Peter Turney: "thinking of human relations in terms of "good" and "evil" is not rational"
What?
Except for the fact that most humans do think of human relations in such a manner (and so they are useful in communicating with fellow humans) and those terms do (generally) usefully differentiate between different sorts of actions. Even if Manicheanism, in its various formulations, is a bias, those words serve, very well I might add, to show which actions humans general abhor versus those they generally approve of.
There is also usually a distinction between wrong vs evil, wherein evil is simply more wrong than simple wrong. It is perhaps an expression of my distaste for onions vs my distaste for Rocky Mountain Oysters.
Also, none of these terms require appeals to a higher authority as, as words, they simply reveal individuals' subjective impression of actual facts of the world. Rather than always list a litany of facts (torture causes such a specific threshold of pain and that threshold being reached creeps most humans out), we might simply use those normative terms (torture is evil). Those terms carry meaning, because they carry meaning they can be used rationally, the bias/fallacy seems to be in connoting the use of these terms as irrational simply because people often use them irrationally.
"People don't buy three-eighths-inch drill bits. People buy three-eighths-inch holes."
-- Michael Porter
"I feel more like I do now than I did a while ago."
-- Arifel
"Know thyself, because in the end there's no one else."
-- Living Colour, Solace of You
"Student motivation? I'm gonna start hooking you all up to electrodes."
-- Kevin Giffhorn
"A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral."
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: 'The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair.' In these words he epitomized the history of the human race."
-- Bertrand Russell
"Open Source Software: There are days when I can't figure out whether I'm living in a Socialist utopia or a Libertarian one."
-- Alex Future Bokov
"Supposing you got a crate of oranges that you opened, and you found all the top layer of oranges bad, you would not argue, `The underneath ones must be good, so as to redress the balance.' You would say, `Probably the whole lot is a bad consignment'; and that is really what a scientific person would say about the universe."
-- Bertrand Russell
"This thing not only has all the earmarks of a hoax, it has "HOAX" branded into its flank and it's regulated by the U.S. Department of Hoaxes, Pranks and Shenanigans."
-- Brunching Shuttlecocks
"Natural selection gave a big advantage to those who were good at spotting the pattern of a saber toothed tiger hiding in the bushes, but no advantage to those who were good at solving partial differential equations. It is not mere rhetoric to say that in an absolute sense a janitor has a more intellectually challenging job than a professor of mathematics."
-- John K. Clark
"The simple fact is that non-violent means do not work against Evil. Gandhi's non-violent resistance against the British occupiers had some effect because Britain was wrong, but not Evil. The same is true of the success of non-violent civil rights resistance against de jure racism. Most people, including those in power, knew that what was being done was wrong. But Evil is an entirely different beast. Gandhi would have gone to the ovens had he attempted non-violent resistance against the Nazis. When one encounters Evil, the only solution is violence, actual or threatened. That's all Evil understands."
-- Robert Bruce Thompson