"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
The point is that some things are pre-analytically evil. No matter how much we worry at the concept, slavery and genocide are still evil -- we know these things stronger than we know the preconditions for the reasoning process to the contrary -- I submit that there is simply no argument sufficiently strong to overturn that judgment.
In the American civil war, some people fought against slavery and others fought to continue slavery. If your statement above is correct, it would seem that everybody who fought to continue slavery was evil. Was their pre-analytical "sense of evil" somehow missing or damaged? If your statement above is correct, it would seem that there is no possible case in which a rational argument caused a person to change sides in the civil war. This seems highly unlikely to me.
Culture, including ethics, evolves over time. Actions that were once morally acceptable are no longer considered morally acceptable. I don't claim to understand all the forces that govern the evolution of ethics, but it is plain to see that our ethical systems have evolved. Slavery was once accepted and considered ethical by many; now it is not accepted. Women were once not allowed to vote; now they can vote.
To say that something is "pre-analytically evil" seems to be an excuse for avoiding rational, scientific analysis of the epistemology and ontology of our ethical judgments.