maybe it’s just a definitional problem. Evil generally means “morally reprehensible”. It’s specific to times and places and depends on specific moral judgments based on particular moral philosophies. Many people tend to think of evil as some sort of absolute entity out there,independently knowable, like a loaf of white bread. Probably not. It only exists in a moral framework when determiend bya aprticular person witha particular philosophy. So, y’know, not to defend garrido’s acts, but one could imagine asociety where people would kidnap others’ women and children and rape them and force them to bear chidlren and it not be perceived as evil. Heck, you don’t even have to go back to older civilizations, it was cool right here in the USA not all that long ago, at least in certian states. You don’t even really need to imagine it, we can read about them. And, like hitler, it’s very evil from my point of view to exterminate lots of people, but the imorality of it depends on who’s writing thephilosophy book. It’s difficult for me to see the moral justification, but i can imagine it, or at least i can imagine others imagining it, and believing it. Calling a “nazi” a “nazi” after all, isn’t an insult. . So, no, there probably is no absolute Evil in the world, but there is definitely evil with a small e,a s viewed through our variousa nd particular moral frameworks and worldviews. It sure looks like Evil witha big E to us at the time. and what is evil in happytown might be business as usual in angrytown. I wonder if this is what they call moral relativisim…so, in answer to various posts, hell yeah, our past encounters with slaverya nd etc doesn’t prohibit us from trying to spot and eradicate evil out there, but it ought to make us damned cautious about our ability to do so, andalways open to the possibility that we might be wrong.
