The Beginning of Life as We Know It

Good versus evil - a battle in shades of gray

In my opinion, very few things in this world are truly evil. No action is black or white - everyone has some method to their madness. To me, an action is only wrong if it or its effects infringe on another being's natural rights. This is why I am oftentimes concerned when I see opression against gay marriage, abortion, and the like - those things don't inhibit others' freedom or happiness, so why are they wrong?

However, it must be noted that Mark Twain, a fairly well-known writer who is no longer suffering from personhood, once stated that, due to our natural sense of good and evil, humans are the only creatures in existence capable of even doing wrong in the first place. As far as we can prove, humans are the only species intelligent enough to experience consciousness - a constant awareness of oneself, one's actions, and time. Nothing a penguin does can be "good" or "bad" because it has no mental capacity to label actions as such. Our instinctive sense of good versus evil is as much a curse as it is a blessing; we have to power to choose evil, a trait wholly unique to humanity.