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simplicio comments on Rationality Quotes September 2012 - Less Wrong
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If only it were a line. Or even a vague boundary between clearly defined good and clearly defined evil. Or if good and evil were objectively verifiable notions.
You don't think even a vague boundary can be found? To me it seems pretty self-evident by looking at extremes; e.g., torturing puppies all day is obviously worse than playing with puppies all day.
By no means am I secure in my metaethics (i.e., I may not be able to tell you in exquisite detail WHY the former is wrong). But even if you reduced my metaethics down to "whatever simplicio likes or doesn't like," I'd still be happy to persecute the puppy-torturers and happy to call them evil.
Animal testing.
And even enjoying torturing puppies all day is merely considered "more evil" because it's a predictor of psychopathy.
So I think maybe I leapt into this exchange uncarefully, without being clear about what I was defending. I am defending the meaningfulness & utility of a distinction between good & evil actions (not states of affairs). Note that a distinction does not require a sharp dividing line (yellow is not the same as red, but the transition is not sudden).
I also foresee a potential disagreement about meta-ethics, but that is just me "extrapolating the trend of the conversation."
Anyway, getting back to good vs evil: I am not especially strict about my use of the word "evil" but I generally use it to describe actions that (a) do a lot of harm without any comparably large benefit, AND (b) proceed from a desire to harm sentient creatures.
Seen in this light it is obvious why torturing puppies is evil, playing with them is good, and testing products on them is ethically debatable (but not evil, because of the lack of desire to harm). None of this is particularly earth-shattering as philosophical doctrine.
Not if you think animals' interests count morally, which I do explicitly, and virtually everybody does implicitly.
I think your philosophy is probably fairly normal, it's just any attempt to simplify such things looks like an open challenge to point out corner cases. Don't take it too seriously.
Also I'm not fully convinced on whether animals' interests count morally, even though they do practically by virtue of triggering my empathy. Aside from spiders. Those can just burn. (Which is an indicator that animals only count to me because they trigger my empathy, not because I care)
But.. but.. they just want to give you a hug.
You point out that there are acts easily agreed to be evil and acts easily agreed to be good, but that doesn't imply a definable boundary between good and evil. First postulate a boundary between good and evil. Now, what is necessary to refute that boundary? A clearly defined boundary would require actions that fall near the boundary to always fall to on side or the other without fail. Easily, that is not the case. Stealing food is clearly evil if you have no need but the victim has need for the food. If the needs are opposite, then it is not clearly evil. So there is no clear boundary, but what would a vague boundary require? A think a vague boundary requires that actions can be ranked in a vague progression from "certainly good" through "overall good, slightly evil" and descend through progressively less good zones as they approach from one side, then crossing a "evil=~good" area, into a progressively more evil side. I do not see that is necessarily the case.
You are pointing to different actions labeled stealing and saying "one is good and the other is evil." Yeah, obviously, but that is no contradiction - they are different actions! One is the action of stealing in dire need, the other is the action of stealing without need.
This is a very common confusion. Good and evil (and ethics) are situation-dependent, even according to the sternest, most thundering of moralists. That does not tell us anything one way or the other about objectivity. The same action in the same situation with the same motives is ethically the same.
Thank you for pointing out my confusion. I've lost confidence that I have any idea what I'm talking about on this issue.