Is "Evil" defined by action, intent, both or neither?

Or history gets written by historians and victors, with the historians hoping their accounting survives. Or gets revised later using information from the losers. Or by someone hoping to be a future victor.

*gah*

There is no such thing as heroes and villains, only "my side vs. your side"

Assuming a paradigm where Good and Evil are objective, measurable absolutes, I would say All of the Above: Evil in Thought, Evil in Word, and Evil in Deed.

That dualistic paradigm is a bit old-fashioned these days, and I don't feel that a compelling case for the objective existence of Good and Evil as absolutes can still be made, however. But when dealing with these sorts of things in fiction, I'd have to go with the classical definition and say Evil is an absolute. There isn't much if any middle ground.

Quote:

Originally Posted by eltonio This is over the top mental slavery.

Its a combination of intent, the viewpoints of others and history.

The Spanish inquisition for example. Supposedly the INITIAL inquisitors initially believed that they were genuinely trying to save people from a fate worse than death, that of eternal damnation and suffering.

Were they evil ? I mean the whole burning people alive suggests so, but the intention was good.

Its is of course compounded by the historical fact, that thew inquisition was most definitely hi-jack by those whose intentions were not genuine, and used for political monetary and power reasons.

There is very little which is ultimately evil and very little which is truly selflessly good. There is a huge continuum with rapidly changing rules, and history which changes the rules on you even after the event.

Of course people (including myself) ascribe evilness to actions which really are more sickness/mental illness. There are some lines that society is loathe to forgive, and to justify that failing in ourselves we project evil.

Ozzymandias was a hero who saved the world when others, even with godly superpowers, failed to do so.

Saving the world from nuclear destruction is a great end, and great ends require great sacrifices. Was it humane of him to do what he did? by no means it wasn't, but you don't accomplish great things (such as saving the world) by being humane.

He sacrificed millions to save billions, the needs of the majority outweigh the needs of the minority. And that's like the textbook definition of justice and fairness

Intent is prime, because intent drives action.

Imagine that a man is walking through the woods and is killed when he falls into a deep hole.

If some enterprising badger is responsible for the hole, is the badger evil?
If a person dug the hole for the purpose of killing someone in this fashion, is that person evil? Did they do an evil thing?
If some public works crew left an unfinished project at the end of the day, is that crew evil?

Since I feel qualified to speak for everyone here, I'm going to say that we'd all find the badger incident unfortunate but not evil, the deliberate hole digger, evil, and the public works crew possibly negligent, but not evil. But our opinion might change if that negligence happened even after other accidents had occurred at their sites, or if they didn't feel bad about what happened. In fact, we might find the crew evil if they were just sitting around joking about a potential accident that hadn't happened at all. We might find that deliberate hole digger evil before he had ever dug a hole at all, just for thinking about it. We wouldn't even consider matters of good and evil if a human wasn't involved.

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions" is generally seem as a transformative process, where a well-intentioned set of actions butterfly-effect themselves into something terrible, where the journey from white to black happens through such a fine gradient of grays that justification for each successively terrible act comes easily. Alternatively, the saying is a metaphorical tsk-tsk at the Law of Unintended Consequences, and a caution to over-eager do-gooders to double check their methods. We are very forgiving of unintended consequences, in fact. Our laws clearly separate the difference between intentional (First degree murder) and unintentional crimes (manslaughter), even though the basic act (killing a person) is the same.

That's all beside the matter of what evil actually is. We spend a large portion of our lives learning the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, and some of us never even get it. If you're like me, you believe that while we don't often get the particulars straight, humans (normally) possess an internal moral compass that ends up being influenced, to a degree, by the social conditioning that we all get and all get differently. This doesn't send morality into a relativistic cornfield, but it does cast some doubt over how useful such broad terms as good and evil can be.

I imagine that we might all agree that a villain is someone who works against the common good, whether that means intentionally disrupting it, or putting their own interests above it. But then, I guess you might be able to say that about a vigilante as well.

I like the comic better than the movie in that regard. The comic is clearer in that things won't last. And honestly, if Doctor Manhatten saved the world then you wouldn't have had much of a story.

Besides - what happens when Ozy dies? Does he have plans to have keep the fear of Manhatten in everybody for the rest of time? Memories are short (sadly).

I would note that the "many outweighing the few" can't be the catch-all for things. While its a good principle for a lot of things, it could rationalize a lot of horrible things, too. Its too... simplistic.