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Konkvistador comments on Science: Do It Yourself - Less Wrong
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It only implies "objectively wrong" if you believe in objective morality. But even if you do, the term "evil" also implies that your top goals and theirs conflict, so it works even then. The alternative, it seems, is to have "evil" be a term we can't use under any circumstances, which just means some other word or phrase will come to mean what "evil" meant before we stopped using it, and it looks like you're using "alien" for that purpose in the other branch of this thread.
The 19 hijackers (or Hitler, as originally mentioned) were not (necessarily) irrational, stupid, insane, or otherwise mentally damaged. Nor were their motivations completely opaque or untranslatable, as "alien" implies -- any human could understand their position given the effort to do so, unpleasant though it might be. Their goals were just incompatible with our goals, and only one set of goals could win. It seems to me that evil is exactly what that means.
But most people do work with a implicit belief in objective morality even if they seldom do stop to think about it. Isn't it a bit misleading to use it in another sense without clarification? Though of course the kind of person who typically visits LW would probably not be confused.
Also let me point out that "evil" has a whole host of associations in Western popular culture and especially in fiction, saying something is evil can in certain circumstances be like saying something is Elvish. Sure most of these don't ever make it into serious thinking, but they are there and can be employed in say propaganda.
Well baby eaters aren't really that hard to understand. Looking back it seems that I may have affirmed the use of alien to describe this without thinking about it too much, a tendency to complete patterns in familiar ways I suppose .
I don't think the question of whether one's top goal(s) rely on an objective morality would really change the sense of "evil" for most people.
It's unclear to me whether your second paragraph was intended as disagreement, since evil in fiction is often even more relative than I would argue. :)