this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
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Doing evil because it's fun and doing evil because it's profitable are both evil. An evil alignment doesn't require you to relish the screams of your victims - you just have to decide "those lives are not as important as what I want."
Then there's no difference between apathy and evil according to you guys. Not caring if someone dies from your actions is the same as gleefully killing them. Makes total sense.
"Not caring if someone dies from your actions" is basically the definition of negligent homicide.
That's the idea. Evil is apathy. Peter Singer is willing to make personal sacrifices to help others, and tries to figure out how to help people as much as possible with limited resources. There's no Evil Peter Singer that makes personal sacrifices to hurt others and tries to figure out how to hurt them as much as possible with limited resources. Evil people are people who just don't care, and harm others whenever it benefits them.
But maybe in something like D&D where there's demons, they actually care about causing suffering and the people we think of as evil are merely neutral.
Yep, this is basically the "Evil is the Absence of Good" argument, and you could do way worse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absence_of_good
To be Neutral is to be able to do not only good things, bad things, but to also abstain from both. Neutral is 'boring' because it doesn't lock your character into an alignment. You aren't forced to help people, you aren't forced to harm people, your character does what would make sense for your character to do, even if it means doing nothing.
Good aligned characters aren't "forced" to help people if they have a reason not to. Nor are they "forbidden" from stealing. A single act does not determine an alignment and alignment isn't a cage restricting player autonomy.
Giving 100 gold to a beggar and donating your time and 10 000 gold to an orphanage are not the same thing, but the existence of the 2nd option doesn't make the first option neutral.