Above Good And Evil - Television Tropes & Idioms

The man who is to be great is the one who can be the most solitary, the most hidden, the most deviant, the man beyond good and evil, lord of his virtues, a man lavishly endowed with will— this is precisely what greatness is to be called: it is able to be as much a totality as something multi-faceted, as wide as it is full.
—Nietzsche

A character's argument for his side or actions declares that he, or what he is dealing with, is more important than petty considerations about good and evil. Which may be good enough for lesser beings, but not for him. He often terms them antiquated or childish.

Generally a sign of the Complete Monster, the Ubermensch, The Unfettered or the Nietzsche Wannabe — or either of the others with the Complete Monster.

Also commonly found in the more philosophical and thoughtful forms of It's All About Me. In which case, do not expect the contempt to last after the character finds that he's been wronged. Even if the character does not waver in these circumstances, Laser Guided Karma is commonplace.

A signature trait of Eldritch Abomination, thus very common in Cosmic Horror Story. A God Am I can produce this.

Sometimes the character is not so much after raw power as knowledge. This can be (marginally) better, but their willingness to do anything to obtain knowledge is absolute.

In practice, "beyond good and evil" usually ends up meaning "evil, but with lofty sounding excuses". VERY VERY rarely a pacifist True Neutral character will use this to explain this is why they don't fight, because they see everything is in shades of grey, usually Old Masters and the like - I'm certain "grey" Jedi (the rare force users who balance their study between Light and Dark) have used it at least once.

Compare Bad Is Good And Good Is Bad. Villains whose strong point is not logic will sometimes use both tropes.

Do not confuse with Beyond Good And Evil, which is a video game.

Examples

Literature

In Graham Mc Neill's Warhammer 40000 Horus Heresy novel False Gods, Magnus the Red is determined to study the warp and gain power, because
Notions of good and evil fell by the wayside next to such power as dwelled in the warp, for they were the antiquated concepts of a religious society, long cast aside.
In CS Lewis's The Magician's Nephew, when Diggory scorns Uncle Andrew for breaking a deathbed promise, Uncle Andrew scorns such things as fitting for boys but not him. Jadis talks in the same language about using the Deplorable Word:
Men like me who possess hidden wisdom, are freed from common rules just as we are cut off from common pleasures. Ours, my boy, is a high and lonely destiny.
Professor Quirrel in Harry Potter And The Philosophers Stone
Lord Voldemort showed me the truth. There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it.
In James Swallow's Warhammer 40000 Blood Angels novel Deus Sanguinius, the triumph of the Chaos forces in Arkio is shown when he declares
There is no right and wrong, no black and white. Only the strong. . . and the weak.
In Robert Anton Wilson's and Robert Shea's The Illuminatus Trilogy, the Dealy Lama remarks that, "The reason I have lived so outrageously long is that I don't give a fuck for Good and Evil."
- In his case he's actually a pretty nice guy. He's just seen what happens when people get too taken with those concepts. And he invented them to begin with, 30,000 years ago, and got really disappointed when people misused them.
In one Warhammer novel (part of the Konrad Trilogy), the wizard Litzenreich explains that Chaos is no more good or evil than fire is. This being an original Games Workshop setting...yeah, he's pretty much wrong about that one.
- As always, it sort of depends on your definition of evil - Chaos correlates with the emotions of sentient creatures, and without one there can't be other, so arguments could be made that the existence of Chaos is better than its absence, even if you must constantly fight it off.
  - It's probably worth noting at this point that Chaos tends to result in hideous mutations, insanity, and generally being Always Chaotic Evil.
  - Yeah. Chaos' "good side" is pretty much an Informed Ability. In practice, they basically just rape people to death.
Rhynn and Kwll are two elder gods in Michael Moorcock's Corum series. They claim to be above the divine squabbling, and are actually unbound by the Cosmic Balance. By the end of the series, Corum gets Kwll to slaughter the entire pantheon of Chaos. Then, for good measure, Kwll decides to off all the Law gods too.
In the Star Wars Expanded Universe, there's actually an entire Jedi heresy built around the idea that the dark side doesn't exist. It turned out to be a Sith lie, though.
- A good-sized segment of the fandom would argue that the novels in which Vergere's philosophy is considered heresy is actually Dis Continuity.
  - Though ironically Vergere herself is not an example of this trope. She rejects the notion of an external Dark Side, but she clearly believes in some form of morality anyway, one that she's come up with herself by adapting Vong, Jedi, and Sith ideas.
- It's largely a matter of a series attempting to go a new direction with its philosophical underpinnings, hitting a backlash, and then furiously making an Author's Saving Throw to retcon their previous changes.
Discworld: In Carpe Jugulum, the sophisticated modern vampires claim good and evil are just two ways of looking at the same thing. In the next book, The Fifth Elephant, there's a Call Back in Vimes' internal monologue:
Vimes had heard that good and evil were just two ways of looking at the same thing - or, at least, so said people traditionally considered under the category of "evil".
- In Making Money, a professor performing a necromatic rite (an insorcism, which make a dead professor happy and keep him out of their hair), argues with his students that who can say what is right and wrong? When they still argue, he offers to give them all A's. Whereupon one sees that it goes beyond mundane definitions of good and evil, in service of a higher truth.
In Susan Kay's Phantom, Erik loses all sense of good and evil after realizing how easy it was to kill his Gypsy captor, and regards murder as just another art to master.
The Children of the Lamp series features the Tree of Logic, proximity to which will eliminate all senses of good and evil from a djinn (possibly a Muggle, but it's never fully explained). It's used in order to judge better, but it also eliminates all kindness, making the affected person a jerk.
In Dorothy L Sayers's Whose Body?, Lord Peter Wimsey find this attitude a clue to the murderer.
He likes crime. In that criminology book of his he gloats over a hardened murderer. I've read it, and I've seen the admiration simply glaring out between the lines whenever he writes about a callous and successful criminal. He reserves his contempt for the victims or the penitents or the men who lose their heads and get found out. His heroes are Edmond de la Pommerais, who persuaded his mistress into becoming an accessory to her own murder, and George Joseph Smith of Brides-in-a-bath fame, who could make passionate love to his wife in the night and carry out his plot to murder her in the morning. After all, he thinks conscience is a sort of vermiform appendix. Chop it out and you'll feel all the better.
Ruin of Mistborn is like this, claiming that good and evil have nothing to do with him, his counterpart Preservation, or his reason for wanting to destroy the world (it's not out of malice- it's because destroying worlds is what he ''does''.) Vin disagrees. Strongly.

Comic Books

Galactus, foe of the Fantastic Four, is a Planet Eater who often uses this justification; he (and other Cosmic Beings of the Marvel Universe claim that he will one day do something that more than makes up for the uncounted trillions of deaths he causes, which sort of falls under Take Our Word For It, since you'd have to wait billions of years to find out what that is. Which is even more in Comic Book Time. Also, Galactus' death would lead to the end of the universe.
- Galactus will at the end of the current universe provide the energy for the next universes big bang while the Phoenix shapes it. He also holds the embodiment of destruction, Abraxas at bay, who when released caused the unseen destruction of most of the multiverse. This was, however, retconned.
Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen sort of falls into this category, although his arguments aren't moralistic in nature, but defeatist.
Darkseid is.

Film

The Cenobites in the Hellraiser movies make this sort of argument when someone calls them demons. "There is no good or evil, only flesh." They also claim they would be "Demons to some, Angels to others," depending on your perspective.
- Sadly, later movies tend to just make them straight-up demons, instead of otherworldly beings with alien perspectives.

Live Action TV

Charmed had a group called Avatars with this philosophy.
Gary Mitchell from the second Star Trek pilot follows the A God Am I variety of this:
Morals are for men, not gods.

Videogames

The Elder Scrolls III had the Daedra being cast as divine beings whose actions were driven by concepts far too alien to reasonably compare to straight-up Good or Evil. In practice, however, they come across as more like Chaotic Neutral.
In Sly Cooper, the Contessa says this about herself. Sly points out that saying that isn't going to make him give the Mac Guffin.
The first Knights Of The Old Republic has Jolee Bindo, an old hermit with a lightsaber and Force powers. He was one of the Jedi once, trained the woman he loved in their arts, and was betrayed by her during Exar Kun's Sith wars; later the Jedi forgave him and he rejected them to wander the galaxy and exile himself on Kashyyyk. He tells the player character that he's seen his share of the light and the dark and both extremes annoy him, and the portrait of his morality scale puts him exactly in the middle. Once, he tells another party member that if Darth Malak wins this war, the galaxy is in for a couple of rough centuries, but it will right itself again, eventually. Everyone feels that their era is the most pivotal one, and it's just not true. He speaks out against needless cruelty and the rejection of love with equal sincerity, but when push comes to shove he stands with the Jedi.
In The King Of Fighters Maximum Impact 2, Big Bad Jivatma invokes this trope in the Pre-Final Battle one-liner if you fight him with Kim Kaphwan:
I do not wish to be bound by notions of justice and evil.

Anime

The Lord of Nightmares from the Slayers continuity is Above Good And Evil, and creator of both. She represents the primal chaos from which all things emerge, and can side with creation just as easily as with destruction. Most people are only aware of her destructive side, and consider her the Dark Lord above the Dark Lords.

Western Animation

Wan Shi Tong, the knowledge spirit from Avatar The Last Airbender lands on the True Neutral (technical) pacifist side. He didn't care that the Gaang was looking for knowledge to stop the Fire Nation from destroying the world. To him, one war was the same as the other and the sides and reasons didn't matter. All that mattered to him was collecting knowledge and keeping that knowledge from falling into the "wrong" hands (read: anyone who actually wanted to use said knowledge). He went so far as trying to trap them in the hidden library once he discovered Sokka trying to smuggle out info on when the Day Of The Black Sun would occur.
Apocalypse declares in the appropriately-named "Beyond Good and Evil" four-parter of X-Men: The Animated Series that he is "not malevolent. I simply am."
The Nightmare Fuel-suffused "The Mysterious Stranger" from The Adventures Of Mark Twain has the titular Stranger say, "I can do no evil, for I do not know what it is."