On Tue, 18 Nov 1997, David Johnston <rgorman@telusplanet.net> wrote:

At 03:57 PM 11/17/97 -0600, John W. Biles wrote:

That's not the problem I have with this story, it's the idea of
"Conservation of Evil" which bothers me. In a universe in which such was
true, all human striving to improve the world would be futile, for if you
solved one problem, you would only, and always create another one.  It
also conflates natural evil (Earthquakes, fires, floods) and human/moral
evil.  If you did have progress in fighting natural evil (which clearly
has occurred in at least some respects in our century), then you would
have to lose ground somewhere else.

If evil is TRULY conserved, then every advance you make has to occur at
someone else's expense.  By helping someone, you would have to hurt
someone else.

It doesn't necessarily follow that evil is truly conserved 
just because attempts to truly eliminate absolutely all
evil create a backlash.

	Besides, you don't have to look at it as a conservation thing, think 
of it rather as a world where evil continues to come into existance, but 
before it can actually manifest itself tangibly, it gets absorbed by Queen 
Serenity.  Thus it's not evil being conserved so much as evil continuing to 
come into existance but being prevented from manifesting itself so that it 
instead pools in one place and becomes incredibly dangerous.