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

Good and Evil are relative.

Using Going Rogue as an example...

From the Loyalist perspective, they are "good" and the resistance is "evil".
Cole has built a Utopia, and the resistance wants to destroy it. They are responsible for the deaths of more loyal men and woman than any other faction in all of Praetoria. From the loyalist perspective, Calvin Scott and the Resistance are terrorists.

From the Resistance Perspective, they are the "good" ones, and Tyrant and his Praetors are "Evil". Their "utopia" was built upon the bones of a once free nation. Metahumans are forced into service. You no longer have the sanctity of your own mind anymore. Dissenters are imprisoned, or worse. The Resistance, in this case, are freedom fighters.

And here's the kicker. Both of these possibilities are valid. Despite the viewpoint that Tyrant = Bad and Resistance = Good, both sides have performed actions that lead in the other direction. The Resistance has been responsible for civilian deaths. Cole has nearly abolished hunger through his control of the Praetorian Hamidon.

The real world isn't like "Primal Earth", where the Freedom Phalanx can do no wrong, and Arachnos is "Mwhahaha" evil.

It's complicated.

I have to disagree with a lot of people here. IMO, evil is not relative or a matter of perspective, there is a universal base understanding of evil. Evil is any behavior that promotes the good of the individual or the few at the expence of the good of the many. As human beings, it is our purpose to advance the species and anything that functions to counter that is fundamentally evil.

Ah, it is the favorite of Ontology and Epistemology classes!

See my sig for my thought on the matter.

From what I have read of your posts over the years, MT, you have probably heard that answer before.

Good and evil are relative, but relativity does not erase or hinder meaning, necessarily. Short and tall are relative, but we can look at two people and tell who is taller. We can usually look at a person alone and tell if he is short or tall. We have at least as much experience dealing with the actions of people as we do looking at them, so why do we struggle with concepts like this?

The problem might be that good and evil are secondary modifiers, and that we normally categorize behavior using narrower terms. A Wall Street executive who cheated hundreds of cookie-baking grandmothers out of their retirement savings did something very selfish. But did he do something evil? Our answer would probably change once we were given different sets of qualifying information. He did it because he wanted to buy a new jet. Boo! Evil! He did it because his own grandmother is being held hostage, and his house was robbed last week, and this was the only way he could get the funds to save her. Ummm. Less evil? (It's hard to think of a good reason to do that).

Conflict arises, within our own minds and between others, partially because we categorize, and ultimately judge, the actions of others from the ground up.

We observe: That Boy Scout is helping an old lady across the street
We analyse/categorize: That is a helpful, selfless thing to do
We pass judgment: That is a good thing to do!
And sometimes we take it a step further: That Boy Scout is a good person!

And from there associations can begin to form, to the point where when we are talking about good and evil, a Boy Scout helping an old lady cross the street becomes a useful example of a good action.

Our social conditioning, however, does not work from the ground up. While as children our behavior is often modified and corrected action-by-action (Don't hit your sister!), we are brought up being taught an overarching set of rules into which those actions fit (Honor thy father and thy mother, that it will be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the Earth, if you were raised a Lutheran like me). We are raised by our parents, teachers, and society from the top down.

We set criteria: You need to do well in school
We observe: You got a D+ in math
We analyze: You are not doing well in school
We attempt to correct so that future behavior will fit the prescribed criteria: GO TO YOUR ROOM!!!!!
Bad instructors and parents (in my opinion) take it a step further: You are a bad student/person.

And from there, associations can begin to form, to the point that a student who is told he is bad because he merely failed begins to think of failure and being bad as commutative, and stops trying.

The conflict arises when we get to the step where we pass judgment, because calling a person or thing good or evil IS passing judgment, for all we like to say these days "Don't judge me!" We judge people all the time, the only real moderating factor being the volume of our voices when we do it. Saying "What is evil?" doesn't work so well in a vacuum, because we need an example of evil to use. Descriptions of evil are almost always referential. We want the whole story before we pass judgment on someone (Bob had an affair? What happened?), and we jump to pass judgment when we have already made up our minds about them (I knew that Bill Clinton was a bad egg! Let's hear David Letterman out on this one.).

Good and evil are easy to define, if you have a who/what/when/where/why/how to draw from. If you don't, then it's like apples and oranges. If you do, then it's like Fuji Apples and Golden Delicious Apples. If someone asks us what evil is, we like to point at something and say, "THAT is evil!" If we have nowhere to point, then the jaws start flappin'. Because while good and evil are relative, they are most useful as abstract terms, ones which work best as archetypes to which we can draw bridges from real-world analogues.

I think we may be forgetting that there are many things that are "not good" or "not evil." There are also many indeterminate actions and courses of action that are also not well-served by being categorically polarized like that. Things like salad, and eating salad, are not good or evil. They are something else, or they just are.

Now eating a salad instead of your wife's casserole, and eating it while you look into her pained, teary eyes and smile, might be evil. A salad made of orphans might be evil. A salad made for orphans might be good. The devil is in the details, so to speak.

You people likely have definitions of good and evil that overlap like my drinking binges (a lot), but you are using such disparate terms that you appear to be overlapping like continental plates, much to the same effect. This is evident in that you are throwing examples at each other that clearly demonstrate that you have a healthy understanding of each others platform. The problem is that you are leaving so much contextual information out (Things like, what kind of group sex? And where, for what purpose?) that it seems like you are deliberately trying not to agree with each other.

But you do! By Jove, you do! Well, I'd bet serious bananas that you overlap enough that you could be drinking buddies, anyway.

See now, I'm in the camp that circumcision is evil full stop. But that's because my aesthetic is violated by inflicting pain on babies for no good reason... And there are no statistically significant health benefits to circumcision, while there are several statistically significant complications of the procedure. There's a reason why the American Pediatrics Association denounced the practice, and the AMA no longer endorses it as anything other than an optional, purely cosmetic procedure.

Since I'm also of the opinion that parents should not have the right to give consent for a completely elective purely cosmetic procedure for a child who is not old enough to express his own wishes, well my conclusion is self-evident.

But again, that all rests on the fact that inflicing pain on infants is in violation of my aesthetic. If it wasn't, I suppose I'd have no problem with the practice. Which is why morality will always be relative

The World Health Organization (WHO; 2007), the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS; 2007), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC; 2008) state that evidence indicates male circumcision significantly reduces the risk of HIV acquisition by men during penile-vaginal sex, but also state that circumcision only provides partial protection and should not replace other interventions to prevent transmission of HIV.[5][6]

I've long thought that the text-book definition of evil was knowing you could do something good and refusing to do it. What is good? Willfully making personal sacrifices to benefit others without being under compulsion to do so and without seeking compensation or personal glory.

Just my two cents.

Remember kids: The safest sex you can have, is the sex you have with yourself!

You know what's truely evil...Clowns.

aside

I never understood why baby seals get all dressed up and then head out to go dancing.

As for why this is Evil, I really don't know.