But some of them are on opposite sides

Before we can properly consider why Good ought to be rewarded, and why Evil ought to be punished, and why not the other way around (or why it is the other way around), one should first consider what Good and Evil are, and why they are at all, what it means for a thing to be Good or Evil. If we accept that human nature has us believe that Good ought to be rewarded and Evil ought to be punished, this permits us the following operational definitions: Good is what is rewarded, and Evil is what is punished.

Such a definition is very simplifying, easily explaining why one ought to do Good (there is reward), why one oughtn’t to do evil (there is punishment), glorification of the rich and powerful (it was rewarded, it must have been Food), and victim blaming (it was punished, it must have been Evil).

The explanation of why one ought to act ethically even if punished for it, then, is perhaps not the most satisfying: one shouldn’t, ethics is not Good; one not should act ethically because this has some intrinsic quality which has that it ought to be done even when it is punished; that makes no sense unless we that make the assumption there is a reward for punishment, which is tantamount to postulating falsum.

Complications in this model arise in three ways: first, why human nature is so; second, whether the consequences to an action can be perceived as reward or punishment or neither or not at all; and third, weighing rewards with punishments.

The first of these is most easily explained by anthropic bias: this is what we observe, because if it were otherwise, we could not observe it; if we did not define what ought and oughtn’t to be somewhat like this, there wouldn’t really be enough humans around, let alone with enough time to spare thinking about the source of ethics and morality: there wouldn’t really be an excuse to be at all. There are apparently people who think that way, though, but they have a certain tendency to stop thinking that way, either by being convinced otherwise or by being prevented from thinking by a failure to be.

The second and the third are rather more interesting, and interact with each other somewhat:

It’s difficult to say whether it’s actually possible to compare an arbitrary pair of rewards and punishments, but certainly we can posit two extremes: a maximum reward which yields a net reward when compared to the sum of all possible simultaneous punishments; and a maximum punishment which yields a net punishment compared to the sum of all possible simultaneous rewards. (The two are, of course, not simultaneously possible—is the set containing all nonrecursive sets recursive?) This provides a familiar conception of absolute Good and Evil in terms of actions which result in these maximum consequences.

However, in defining Good and Evil in terms of consequences, we have added an element of futurity, and thus incertainty, which introduces the problem of judging the consequences of an action; and it is natural that, to some extent, we form expectations for consequences based on what has previously followed similar actions—and, if the psychology of other mammals is any guide, frequently generalising and discriminating only when expectation is violated.

Then, one still must evaluate whether the consequences are desirable (Good) or undesirable (Evil), and it is entirely possible for the consequence to be entirely inconsequential or at least in part indiscernable—whether due to lack of information or because information is contradictory. Furthermore, if both rewards and punishments are possible consequences, their respective values and probabilities must be weighed against each other; the relative values assigned to consequences and weights assigned to probabilities can contribute substantially to different persons’ assessments of a situation. In addition, there is an element of the unknown and unforeseeable, which, understandably, is difficult to account for.

However, since the future is not, from our point of view, deterministic, it becomes impossible to evaluate the morality of any action unless one is at the terminal end of time and all possible consequences have resolved, and, supposing causality, information about an action acquired after the actor acted cannot affect the action, it is only useful to judge whether an action is Good or Evil in light of all information available to the actor at the time of the action.

All of this, brings us back to Job thus: Job has received a negative result, but what information he has brings him to the conclusion that he has been righteous; he is not able to know that he was chosen for this “punishment” because he has been the most righteous.

There is, however, no guarantee that what is expected is what will actually come to pass; and God’s information is not the same as Job’s. Therefore, one cannot attribute to God the same beliefs regarding Good and Evil as Job or any of humanity; indeed, for an omnipotent being, consequential morality is not really meaningful. God doesn’t need a reason to something; it is. And just as well, if God doesn’t need a reason for anything, there’s no use in worrying how God might respond to one’s action: God can respond however, and can’t be anticipated; one ought, instead, to pay attention to things which do need reasons and have limitations—such as, say, the world.