“There are two kinds of people in the world - good and bad. The good ones sleep better at night, but the bad ones have more fun during the day.”
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a book about the difference between good and evil as opposed to the simple difference between good and bad. Good and bad are easy. Children as young as five can understand the difference. Good and evil are interesting. The book is complicated and not always easy to follow, but I would recommend it most warmly nonetheless. In a couple of nutshells: Good and evil are highly contingent, subjective, variable, tunable, contradictory, arbitrary and deeply human. No animal we know of has a concept of evil, but all know what is bad for them (for instance: predators, fire, dust storms…) and try to avoid them. But they would not call any of that evil, not even if the bad thing was humanity itself.
The fact that the OP uses the term bad and not the term evil suggests to me that his philosophical thinking is a bit naive. I recommend reading Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil” for starters.
Yes, but even further, how much weight you give to various forms of happiness, (physical needs met vs personal sense of fulfillment vs effect on the immortal soul) is also arbitrary. So all you have really done is move the arbitrariness down another level. That said its probably a bit more tractable, than the original problem and I personally support the notion of utilitarian altruistic hedonism as a basis for ethical philosophy.
Sadly yes, though if doing so forces people to think more deeply about the ramifications of their actions then perhaps that’s as much as we can hope for.
My most liberal friends do not believe any person is “bad.” They believe that, if a person does something that is “bad” or evil, then it means they suffer from a mental disability. I disagree. I believe there are people who are simply bad.
In some future world where mental disabilities were remediable that’s an operationally useful distinction. Now, not so much.
I don’t think it’s useful to say someone is a bad person or a good person in most contexts. I think you can make some exceptions - I’m confident that Hitler is a bad person. Whatever virtues he might have had are irrelevant in the face of his awfulness. But most of the time, dividing the world between goodies and baddies is not a net gain for society.
There are several mental disorders that more or less mean, “this person has a bad personality.” That is, their bad behavior is so pervasive that it rises to the level of disorder (and it follows a pattern.) Some people are so profoundly mentally ill that they do awful things, like abuse their children, but they may not have the intent of a bad actor. Being truly evil, IMO, is taking pleasure in the suffering you inflict, and whether that’s a mental condition or not, you can’t change those people, reform them or integrate them, you just have to minimize their impact on other people for as long as they are alive.
So while I do think some people are bad people and some people are good people, most people are just a mix of good actions and bad actions.
I’m pretty liberal - somewhat different from saying I’m progressive instead of centrist - and as I grow older I more and more believe that many people are just plain bad. I dislike “evil” because of its religious connotations, but in everyday language describing bad people as evil people is one and the same.
Obviously I don’t expect others to see every person and action the way I do. I agree with @Spice-Weasel that most people are a mixture. But my reaction to the modern endless arguments about whether one can like artists who are not good people, or have done one famously bad act, or whatever is to look at the world and history is to wearily remind them that “EVERYBODY IS FLAWED.” I mean that quite literally. I and you and the others in this thread and everybody we’ve ever met or heard of is flawed in some way. Who you sort into the untouchable category and why is an intensely personal act. But saying that a person doing bad acts must be mental disabled is especially flawed.
These are the same thing.
I think the distinction the OP was aiming for was that in prior times the universally agreed standard for good/bad was handed down from above and any personal disagreement was quashed, by violence if necessary. Which unanimity was Good in itself.
Whereas now it seems personal definitions rule, are all over the map, and are constantly changing.
Which the OP finds distressing. Never mind that their “before” picture is fantasy. It’s the comforting fantasy they were taught and believe. Finding out now that reality now is more complex is a hard pill to swallow.
They may never come to believe that reality was always that way. Which it really was. But with effort there is hope they can embrace the truth over comfort.
What are some examples of this? I would appreciate it if the OP would explain when and where:
(Brackets added within quote to change tense.)
I’m just trying to think of what specific values were nearly unanimously accepted in what cultures at what time. You’ve always got the problem of the tyranny of the majority (or the powerful minority.)
Even today, I’d imagine most cultures consider some violent offenses - certain assaults, murder by non-state actors - to be “bad.” And I’d imagine some actions - such as showing compassion and/or hospitality - might be widely accepted as “good.” Definitely complicated when populations believe certain standards apply within one’s own group, and tolerate. different behaviors to others outside that group.
I think there has definitely been a tribalism, that has been a big part of US culture many times and is in its ascendency again. And that tribalism sees good and bad as less important than supporting your tribe.
(I think we both know which political wing I’m alluding to, but I won’t say it, to avoid hijacking).
So yeah, good or bad is still there, and nothing’s changed in terms of subjectivity, but yeah it has a different feel in recent years.
FWIW this question underpins why I have a (very squishy) god concept.
I believe that there is no clear demarcation but that there is Good and Evil, not only good and evil. Hitler could have won the war and all remaining could have believed as he did and he and his actions would still be Evil even as extant society labeled it good.
I cannot accept such evil is only relative.
From that belief of objective moral reality follows my god concept, even if it is a belief in something that doesn’t give a fuck.
And this I say as Evev Yom Tov approaches …
Exactly. There has never been a society where someone like Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Speck, John Dillinger, Charles Manson etc would have fit in and their evil behavior accepted and condoned.
What should we conclude about the relationship between your post and your avatar? Seems like you might prefer such a society were one to exist. 
I have that on my reading list. It would be nice to see what people other than Hauser are saying as he was later involved in a big scandal in which he allegedly falsified some data. However, his book drew largely upon other people’s research so I wouldn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Haidt started out sorta neutral, but the big conclusion of that book turned out to be “conservatives are inherently better humans than liberals”, so he ran with that straight into the arms of the crazies, profiting all the way.
There have been societies, many of them, in which human sacrifice was the norm. What made those individuals psychopathic was not the killing of innocent people but only that it was killing not sanctioned as normative by the society they were in.
I… did not get that conclusion at all from that book. Though I did get the impression that Haidt had more sympathy with the liberal viewpoint and was therefore trying to bend over backwards not to demonize conservatives.
But it’s been a while since I’ve read it and I don’t remember it very well at this point, so idk, maybe I should look at it again. I do remember being rather impressed that he managed to pull out some things that made a lot of sense to me with my observations, given that about half the people I socially interact with are liberals and half of them are conservatives. Though I’m pretty sure I didn’t agree with everything he said.
I found this summary - does it seem accurate?
I find the example given here fascinating. Here is the example summarized in the article:
I agree with everything he says so far, but his conclusion seems exactly backwards to me.
Haidt is arguing that because most people would be offput by a man having sex with a chicken despite nobody being harmed and no unfairness being created, this is evidence that there is a real and valuable thing called “sanctity” or “purity” that should not be ignored.
I would point out two problems with this logic.
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While the man isn’t directly harming anyone else by having sex with a chicken, one must wonder whether this is an emotionally healthy behavior. Is it a sign that this person is unable to emotionally connect with other people? Is his obsession with rotisserie chicken robbing him of the opportunity to connect successfully with another human being? I think Haidt is being too narrow minded with his definition of “harm” if he thinks there are no potential grounds to understand our moral dislike of this act other than “purity”.
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Just because most of us object to this doesn’t mean there is a good reason for us to do so. After all, almost all of us grew up in a culture whose sense of morality was dominated by morally restrictive religions, and the older we are the truer this is. If this person is truly not being harmed by their unusual sexual proclivity - maybe they go to town on a rotisserie with an eagerly consenting partner with whom they share an emptionally fulfilling relationship - then why is our revulsion actually indicative of anything aside from our society’s preconceived notions?