What is the nature of good and evil?
Regardless of what image the above subtitle may conjure up, don’t get to thinking that the question of relativism vs. objectivism will have any bearing on this argument. The privatio boni is a description of the relationship between good and evil, not the broader nature of morality as a whole. The argument works in metaphors. So, let’s begin by discussing light and shadow as a metaphor for the problem. In a way, shadows do not really exist. They are phenomenal, and not noumenal, which is to say they are not things in themselves. They are mere phenomena of something else, which in this case is light. A shadow, or more properly, darkness, is the absence of light; it is the non-existence of a thing. Shadows can be said to exist in the sense that “nothings” exist. To put it bluntly, a shadow is just another kind of nothing. After all, there is no such thing as a flash-dark, though there are flashlights. See, when I shine a light on my hand so as to cast a shadow on the wall, such that the
