Come to the Dark Side, Luke

Harlan Coben, an American author, describes the line between  good and evil with a metaphor. "I like to see the difference between good and evil as kind of like the foul line at a baseball game," he said. "It's very thin... and if you cross it, it really starts to blur where fair becomes foul and foul becomes fair."

Almost nothing is black and white. Somewhere, no matter how small, there is grey area. Some people do bad things for the right reasons, and some people do good things for the wrong reasons.

There are people throughout history that we consider to be evil. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Ruhollah Khomeini may come to mind. These people, however, did not consider themselves evil. They felt that they were doing the right thing; the good thing. This begs the question: how do we determine what is right and what is wrong?

There are many moral codes that one could choose. The law, religious ideas, community ideals, or even one's own personal moral code could be the determining factor. Some may assume that the law is the ultimate good; but what if it isn't? What if the law is wrong, and people who break it are right?

There are an infinite number of ways to define good and evil, and all of them are subjective. So if there are no two absolute sides, how could good and evil in the real world even be definite? If that line changes from one person to the next, then there is no one line. There is grey area.

NOTE: All of this isn't to say that there should be no law or enforced definition of right and wrong, because there should be for the safety of all people. However, there is no way to prove that law is actually right or not.