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Nornagest comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - Less Wrong
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That would clear up a lot of philosophical issues with the alignment scale (at the cost of making Evil beings rare outside of "a wizard did it" and very hard to play), but it's not especially consistent with the way D&D uses the words. D&D products tend to conflate Evil with selfishness; some (usually supernatural) Evil beings are described as taking the suffering of others as what we'd call a terminal value, but often they just have a weak coupling constant and happen to be pursuing zero- or negative-sum goals.
Then there are other complicating factors: a few zero-intelligence creatures (mostly undead) are described as Evil even though they don't have goals, for example. It's a mess, honestly; a hash of consequentialism and virtue ethics and deontology, and let's not even talk about how messy it gets once you take the Law/Chaos axis into account.
(Horrible nerd mode: DISABLED.)
(Complete rationalization mode: ENGAGED.) That's just equivocation. Being evil (in ialdabaoth's sense) in D&D attaches some negative energy to the soul (it's detectable with a Detect Evil spell) which happens to be the same thing that animates undead. So it's not so much that mindless undead are actually evil, so much as that tests and effects for evil also work on undead.
See, now we're actually approaching something like a coherent system!
Okay, so this lends evidence to the idea that there's essentially two different phenomena at work in the D&D world, BOTH of which have been labeled "evil" simply because the only detector that could be constructed, detected both of them.
Now, how could we prove this theory? What would be different if it were true or false?
The correct answer is obviously "Ask your GM." That aside, maybe you could convince a good or neutral cleric to raise undead, then Detect Evil? (Disclaimer: I have only a basic understanding of D&D mechanics, and the alignment system never made sense to me either.)
You'd probably need a neutral cleric to do that, but they'd have to be careful, since some DMs might make premediated casting of a [evil] spell simply to gain knowledge as something that would push a neutral individual over to evil.
... Spells are also categorically Good or Evil?
If said cleric casts that Evil spell, but does it unknowingly (e.g. mind control, or other more convoluted scenarios, perhaps involving magical sensory deprivation), are they still considered to have done an Evil act?
Yes, though it's usually not much of an Evil act. More to the point, in most versions, clerics are prohibited from using opposed-alignment spells, which nicely insulates them from accidental alignment shifts due to spellcasting.
A good wizard, on the other hand, can actually cast protection from good (an evil spell) every day until he feels like committing horrible atrocities.
Yes, see for example in the 3.5 SRD how "Animate Dead" has the bracketed Evil after it here.