The Greater Good

The movie Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring follows the life of a Buddhist apprentice in the critical stages of his life. The movie takes place on a floating monastery somewhere in Korea, and the stages of the apprentice’s life are portrayed in the five seasonal periods in the title. It begins in his childhood living with his master in the spring. The story advances by about 10-20 years at the transition between seasons and ends in the spring, the apprentice becoming the new master in his old age. There is very little dialogue and the movie does not explicitly discuss religion, however, one of the themes that I saw within the movie is one discussed by J.L. Mackie in Evil and Omnipotence. The main objective of this work is to address one of the key issues that arise in God’s identity, that God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent yet there is still evil in the world. I think that this film can be used to address some of what Mackie talks about.

One of the arguments used to solve the contradiction is that the evil that we see is needed for good and that true evil does not actually exist. This basically states that the hardships and ill-fortune that humans experience exist for the sake of bringing out the greater good within humanity. This is a view that was also put forth by the Stoics for their god, Providence. To them the greater good was found after one overcame hardship and that one who endures such things are of better character than those that did not. The movie seems to bring attention to this point of view in the way that the apprentice grows and matures. A trend in the film is that by the end of each season (excluding the last one) the apprentice has undergone some sort of hardship which advances him into his next stage of life. I certainly think that this follows the argument that Mackie discusses. One of his major criticisms of this argument is that there must be certain orders of good and evil for this to be valid, and that regardless of how many goods there are there has to be an evil of the same order as a result, spiraling into infinity.

I just want to focus on the first and second orders because I think those are the most important. Essentially first order good (happiness) and evil (misery) oppose each other. Second order good (benevolence) and evil (cruelty) affect the first order. One of the things that failed to be addressed is the target that these goods and evils are directed at. What I mean is that the first order seems to be feelings associated with the self. The second order seems concerned with what one does to others, but second order evil and good I would think achieve the same goal. For example, there are those who are benevolent to another because it makes them happier and in turn less miserable. There are also those who are cruel to others because it makes them happier and less miserable. There isn’t anyone who would actively cause their own misery and so it seems that both second order evil and good perpetuate first order good within the self. The difference is that second order good presumably makes others happy while second order evil makes others miserable. Now the question to be asked is which of these are the greater good? In the movie the master makes the apprentice undergo hardships which could be seen as cruel For example he tied a stone to the child apprentice to punish him for doing the same to animals, and made the apprentice in adulthood carve characters until morning to calm his angry heart. What the master did was cruel, but it was for the sake of making the apprentice a better person. This is the same idea that evil exists to produce the greater good, for the apprentice would not have been able to become the new master without the hardships he overcame.

I suppose this argument would be doomed to collapse on itself because if loosely interpreted then it suggests that all actions and events are ultimately good in the end. Suicide would invalidate the argument because I do not believe anything good comes from it (unless one argues that it provides a hardship for others to overcome). Another possible issue is that maybe the greatest goods also produce the greatest evils, which is the general critique that Mackie gives. I do not think the argument that evil can produce a greater good is entirely false but I do believe there should be stricter conditions for good and evil if using this argument.