Goodbye to Good and Evil

For centuries, we’ve fought over what is right and what is wrong. What if the real problem is that both concepts are a harmful illusion we’d be better off without?

We live in a state of permanent moral war. From our politics to our dinner tables, we are locked in intractable disputes about justice, rights, and the nature of the good life. We feel the truth of our own moral convictions with a burning certainty, yet we are utterly unable to persuade those who disagree. This endless, exhausting conflict raises a troubling question: what if the problem isn’t that we can’t agree on the answers, but that we are asking the wrong questions altogether? What if the entire framework of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘good’ and ‘evil’, is a collective illusion – a fiction we’ve inherited from our evolutionary past that now stands in the way of human progress?

This is the audacious proposal of a philosophical position known as moral abolitionism. It argues not that our moral beliefs are sometimes mistaken, but that the very concept of objective morality is an error. More radically, it argues that this error isn’t a harmless crutch or a ‘noble lie’ that helps society function. It is a pernicious fiction, one that fuels our most destructive impulses and prevents us from solving our most pressing problems. To build a better world, the abolitionist argues, we must first say goodbye to good and evil.

This idea might sound like a recipe for nihilism and chaos. But the case for abolitionism is grounded in a clear-eyed, scientific understanding of where our moral intuitions come from. For most of human history, morality has felt like a feature of the universe itself. When we say ‘torturing children is wrong’, it doesn’t feel like a mere opinion; it feels like we are stating a fact as solid as gravity. Philosophers call this the objectivist pull of morality. It seems to come from outside of us, a law written into the fabric of reality.

But modern science offers a more parsimonious explanation. Our intense moral feelings are a product of evolution. Our ancestors were social primates, and survival depended on cooperation. Individuals who felt a deep, inner compulsion to share food, care for kin, punish cheaters, and follow group norms were more likely to survive and reproduce. Natural selection hardwired our brains with these pro-social instincts. The trick was to make them stick. What better way to ensure we follow these instincts than to have them feel like unbreakable, cosmic laws? The feeling that morality is objective is an evolutionary illusion designed to make us better team players.

Once you accept this, the grand edifice of morality begins to look like a phantom. We believe in right and wrong for the same reason we crave sugar: it was adaptive for our ancestors on the savannah. But like our craving for sugar in a world of supermarkets, our ancient moral hardware may now be dangerously maladaptive.

So, if morality is a fiction, what should we do? One path, known as moral fictionalism, is a form of cautious conservatism. It advises that we treat morality as a ‘noble lie’. Yes, it’s an illusion, the fictionalist says, but it’s a vital one. Without the fear of objective damnation or the promise of cosmic justice, society would crumble into selfish chaos. This view is rooted in a deep pessimism about human nature, suggesting we need this fiction as a psychological guardrail to keep our worst instincts in check.

But there is another, more optimistic path. Moral abolitionism argues that the fiction of morality is not a guardrail but a cage. It is a pernicious fiction precisely because of what it does to us. To see the harm, consider morality’s conceptual twin: the folk idea of ‘free will’.

For centuries, our approach to criminal justice has been built on the idea that people are the absolute, free authors of their actions. This belief licenses a retributive response: if someone chooses evil, they deserve to suffer. This focus on blame and desert prevents us from looking at the deeper causes of crime – poverty, trauma, mental illness, poor education. A more scientific, ‘public health’ approach dispenses with blame. It treats crime not as a spiritual failing but as a systemic problem. It asks: what are the causal determinants of this behaviour, and how can we engineer a system that produces better outcomes? This approach is not only more humane but vastly more effective.

Morality does to all of social life what the idea of free will does to criminal justice. It is a system for licensing blame. By framing complex social problems as a battle between ‘good people’ and ‘evil people’, it short-circuits our ability to think systemically. Instead of analysing the economic and social drivers of inequality, we condemn the ‘greedy’. Instead of designing better systems to combat climate change, we rage against the ‘selfish’. Morality gives us the satisfying rush of condemnation but distracts us from the difficult, practical work of actually solving problems. It turns politics into a holy war and prevents the kind of rational, compassionate engineering that we need to flourish.

Abolishing morality does not mean abolishing values. We can still value compassion, well-being, and cooperation. But we would ground these values not in a mysterious objective truth, but in a transparent, shared commitment to human flourishing. The goal is to shift from a moral framework to a public health and engineering framework.

What would this look like in practice? Imagine a world where political debates were no longer about which side was more virtuous, but about which policies were most effective at achieving shared goals. Consider drug addiction. The moral framework treats it as a ‘moral failing’, leading to a punitive ‘War on Drugs’ that has created vastly more suffering than it has prevented. A public health framework treats addiction as a medical condition with social and psychological causes. It replaces condemnation with a focus on treatment, harm reduction, and addressing the root causes of despair.

This is the constructive vision of moral abolitionism. It is not nihilism, but a form of Enlightenment optimism. It wagers that the flaws we see in human behaviour are not signs of an immutable, sinful nature, but symptoms of ignorance and poorly designed systems. It believes that we do not need the threat of a cosmic policeman to be good to one another.

The transition would not be easy. It requires us to trade the satisfying certainty of moral righteousness for the more difficult work of causal analysis and systemic design. It asks us to stop blaming individuals and start taking responsibility for the worlds we build together. But the prize is immense. By moving beyond good and evil, we can finally begin the real work of building a more humane and intelligent world. In rejecting the fiction of morality, we do not descend into chaos; we ascend into a world where responsibility, compassion, and reason are consciously chosen rather than imposed by illusion.