In religion and ethics, the phrase good and evil refers to the location of objects, desires, and behaviors on a two-way spectrum, with one direction being morally positive ("good"), and the other morally negative ("evil"). "Good" is a broad concept and is difficult to define, but typically it deals with an association with life, continuity, happiness, desirability, or human flourishing. Evil is often defined as the opposite of good.

Depending on the context, good and evil may represent personal judgments, societal norms, or claims of absolute value related to human nature or to transcendent religious standards. There is no consensus over whether either good or evil are intrinsic to human nature. The nature of goodness has been given many treatments; one is that the good is based on the natural love, bonding, and affection that begins at the earliest stages of personal development; another is that goodness is a product of knowing truth.

Differing views also exist as to why evil might arise. Many religious and philosophical traditions claim that evil behavior is an aberration that results from the imperfect human condition (eg. "The Fall of Man").

Sometimes, evil is attributed to the existence of free will and human agency. Some argue that evil itself is ultimately based in an ignorance of truth (i.e., human value, sanctity, divinity). A variety of Enlightenment thinkers have alleged the opposite, by suggesting that evil is learned as a consequence of tyrannical social structures.

By an evolutionary perspective, humans are biologically adapted to carry out a variety of game theory strategies, some of which may promote individual utility at the expense of group utility, which, if the disparity is extreme enough, would be termed evil. . Goodness in mathematics has also been related to entropy and information theory, as well as how well a statistical model will reflect a set of observations (known of as goodness of fit). Although goodness is generally not considered to be a real or well-established property under the laws of physics, each person's highly individual concept of the perfect good has profound psychological significance.

Agreement is divided over the extent to which this with the real world, but there is little disagreement that one's concept motivates one's actions in the real world. Theories of moral goodness inquire into what sorts of things are good, and what the word "good" really means in the abstract. As a philosophical concept, goodness might represent a hope that natural love be continuous, expansive, and all-inclusive.

In a monotheistic religious context, it is by this hope that an important concept of God is derived —as an infinite projection of love, manifest as goodness in the lives of people. In other contexts, the good is viewed to be whatever produces the best consequences upon the lives of people, especially with regard to their states of well being.

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