Unde bonum? Unde malum? Dobro jako utylizacja zła

Abstrakt

Unde bonum? Unde malum? Good as a disposal of evil

The twentieth century has been hailed an epiphany of evil, which provoked a return to the question of unde malum and severity of philosophical reflection on evil. Unfortunately, it is not accompanied by an equally insistent reflection on a symmetrical problem: unde bonum? — where is the good from.
The purpose of this article is related to both these issues in one nodal problem and is an attempt to argue the thesis that both evil and good done by a man have the same “substance” which are human acts and their consequences. As there is no “dirty substance of evil”, distinct from ‟pure substance of righteousness enlarging good in the world can take place only as the utilization of evil, in other words, as repairing the damage and harm done knowingly or even unknowingly. In particular, the “banal evil” discovered by Hannah Arendt demands compensation in the form of deliberately caused “radical good” that is based not only on the impulse of the heart, but on the firm will to transform the fatal consequences of own and others’ destructive actions to the common good.