Evil is when you “know that some things are damaging to someone else, gain no tangible value from doing them (or even expect that their life would be worse off!), know it is not a virtuous act, and do the harmful acts anyway without expecting future good to come from it.”
The first failure point is “gain no tangible value.” Imagine any prototypically evil character, maybe a person who is bullying once, maybe a chronic bully, maybe Dr. Evil, maybe Satan. Each of these gains some subjective value from their actions, if not “tangible” value. Either “tangible” is critical here, in which case you have way too narrow a definition of value, or it’s not, in which case it is clear that these people are selfish and pretty legible.
What makes them evil is that their value system is so out of whack that they are evil (please just live with the circularity for now, I’m not trying to propose that as a formal definition). So the person who is bullying once and then learning it doesn’t fulfill them that much...they may have done a bad, or even evil, thing, but they aren’t evil! Same of the chronic bully—if they had a bad home life and are coping poorly, their innate value system may still be programmable to avoid evil acts. Dr. Evil is much closer to chronic evil right up until Goldmember (I can’t believe I’m really going with this), when we find out he is a victim of circumstance, which anyone seemingly can be with enough compassion. Satan, well yeah, he’s evil.
No one likes or endorses bullying, but you need a definition of evil that has validity, and yours is debatable. But even if accepted, it hardly encompasses a lot of people. You could actually stand to loosen the definition of evil, but you quickly run into selfishness. Construct definition is step one here. And it’ll probably carry value judgments (see: virtue).
Evil is when you “know that some things are damaging to someone else, gain no tangible value from doing them (or even expect that their life would be worse off!), know it is not a virtuous act, and do the harmful acts anyway without expecting future good to come from it.”
The first failure point is “gain no tangible value.” Imagine any prototypically evil character, maybe a person who is bullying once, maybe a chronic bully, maybe Dr. Evil, maybe Satan. Each of these gains some subjective value from their actions, if not “tangible” value. Either “tangible” is critical here, in which case you have way too narrow a definition of value, or it’s not, in which case it is clear that these people are selfish and pretty legible.
What makes them evil is that their value system is so out of whack that they are evil (please just live with the circularity for now, I’m not trying to propose that as a formal definition). So the person who is bullying once and then learning it doesn’t fulfill them that much...they may have done a bad, or even evil, thing, but they aren’t evil! Same of the chronic bully—if they had a bad home life and are coping poorly, their innate value system may still be programmable to avoid evil acts. Dr. Evil is much closer to chronic evil right up until Goldmember (I can’t believe I’m really going with this), when we find out he is a victim of circumstance, which anyone seemingly can be with enough compassion. Satan, well yeah, he’s evil.
No one likes or endorses bullying, but you need a definition of evil that has validity, and yours is debatable. But even if accepted, it hardly encompasses a lot of people. You could actually stand to loosen the definition of evil, but you quickly run into selfishness. Construct definition is step one here. And it’ll probably carry value judgments (see: virtue).