a funny and thought-provoking Hegel passage

Phenomenology of Spirit, §625:

“Since morality is always incomplete, it is a mere expression of envy when people complain that the wicked flourish while the good suffer. There are no good and no wicked, and happiness should simply be as widely spread as possible.”

This doesn’t quite correlate with my experiences over the years, which indicate that there are in fact the good and the wicked. I have found the wicked to be fairly rare, though not as rare as lottery jackpots and lightning striking the same tree twice. Furthermore, I tend to agree with the conviction of Max Scheler (among others) that there are wicked people rather than wicked actions. It may sound reactionary to believe in evil, but there really are a handful of people out there who spread a bit of wickedness to everything they touch. Comb through your memories and, no doubt, you will find a half dozen or so of them.

I can think of one in particular who was so awful that you could practically write an entire ethics simply by taking each of his actions and reversing them 180 degrees.

One possible red flag (there are others)… If you meet someone who gives a reason for everything he/she does, you may start to find after awhile that this sort of systematic rationalization is an effort to conceal the true reason in each case.