A knife is a tool. Which makes it a function of sentience. So if it is good, it is effective for its purpose, even if that is aesthetic. As opposed to being bad. Which, being a knife, might also mean it is effective, as in threatening. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken.

Good and bad are a basic binary. When someone is saying, Democrats good, Republicans bad, or vice versa, they are not making an aesthetic, or abtruse philosophic distinction, but a primal, tribal one.

It also goes to the logic of monotheism, in that a spiritual absolute, undivided state, would necessarily be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The fact we are aware, rather than the details and distinctions of which we are aware. The light shining through the film, than the images on it.

When we assume the ideal as an absolute, it creates the assumptions each persons, or groups ideals should be universal and unquestioned, rather than unique projections of circumstance. Then political arguments spiral into absolutism and the resulting tyrannies of monocultural belief systems.