Philip Hallie’s “from Cruelty to Goodness” and Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil’
The professor Philip Hallie’s ‘From Cruelty to Goodness’ radiates unwavering genuine philanthropy which by its nature oppose the cruelty and imbalance of power he talks about. The understanding of how cruelty works goes through the understanding what cruelty is and what morality has to say about that. Professor Hallie recognizes two types of ethics- negative and positive- that illuminate the path of good-making. The negative is the ban for actions associated with deliberate harm-making and pain-inflicting on other human beings. The most significant negative ethical rules are the Ten Commandments, says the professor. As reverse, the positive rules enjoin actions that preserve human’s welfare. The positive ethics commands activity; demands courage, and takes sacrifice. The positive ethical rules are for the brave. In close association with the ethical rules, whether negative or positive, comes the question what cruelty is? Had we looked at the institutionalized type of cruelty from the near past to nowadays as the slavery, the Holocaust, the political prisons and the prisoner-of-war camps we would see the cruelty is not mere bloodshed, cut-off limbs, beatings and other atrocities which all are included though. The cruelty goes beyond that- it affects the self-respect, self-esteem, all of that which makes person a person and destroys it. So the cruelty not only (often) kills the body, it first kills the spirit, the soul, the life inside. As professor Hallie uncovers the cruelty derives from something so frequently seen as the imbalanced power in the relationship. The relationship could be both personal (private) or institutionalized. The imbalance is being born when the power between the two parties is unequally distributed, often leaving one of the parties with negligible or no power. Respectively, the strong party gains not only the power to decide for herself but to rule over the destiny of the powerless side. The imbalance of power resides in families, business