ABSTRACT
The seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza held several views that his contemporaries found heretical, his beliefs about the nature of good and evil among them. According to Spinoza, nothing at all is either good or evil, from the perspective of God or the natural world. The chapter establishes the four claims, respectively: that neither good nor evil are intrinsically real; that good and evil are terms we should retain to describe what we know to be truly useful or a hindrance to our good; that a life guided by reason is our true good and, thus, anything that aids this is rightly called good and anything that hinders it evil for us; and, finally, that our true good is only achievable in a relatively harmonious, rational society, so that anything that prevents us from doing so is also rightly called evil.
