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Good vs Evil: As the eagerness to change vs the refusal to change

Most people don’t consider babies to be evil. They also possess the innate need to change to grow and survive. Once they reach an age where perhaps they become stubborn (refusal to change) parents have to discipline when necessary to get the child to cooperate. As the child becomes older, they may adapt habits or behaviors that are viewed unfavorably by authorities. In this case there could be neutrality when examining morality using this lens. For example, the youth could be changing internally and decide to vandalize school property due to inner angst, etc. The authority however, views the child as one of many and vandalization as an unchanging aspect of youth that needs correcting. So in this case, both people are behaving in a good way. If the youth continues to vandalize after punishment then this becomes a refusal to change and thus the youth starts to become evil. If the authority continues to perhaps yell at the child but never escalates or does anything further to prevent it, then the authority becomes evil (just a nuisance.) 

In this manner, morality can then be viewed as simply discourse between people. Once someone is corrected for evil behavior, they must change or else confirm an evil demeanor. This assuming the person doing the correcting has authority. In other cases, the discourse must begin with establishing who the authority is for the given moral dilemma. Once the subject and authority are established then communication regarding the moral topic can be had. 

For example, two coders are debating how to modify some given piece of code. The coders first begin by arguing/discussing who has the most relevant knowledge to the area of code to be the one to work on it. Once this is determined and accepted by the “loser” they become the moral subject. Now the “winner” has authority to change the code as they see fit. However, the loser still has the ability (most likely) to examine what changes the authority made, and criticize the changes perhaps by submitting an improved bit of logic. Now, eagerness to change vs refusal to change becomes the motif. The authority in this case is receiving a moral correction from the subject in the form of improved code. In this case, if the authority refuses to change the code, they now become evil (at least in this circumstance.) If they choose to accept the changes, then they maintain their goodness. 

So now two directions of change willingness and its relation to morality is established. The first, authority to subject is the most natural so perhaps we can call this the 1st law of change morality. The second, subject to authority is unnatural in some sense (it goes against the order of things) however it’s an important component of morality as authority isn’t always right about everything. Let’s call this the 2nd law of change morality. 

This leaves the case where neither two people are able to establish authority over one another. For example, two students are studying together. The two students are debating a complex topic for which they both have personal experience but lack scientific evidence to favor one over the other. Anytime the first student argues for their perspective, the other student is able to provide some counter-evidence from their own experiences. Eventually the two decide their experiences are too disparate and thus they give up on their debate, leaving it up to an outside authority to decide. 

Let’s name this the 3rd law of change morality; the case where outside authority is needed.