"there is no good and evil"
That is a very very strange sentiment. There certainly are good and evil people. There certainly are good and evil acts.
That is a very very strange sentiment. There certainly are good and evil people. There certainly are good and evil acts.
An extremely small percentage of people throughout history have been purely good or purely evil. The vast, vast majority are somewhere in the middle.
Unfortunately, too many adults have been raised by Marvel movies and want to label everyone in the world as "good" or "evil" with no nuance.
That's not to say there aren't consequences to rejecting them as such, we have a whole system for social fact enforcement that includes social, physical, and mental punishment, but that doesn't mean that one can't appreciate them as social facts either.
Would evil exist in the natural world absent humans? If not, then evil is a property contingent on humans in one way or another.
Of course you can. As long as the animals we are have the ability to understand the consequences of their actions, to themselves and others, and make rational choices about that.
I wouldn't put in prison or on death row a person who killed even a hundred people but functionally has an IQ of 45. That person likely couldn't make rational choices and couldn't understand what they were doing, why they were doing it, or what would happen next.
Whereas I would incarcerate a person with a 100 IQ who drove drunk in a well populated city, whether or not they hit someone.
Good and evil don't have much to do with either case.
The trick is to make it sound like it's not you that's saying it. We launder it through God, society, reality, and it comes out sparkling clean to everyone who's gullible enough to believe it. It's a trick, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work.
The bug-brained stance is to just agree with moral relativism. "Oh gosh stealing/assault/murder is okay if you're poor," etc. Fuck that shit.
If no one helped others, but also didn't harm them, life would be still be much better without people doing evil things. For example, no volunteer would clean a beach of other's trash, but also no visitor would pollute the beach intentionally.
Oh I can think of plenty of evil acts that don't involve deliberately harming others.
But at the end of the day the evil-doer doesn't think they're evil and nothing I say will convince them otherwise. And indeed I can't be sure they're an evil person or a person merely committing evil acts or a person committing neutral acts that seem evil to me.
All I can be sure of is that I don't want or need to be around them. It does me no good to hate them or revel in their misfortune. I can be relieved when they stop doing whatever was objectionable to me though.
Even if you debate the edge cases forever, most of the situations where significant harm was purposefully done would be clearly evil.
I don't think this definition of evil survives the trolley problem.
Also, if you don't intervene, you don't have to answer to the police about why you deliberately killed a man. Murder is murder, even if your intentions were good.
> Yet it reflects the natural reaction of not deliberately killing someone for the greater good, because people judge that more evil than the neutral position of not intervening.
is quickly disproven through the Trolley problem, since it's literally about deliberately killing someone for the greater good - and the average respondent DOES deliberately kill someone for the greater good.
One person's good is another person's evil.
One person's good is another person's evil.
It would appear you are falsely equivocating benefit (which is indeed, subjective) with good; it therefore follows that you also equivocate injury with evil.
While indeed, something beneficial is often considered "good," this does not imply that all good consists in benefit, or that all benefit is inherently good. It would be evil, for instance, for one to benefit by exploiting another. Contrariwise, their mutual co-operation would be good and result in their mutual benefit.
The distribution[0] of your major and minor terms is of great importance when reasoning upon matters as grave as a system of objective morality. One may benefit from good or evil actions. To equivocate between good and benefit in toto is to possess a fundamentally mistaken idea of the principles of objective morality. In so doing, you do not reject objective morality, but rather your misunderstanding thereof.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_proposition#Distri...
I was not in fact saying that good must always involve benefit and evil injury. It is obvious that acts which some will categorise as evil can provide benefit, and vice versa.
I was merely saying that there is no objective definition of good and evil independent of human judgement and people do differ in how they ascribe those labels.
Yes, you can map these manifestations to those end-of-the-chain constructs, but does it make them true or real? Or are they merely your personal, fuzzy classifications based on your experience and programming?
Viewed from this perspective, there is neither evil nor good indeed.
I personally find this reductionism quite helpful in seeing through these layers of constructs and making it my own choice which ones to adopt, rather than simply accepting them all as given.
Edit: typos
It's a rejection of common reality and not worth engaging with because it's an argumentative dead end.
* "according to who?" you may ask: well, according to the populace, ultimately the only measure that matters