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 usual...
Peter, people do use the world evil to distinguish acts from merely "morally objectionable behavior," or wrong. In this case intellectual charity and a little contextualism is in order in order to understand the meaning we might imagine Thompson was getting at.
There is a difference between these two acts: a mass murder and a five year old shoplifting. The difference lies in the severity of the consequences of the acts, the motivations of the individuals performing the act, and in the degree to which it is objectionable. Dictionary definitions hav... (read more)