human nature. These natural needs, for example, which are deeply, rooted in human nature, manifest themselves in our human desire for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, among other things. In these two senses, the term good is an objective universal value, based on the reality of man (by man I mean human beings everywhere, of course). From natural needs, we derive the doctrine of human rights. It logically follows that the things we have a natural human need for, we as human beings also have a natural right to. This idea is not only used in the real world that you and I live in; it is also used in the storyteller's world of fiction or imaginary literature. Anything working to defeat or frustrate the good in the real world or in the storyteller's world is judged evil. This is of the utmost importance to those who believe in right and wrong. For right and wrong always follow good and evil. Society can never know what right or wrong is in the domain of social human affairs, without first knowing what is good and what is evil, and what makes it so. In Trapped Between the Extremes of Good and Evil, we enter a fictional world and explore the phenomenon of good and evil through the actions of an international serial killer, angels and demons, one twin brother's hatred of the other, and a San Francisco detective caught in the middle of it all.