Why Does Evil Exist? Because Right and Wrong Are a Verdict, Not a Wall

On Tuesday, a hurricane flattens a town.

On Thursday night, a man quietly empties the town's relief fund, the stock set aside to pay for repairs. Nobody notices for a week.

Both leave families hurting. Only one of them is evil.

Why that one? It isn't how much it hurts. A family under a flattened house and a family with an empty fund both hurt, and the hurt doesn't say where it came from.

There's a harder question under it. Reality has one moral code, and it runs on the same record as the rest of physics. So why didn't the code stop him?

The short answer

Evil is doing what the one moral code forbids. It exists because the code is a verdict on acts, not a wall around them. A wall would be a law that takes the wrong act off the menu of things anyone can do. The code isn't one.

The code sorts every possible act into permitted or forbidden, and it moves no one's hands. No law fixes which act comes next, and the forbidden act sits on the menu beside the permitted one. When someone does it, the record doesn't stop it and doesn't undo it. The record writes the act down under its author's name, never erases it, and charges its excess cost at every later moment, undiminished.

Pain that nobody wrote, from a hurricane or a virus, is suffering, not evil. Evil needs an act and the one who wrote it.

Here's the whole answer in six steps. The rest of this post takes them one at a time and shows how we know each one.

1. Evil is doing what the code forbids. The code is four clauses and one judgment, built on a permanent record. It sorts every possible act into permitted or forbidden, never both.
2. Evil needs an author. A bond costs the same after a storm and after a theft. The record's other line, who wrote it, tells them apart.
3. The code is a verdict, not a wall. A forbidden act is as possible as a permitted one, and doing nothing is always possible.
4. Nothing picks the right act. No law fixes which act comes next, and the cost doesn't pick it either.
5. The taking reaches the families through the record's own motion. Harm is changing someone's bond without their write, which leaves their own book false, and the clauses forbid it. The man changed no family's bond. He took away what keeps their bonds repaired, and the record's own motion carried the cost to them.
6. The record keeps the act and charges it. Nothing is erased. The excess cost is charged at every later checkpoint, undiminished, and if nothing brings the bond back, the charge has no top.

Why this matters: it says what evil is and what it isn't. It isn't a substance or a force. It isn't a measure of pain, because a storm and a theft can strain a bond by the same amount. It isn't something the world prevents, and it isn't something the world pays back: the record neither blocks the act nor hands its author a matching loss. Evil is an act, with an author and a cost, kept for good. Repair and forgiveness are new lines after it, and they never edit it.

Where the argument starts

Three facts do the work. The first two come with their reasons, and the third is the structure the code is built on.

Nothing that happens is ever erased. Reality keeps a permanent record of every event. Every event leaves a complete trace, called an entry, and the past still exists. Known physics already says this for the part it covers: its basic laws never destroy information. In quantum mechanics that's unitarity. The present fixes the past exactly, and running the laws backward recovers every earlier state. That's why physicists treat the black hole information problem as a real problem. Hawking's 1976 calculation said a black hole destroys the information that falls into it, which clashed with unitarity. Most physicists now expect the information to come back out in the radiation, and the open question is how.¹ Our work gives the record a reason of its own: it only grows. Each new entry is added with every earlier entry kept, and writing a new entry never alters an earlier one.² The other posts in this series call the record the Ledger. I'll just say the record. What You Are builds it from the ground up.

A relationship is a comparison, and a comparison has a cost. The smallest thing that can happen is one thing told apart from another, a single yes or no. You're doing it right now: reading this tells one letter from another. Telling two things apart takes information about both of them, so the unit of the record is a comparison of two amounts. I'll call a comparison between two people a bond. Its number is one amount divided by the other. When the amounts match, the number is 1, and the bond is level. Each person also has a bond with themselves, a number for how heavy their own load is, and 1 is level there too.

Every number except 1 has a cost, and the cost has one exact formula. For a bond at x:

J(x) = (x + 1/x) / 2 − 1

Add the number to its flip (1 divided by it), halve the sum, and subtract 1. A bond at 4 costs 9/8: 4 plus 1/4 is 17/4, half of that is 17/8, and 17/8 minus 1 is 9/8. A bond at 2 costs 1/4. Level costs 0, and nothing costs less.

The formula isn't a choice. A cost has to be zero when the two amounts match, grow as they differ, and come out the same whichever amount is put first, so a bond at 2 and a bond at 1/2 cost the same. Add a cost with no sudden jumps, the rule for how the costs of combined comparisons add, and one calibration (how sharply the cost rises near level), and exactly one formula is left.³

Each bond is kept twice, once at each end, on that end's own books. This is the structure our paper The Moral Code starts from.⁴ Each of the two people at a bond's ends keeps their own book of it, and each writes only in their own book. Nobody writes in another's books. A book is true when it gives the bond's actual number. That each end's book holds one exact state of the bond isn't derived yet, and the third clause below rests on it.

What a person carries is the cost of the bonds they are an end of, each counted in full. A bond at 4 costs 9/8, and both of its ends carry 9/8. The record's own total counts the bond once.

Step 1: Evil is doing what the code forbids

The code is four clauses and one judgment. It sorts every possible act into permitted or forbidden, and evil is doing a forbidden act.

An act changes bonds, and the people who do it write the change in their own books. An act is admissible, meaning the structure of the record allows it, exactly when:

1. it acts only on bonds that exist now;
2. every book of every bond is true after it;
3. it moves a bond only when both of its ends write on it;
4. it ends a bond only when one of that bond's own ends ends it.

Of the admissible acts, the code permits exactly those that leave the least total cost over the whole future, counting every checkpoint. (A checkpoint is a moment when the record's cost is counted. The code reads the whole future, not one moment.) Every other act is forbidden: it breaks a clause, or some admissible act leaves less cost. Every act is one or the other, never both.⁴ A forbidden act is a wrong act, and evil is doing one.

The third clause is consent. In the code, consent is the record of who wrote: an act may move a bond only when both of its ends write on it. That's a hard condition, not a price. So the code is least cost over consensual acts: consent comes first, and cost compares only the acts that pass it. The other three clauses are hard conditions of the same kind.

Right and Wrong Aren't Opinions builds this code on a promise to bring a neighbour's groceries. I won't repeat that here. I only need the code itself.

How we know. The clauses aren't chosen. They're what a record kept twice admits. Both ends have to write because an end that doesn't write keeps its old book of the bond, and that book stays true only if the bond doesn't move. An ending changes no number, so it makes no book false, and only a bond's own ends hold its books.

The least-cost form isn't a taste either. Take a verdict made of comparisons, each reading its two costs and nothing else. Four requirements force it to this form: something is permitted on every finite menu that includes doing nothing; reading a case together with a separate case on other bonds changes no verdict (this is called framing); feeding someone who needs it beats doing nothing; and a strict comparison survives every small enough change of its two costs (openness). Framing and openness are still being derived, and the open list at the end says what's left.⁴

And it's one code. A different moral answer to the same case needs a different physical fact, or a verdict of a different form.

The permitted act has a name: love's act, the admissible act of least cost. For a strained pair it's meeting in the middle, and Meet in the Middle works it out. I'll call the cost an act leaves above what love's act would have left its excess.

Next, and why: the opening says a hurricane isn't evil, though it hurts families as much as the thief does. What separates them?

Step 2: Evil needs an author

Pain that nobody wrote is suffering. Evil is an act, and an act has an author.

Take two families whose own loads both read 4. One family's load got there in the hurricane. The other's got there because the fund was emptied, and Step 5 shows how. (The loads are my drawing. The bond is real, and it's what the record keeps for a family's own situation. What its two amounts count for a real family isn't derived yet.)

Both loads cost 9/8, and each family carries 9/8. A bond's cost reads one thing: how far the bond sits from level. It doesn't read where the strain came from. Why Do We Suffer? works out why a strain hurts and how hard, and why a strain doesn't point at a culprit. Strain from luck and strain from a wrong read the same on the cost. The cost is an exact accountant and a poor detective.

What tells the two families apart is another line of the record: who wrote it. Each person writes only in their own books, and the authors of an act are exactly the people whose own books it changes. (A Favor Isn't a Yes works out who wrote what, and shows two acts by different authors that leave every number the same.) The hurricane is nobody's act, so its line reads "nobody". The taking is the man's act. He wrote it, so its line reads "the man".

A virus is the same as the hurricane: strain with no author. It's real, and it isn't evil. None of this makes a storm's victims hurt less. It says what kind of thing the storm is.

How we know. A bond's cost depends on its number and nothing else, so two bonds at 4 cost the same however they got there. And the authors of an act are exactly the people whose own records it changes. That's a definition, and it's the one the code's verdicts read.⁴

Next, and why: if evil is an act with an author, what keeps the act from being done? Step 3 asks what the code does to a forbidden act.

Step 3: The code is a verdict, not a wall

The code sorts acts. It doesn't block them. A forbidden act is as possible as a permitted one, and doing nothing is always possible.

Call an act possible when the people involved have the means to do it: the energy, the supplies, the strength. The possible acts make up the menu. The code's verdict applies to the menu. Each act on it is permitted or forbidden, so a forbidden act is a possible act that isn't permitted. If it weren't possible, there would be nothing to forbid.

Doing nothing strains no bond and ends none. It leaves the world exactly as it was, so it's admissible, and it's possible on every world. That's why something is always permitted, and why the code has no dilemma.

The record alone excludes nothing. Doing nothing, even where another act would lower the cost, stays possible forever, while the record's charge on it grows without bound. The forbidden act sits on the menu beside the permitted one.

Now the question in the title. Suppose the code were a wall: a law that took the wrong act off the menu. Then no wrong act would be possible, and the code would have nothing to forbid. A law about acts needs acts that can go either way. A wall can't be a moral law. A verdict can.

Here is the same fork on a small case. In the right-and-wrong post, bringing a neighbour her groceries is permitted, and sleeping in is possible and isn't.

Why not drop the consent clause and put a high enough price on one-sided acts instead? Because consent comes before cost. An act may move a bond only when both of its ends write on it. That's a hard condition, not a price. Suppose it were a price: a fixed charge on every act that leaves someone's book false, with the code then taking the cheapest act overall. Some one-sided act would still win, because the relief it can buy has no top. A bond can be strained as far as you like, and the more strained it is, the more cost there is to relieve. No finite charge on a false record makes a one-sided act lose. So the code doesn't weigh such an act against the others. The clauses fix which acts are admissible, and only then does cost compare them. The code is least cost over consensual acts.⁴

How we know. The judgment is defined on the menu, and two things follow at once: something is permitted on every world, and no act is both permitted and forbidden. The menu is the set of acts whose energy the people's holdings cover. The book The Moral Code of Reality says the rest in its own words: "Necessity also leaves room for wrongdoing," and "A law governing conduct need not make contrary conduct impossible."⁵

Next, and why: if nothing blocks the wrong act, does something steer everyone toward the right one? Step 4 checks.

Step 4: Nothing picks the right act

No law fixes which act comes next, and the cost doesn't pick it either. So nothing makes anyone do the permitted act.

There are two reasons.

The laws of the record say what any next entry has to satisfy. They don't say which one comes next. Take two next entries: one compares a pair of things at ratio 2, and another compares a different pair at ratio 2. Both are allowed, and both cost 1/4. From every balanced set of books (books in which every entry is matched by its mirror), the laws allow at least two different next entries at exactly the same price, and nothing in them breaks the tie. Is Your Next Move Already Written? works it through, including why no disturbance tips the tie.

The cost doesn't pick it either. If the cost picked each step, nothing would ever be written: writing nothing costs 0, and every entry costs more. Entries get written anyway. And everyone already lives under the same cost. People do what the code forbids all the same.

What does settle which lawful act gets written is the one step that post says isn't derived yet. What's derived is that the pick isn't a cheapest-step rule, and it isn't a law that fixes the act in advance.

Next, and why: the man changed no family's bond, and the families hurt anyway. How does his act reach people who never wrote a line?

Step 5: The taking reaches the families through the record's own motion

The man changed no family's bond. He took away what pays to keep their bonds repaired, and the record's own motion carried the cost to them.

First, what harm is. Each person writes only in their own books, so a book never holds an entry its owner didn't write. A book is false when what it says about a bond isn't what the bond is. So your book goes false when the bond changes and you didn't write the change. That's what harm is, made physical. Harm is a false entry in someone else's own record: an act makes one by changing a bond without the other end writing it. Call that act a push. A push is wrong on any books, true or false: it breaks the third clause, because an act may move a bond only when both of its ends write on it. A better outcome never makes a one-sided act allowed.⁴

The man did nothing of that kind. Taking the fund changed no family's bond. So how does he hurt a family that wrote nothing?

Acts aren't the only thing that moves a bond. The record's own motion moves bonds with no one writing, and the code works one case out. Take a bond that, left alone, doubles its number at every checkpoint, and whose repair is paid from a reserve while the reserve lasts.⁶ I'll say a checkpoint comes once a month. I draw the town's relief fund as that reserve, and each family's own load as that bond. That's the code's care law, used as a case. Whether the record's own motion is that law isn't derived yet, and neither is where a shared bond's reserve lives, held as each end's own share or as an entry both ends write.

Here's one family's load, level at 1, in two histories. In one, the fund is left alone and pays for the repair every month. In the other, the man takes it.

Check the last two costs. For 8: 8 plus 1/8 is 65/8, half of that is 65/16, and 65/16 minus 1 is 49/16. For 16: 16 plus 1/16 is 257/16, half of that is 257/32, and 257/32 minus 1 is 225/32. The cost first jumps by 4.5 times, from 1/4 to 9/8, and then its growth settles toward doubling too.

The families wrote nothing, not one line in any of their books. What changed their bonds is the record's own motion, and the only thing that differs between the two rows is one act: the taking. The man never touched their bonds. He took away what held them up, and the record's own motion carried the cost to them.

Is the taking forbidden? Yes, by the judgment. The taking changes no family's bond at the step it's done. It moves a reserve, and the four clauses, as the code states them now, don't look at reserves. So the taking passes them, though it needs no write from the families. That gap is on the open list below. The second half of the judgment catches it: an act is also forbidden when some admissible act leaves less cost. Leaving the fund alone is admissible, and under the care law it leaves less cost at every checkpoint after the taking, as the table shows. An admissible act that leaves less cost undercuts the taking, so the taking is forbidden. Taking a reserve with no write sends cost through the motion onto people who wrote nothing.

How we know. On the care-law case, the paper proves two things. An admissible act that leaves the reserves alone moves no bond of someone who wrote nothing, at any checkpoint. And taking a reserve with no write sends cost through the motion. The same happens inside a shared bond: where its reserve is held as its two ends' own shares, one end's withdrawal of its share leaves the bond unrepaired a checkpoint later, with the other end writing nothing.⁶

Next, and why: the record doesn't stop him. What does it do with the act?

Step 6: The record keeps the act and charges it

Nothing recorded is erased. The record keeps the act under its author's name and charges its excess cost at every later checkpoint, undiminished. If nothing brings the bond back, the charge has no top.

Kept. The taking is a line in the man's book, under his name. Nothing recorded is erased, so the line is still there at every later checkpoint, and so is everything it did. A later act can repair a bond or release a debt, but each is a new line after the taking, and none edits it. Sorry Doesn't Rewind the Tape works through both. A bond that's cut isn't cleared either. It stays on the record with all its cost, and ending a strained bond removes the only route to repairing it by writing. Whether the record's own motion ever moves an ended bond is still being derived.

Charged. By "charges" I mean that the record counts a cost again in the total for every later stretch of history. Take two histories that agree everywhere except at one checkpoint, where one costs more. In the first, a bond sits at 2 at checkpoint 3, costing 1/4, and is level before and after. In the second, it never leaves level. Through checkpoint 3, the totals are 1/4 and 0. Through checkpoint 10: 1/4 and 0. Through checkpoint 100: still 1/4 and 0. Later checkpoints don't discount the excess, repair doesn't remove it, and time doesn't thin it out. The excess is charged at every later checkpoint, undiminished.⁷

This holds on one reading of time that isn't derived yet: that the record decides each bond's charge from that bond's own entry, the way a comparison reads only its own two terms.

No top. Now the man's case. After the taking, the families' loads double at every checkpoint, and nothing repairs them. The costs are 1/4, 9/8, 49/16 and 225/32. The running total is 1/4, 11/8, 71/16 and 367/32, about 11.5 after four checkpoints, from a first checkpoint of 1/4. It never stops growing, because a load that doubles each time costs more each time. The code proves the general shape for the states a repair can reach, where love's state is the one of least cost. A run that stays away from love's state accrues a charge above it that grows without bound. On menus that offer a way down, love's own runs keep the charge bounded.⁷

Excludes nothing. Through all of it, the record alone excludes nothing. The charge is accounting: it says what an act costs at every checkpoint, for as long as the record runs. By itself it doesn't say the act ought not be done.

That last step isn't derived yet: from "the record charges this without bound" to "this ought not be done". All of the forcing of the code's least-cost judgment sits in it.⁸

No referee. None of this sends a matching loss to the man. The cost sits on the bonds, so it sits on the people at their ends, the families. The record doesn't stop him, and it doesn't hand him a penalty. It keeps what he did, under his name, and what it cost. A penalty from people answers to the same clauses. At the step an act is done, a penalty that changes a wrongdoer's bonds without the wrongdoer's write breaks the clauses like any push. What a wrong calls for is repair, and a repair changes the bond, so both ends write it. The wrong's charge stays on the record whatever follows. The post on karma works out why there's no referee.

What's still open

Here is each link that isn't derived yet. Section 10 of The Moral Code names most of them.

• From charge to ought. That the record's charge makes an act one that ought not be done. It takes one condition: a law of acts forbids every act that an admissible act undercuts by leaving less cost. That condition follows from framing, the requirement in Step 1 that reading a case together with a separate case on other bonds changes no verdict. Deriving framing from the record is the step still to do. This is the one step the answer needs. Openness, the last of Step 1's four requirements, is still being derived too.
• The reading of time. That the record decides each bond's charge from that bond's own entry. "Undiminished" rests on it.
• Reserves. That the record's own motion is the care law, with each bond run from its own reserve. Where a shared bond's reserve lives. And closing the gap the four clauses leave at reserves, which is why the taking passes them.
• Why it's one code. The proof starts from three answers to facts the record fixes: an undercut act is forbidden (the step above), the balancing act (the act that brings bonds toward level, ends none and spends no energy) is permitted, and acts that tie get one answer. The second is still being derived, and the proof assumes the third. It's proved for the judgment at a single checkpoint, while this post reads it over the whole future, and in some cases the two give different verdicts. And why the code totals bond by bond rather than person by person isn't derived yet.
• The books. That each person's books hold one exact state of a bond, which is why an act may move a bond only when both of its ends write on it. And that the truth clause and the ending clause follow from what a comparison is.
• From real acts to writes. Which real acts (a theft, a lie, an assault, a storm) are which writes on the record, and that the record's menu is the energy menu the code is worked out on. The town, the storm and the fund are drawings until that map is made.
• What picks the act. What does pick which lawful act gets written is the open step of Is Your Next Move Already Written?.

The whole trip, in one breath

Evil is doing what the one moral code forbids. The code is four clauses and one judgment, built on a record that keeps everything, with each bond kept twice and one forced cost on every bond. It sorts every possible act into permitted or forbidden, and it moves no one's hands. Consent comes first: an act may move a bond only when both of its ends write on it, and the code is least cost over the acts that do. Pain that nobody wrote is suffering: a bond costs the same after a storm and after a theft, and the record's other line, who wrote it, tells them apart. The forbidden act sits on the menu beside the permitted one. Doing nothing is always possible, no law fixes which act comes next, and the cost doesn't pick it. Harm is changing someone's bond without their write, which leaves their own book false, and the clauses forbid it on any books. The man did something else: he took away what keeps the families' bonds repaired, and the record's own motion carried the strain: 1/4, 9/8, 49/16, 225/32, and on without a top. The record keeps the act under its author's name and charges its excess cost at every later checkpoint, undiminished. Why that charge makes the act one that ought not be done is the step not derived yet.

That's how reality is built. Right and wrong aren't a wall around the world. They're a verdict on a record that keeps every act with its author and what it cost. Evil isn't a thing in the record. It's a fact about an act: who wrote it, what it cost, and that the code forbids it. The record keeps all three for good.