Science Quote by Konrad Lorenz

Lorenz smuggles a moral grenade into a scientist’s pocket: “evil” isn’t a cosmic substance, it’s a relationship. It exists only in the act of endangering something we’ve already decided matters. That framing is doing two jobs at once. First, it strips evil of mystique. No demons, no metaphysical stain; just threats to valued goods. Second, it quietly exposes how contingent our moral vocabulary is, because the “good” here isn’t revealed truth, it’s “what we perceive as a value.” Perceive is the hinge word. It turns ethics into an organism’s way of seeing.

Coming from Lorenz, a founder of ethology, that’s not accidental. He’s speaking from a worldview built on behavior, adaptation, and the machinery of instincts. The subtext is almost clinical: moral categories are downstream of cognition and group life. What counts as “good” is tied to what a community has learned to protect (children, kin, status, territory, norms). “Evil” then becomes the name we give to forces - people, ideologies, rival groups, even our own impulses - that jeopardize those protections.

There’s an uncomfortable edge here. If good is perception, then moral certainty starts to look like a well-lit prejudice: values can be noble or parochial, and “evil” can be an honest alarm or a convenient label for enemies. Lorenz’s intent isn’t to excuse cruelty; it’s to naturalize moral panic, to show how easily ethics becomes a defense mechanism. In the 20th century’s shadow, that’s less abstract philosophy than a warning about how quickly threatened values turn into righteous violence.