Tyler Cowen argues in a TED talk (~15 min) that stories pervade our mental lives. He thinks they are a major source of cognitive biases and, on the margin, we should be more suspicious of them - especially simple stories. Here's an interesting quote about the meta-level:
What story do you take away from Tyler Cowen? ...Another possibility is you might tell a story of rebirth. You might say, "I used to think too much in terms of stories, but then I heard Tyler Cowen, and now I think less in terms of stories". ...You could also tell a story of deep tragedy. "This guy Tyler Cowen came and he told us not to think in terms of stories, but all he could do was tell us stories about how other people think too much in terms of stories."
I'm not sure I can answer this coherently; I came to the conclusion that good and evil are not objectively real, or even useful concepts, long enough ago that I can't accurately recreate the steps that got me there.
I do occasionally have conversations with people who use those words, and mentally translate 'good' (in that sense) to 'applause light-generating' and 'evil' to 'revulsion-generating', 'unacceptable in modern society', and/or 'considered by the speaker to do more harm than good', in estimated order of frequency of occurrence. (I often agree that things labeled evil do more harm than good, but if the person doing the 'evil' thing agreed, they wouldn't be doing it, so it's obviously at least somewhat debatable.) I don't use the word 'evil' at all, myself, and don't use 'good' in the good-vs.-evil sense.
Those words are also curiosity-stoppers - it's not very useful to label an action or viewpoint as 'evil'; it's much more useful to explore why the person doing that thing or holding that attitude believes that it's correct. Likewise, labeling something as 'good' reduces the chance of thinking critically about it, and noticing flaws or areas that could be improved.
For any concept, you can find a sufficiently rich context that makes the concept inadequate. The concept would be useful in simpler situations, but breaks down in more sophisticated ones. It's still recognized in them, by the same procedure that allows to recognize the concept where it is useful.
A concept is only genuinely useless if there hardly are any contexts where it's useful, not if there are situations where it isn't. You are too eager to explain useful tools away by presenting them with existence proofs of insurmountable challenges and the older c... (read more)