Obviously, 'evil' as you defined it, is a description of something which occurs. That definition is not referring to a physical object, but a particular class of human actions, so that it cannot be said to 'exist' in the same sense as a quark. IOW, not a good analogy.

When people refer to the existence of Evil in a general sense, they tend to be referring to it existing in some Platonic idealist sense, as something which somehow exists independent of human minds. This is a debatable, mainly philosophical, point, IOW just a matter of different ways of thinking about abstract ideas, rather than a demonstrable 'fact' about the Universe.

Subatomic particles can be demonstrated objectively. Even if the model of how they work is revised, it will happen objectively; it doesn't require emotion or a subject to exist.

Evil requires a perspective to be experienced, and exists only as an experience, for it's the egregious diminution of whatever properties hold value: i.e. the deprivation of life. But the deprivation of life for one could mean the continuation of life for another. We admit this brutal dance out at the dinner table, unless we're fruitarians who succeed in killing nothing for our nourishment. We kill certain animals to live, and for our culinary pleasure, committing the most heinous act that can be committed against a living thing: from the animal's perspective, it could be an evil act.

Subjectivity in morality is often caricatured for derision, as though it opens the floodgates for decadence -- but the subjectivity, the perspective, is all that gives value and substance to our experiences: it is our experience in total. The variations on moral views in a healthy society are marginal, but the power of the experience to the individual is what drives him or her to act at all. If a person, can, for instance, feel empathy, that is sufficient to prevent them harming another person under normal circumstances. There are transitional points in societies where it takes an act of will to demonstrate, for instance, that another race or subculture is deserving of such consideration; but once established, it's assumed. We don't have to wake up each day and make the choice whether to be bigots (bigots as we understand them, anyway).

We have core values, like the value of the lives of ourselves and our own; and the different ways in which we interpret those values, and their execution, can vary enough that different cultures can see each other as evil. I think Christianity and Islam are evil, for instance, because they reject the assumption that life has intrinsic value; displacing worth from the whole of our experience, devaluing the only thing we certainly have and glorifying its forfeiture, to a saccharine caricature of life that is promised, but not demonstrated -- an afterlife.

So evil, I think, is just a description of whatever is severely harmful to whatever we value.

There are many ways to identify with the child, or with her parents, and ways to see the harm done to her and to society in general, by such an act; which isn't to say conscious thought is necessary to react, as our outrage and disgust would occur transparently. Lacking empathy, a sociopath might say, "What's the big deal?" It's also conceivable a society could exist where that act is a rite of passage, or is otherwise considered acceptable. My potent indoctrination into this society reels at the prospect, but again: core values can be contorted (looking at religion, again), and it takes work to disentangle them.

Blah, blah, blah.

What would YOU call the rape of a 5 year old child? 

Your example is meant to overcome the category mistake you're making?

Rape is terrible, heinous, unforgivable, contrary to all I value -- evil, in accordance to all the qualifiers I've offered. Satisfied?

But whence evil? The evil tree, with evil fruit, dripping evil juice? Finding confirmation of values within the same culture doesn't help the evil-as-substance hypothesis. 

You'll have to forgive for being a bit of a prick, especially since you are habitually reasonable and articulate. But I'm trying tear away all the verbiage and cut to the heart of the matter. I think this is a key thing in my theism. I consider such a thing an act of evil. It is sufficient evidence for me. In my mind it is evil across all cultures and time. It is like a rock is a rock. No matter when or where or what language, it's still a rock.

Am I being simple? Or am I just calling a spade a spade?  

This does not rectify your category mistake, since all it would establish at absolute best is that certain moral concepts and ideas are ingrained innate, largely universal and transcultural. But your ontological assertion is problematic, ie that evil should be an observable, testable entity via indirect observation the way quarks are discovered. As I said before, such an assertion, while it may be true, does not fix the category mistake of such an assertion.

Comte argued that a scientific methodology was transcultural, that it would work universally in all frames of reference. Such an argument would not demonstrate that "science" is actually a substance in the void to be universally recognized and observed, rather it would only establish that the propensity towards the method is innate in human curiosity. Your argument is a non sequitur. It would be no more valid than if Comte had concluded that science was actually a substance in the ether that surrounded us.  

change the topic, i said evolution and quarks can be shown, i am not talking about quantum mechanics, second, evil is a matter of perspective, the mere definition of what is evil changes from each society, religion and as well as era, what is evil, what you define as evil is not the same as evil the past.  Rape a 5 year old child you say is evil, i say it depends, evil now yes, evil in the past, doubtful, it changes from era to era, from society to society and from religious views to other religious views. Evil is solely dependent on perspective. Everything in the bible about killing others, about killing babies about slaughtering whole races is evil, now, but not then, and even then some don't view those acts as evil. So many acts that can be considered evil yet it all depends on the person committing the act, the society in which it occurs and the era in which it happens.

Reification.  

And so science isn't real. Is change real? 

No. 

I never categorized evil as something with actual substance . You stated I committed a category mistake (reification). The implication then is that something that is real must have substance, else a category mistake is made. Science has no substance, therefore it is not real. 

yet here you go again, it's a matter of perspective, to the child the act is evil, the perpetrator, it isn't, and the society in which the perpretator lives in may or may not view this act as evil. Again it's a matter of perspective, the child sure views it as bad, but what you define as evil, well again what is evil. That act could be just a bad act, not necessarily evil. all a matter of definition and perspective, evolution and quarks are not dependent of this pespective.

I hope this comment isn't too much of a tangent, but it seems relevant. It's probably not hugely insightful, but it's a card I wanted on the table while I was reading through this thread.

 We may want to avoid confusing "good vs bad" with "good vs evil".

For example, it's possible to own a good car or a bad car. But if you don't own a good car, you wouldn't say that you owned an evil car. (Well, you might, but you'd probably be joking). Even if your "bad" car had negative effects on you psychologically or even physically (in the case of an accident perhaps) it would still be just a "bad" car, not an "evil" car.

Many GvB situations like that are questions of practicality, cost versus benefit, and so on. Nothing spiritual needed. 

When a 5-year-old is raped, there are all kinds of damaging things happening to the 5-year-old. Since being raped is a "bad" experience in so many ways (in the GvB way, not in the GvE way) compared to NOT being raped (bodily harm, betrayal of trust if the child knows the person, etc), it's easy to see why the child would not think very highly of it.

Your example preys on the empathy you know that the majority of us (save for the sociopaths) share for children. We don't like to see children being hurt, but that's very arguably a biological point. And to some extent, you're probably being speciesist. Most species care about their children, but in many the males could really give a shit, and in many the animals only care about their OWN children and not those of others.

 Question: Do you have the same feelings of empathy toward horses, pigs, and sheep that are raped by farmers with bestiality fetishes? You might want to say these acts are "evil" because they disgust you, but the truth is that they simply disgust you. End of story. And we'd probably agree that it's not fair to the animals (assuming they disagree with it), but it's not the same as the child rape.

So, yes, the child rape is bad in many ways. It's disagreeable. I would not prefer it to the child NOT being raped. It's definitely harmful to the child. All of those statements are true, but they are true all by themselves. You don't need to bring any new words like "evil" into it.

Ask all the different religious cultures throughout history what is considered "evil", and the summary of the responses will probably go like this: "Whatever we don't like."

In short, GvB =/= GvE 

 Of course, there is an obvious difference between the car analogy and the rape analogy in that the "bad" in the rape analogy is the result of a premeditated human action. But if you're going to start describing evil in terms of human intentions, that's just opening another can of worms, which I think Todangst may have already written some articles about. 

I think this is a composition fallacy, dude. What happens at a subatomic level doesn't bear on moral standards any more than I can pour myself from pitcher for being 90% water.

Simply put, probability functions degrade the larger a physical body becomes. Without the mathematics, simply put, the bigger something is, the less it behaves in a quantum fashion, because the probabilities of it doing so are impossible. This is true of all effects that are local to sub-atomic particles (sum over histories, wavefunctions, wavicle duality, entanglement, tunnelling) this is why classical laws hold perfectly from the atom upward.  

I'm with Wavefreak here (at least what I think he's saying) in that I think those who are confidently asserting a categorical difference between "concepts" and "objects" are on shaky ground. Once you start poking at the boundaries of these categories, they start to come apart.

I mean, isn't this the whole line of questioning that Husserl/Heidigger worked with that underpins a lot of Modernism? On some level, everything is a concept since, in order to verify the existence of an object, you need to observe it.  At which point it becomes a concept.

 LOL. I wish. I'm still not sure exactly what question I'm asking. At best I am probing the ideas that surround all this stuff and I doubt that I have had any original thoughts on the matter. Every time I start one of these conversations I learn something. Unfortunately I'm not in a position to be any more than a member of the peanut gallery while the real work on these questions is being done by others.

Evil is quite simply what the majority of people say it is.

Despite the fact most people these days think genocide, slavery  , burning people alive for believing in the wrong fairy at evil at times in the past this has been a good act.

What is evil even today is highly contreversial. I consider murdering defenceless prisoners to be evil,  i consider abortion nothing more than removing a tooth.   

But wouldn't it also be dangerous to move from there to "it's all just a bunch of concepts, so whatever difference between the concept of a quark and the concept of evil has thus been leveled out"?

I can have the concept of a unicorn, and yet the concept of a unicorn is not on the same level as the concept of the chair I'm sitting on. I can rearrange the concepts on my "desktop" to create novel ones (like unicorns), but those novel concepts are just inventions. On some level they are true, but they are false in their arrangement. That's how basic fiction works. For example, you couldn't invent a fictional animal in your mind without basing it on concepts of other things you already have (or other fictional creatures that are probably based on other concepts, etc).

It seems to me that the concept of evil works like the unicorn concept. Just like tacking a horn onto the head of a horse to invent a unicorn, some undefined, supernatural element is tacked onto common badness or deviance to invent "evil".

Concession: I don't claim to be a well-versed in philisopical reading, so this post is more exploratory than a claim that I'm right.

Not exactly... quarks exist insofar as our conventions of subatomic physics and the efficacy of their models of the data show.  They are useful conventionalized entities that we assume to be physically real... but not 'real' in any ontological sense.

Evil is also conventionalized... but there are more than one convention out there that frames/models/defines it.

Forgive me, I was an art major in college and never took any philosohpy classes so it is somewhat foreign territory to me.

At any rate philosophy itself seems to be a sort of play toy....fine for purposes of amusement but having no actual utility. I had a rather useless discussion about the nature of reality with fellow forum member BMcD who appeared to be a "desciple" of Descartes.

The premises that were shared with me about reality were the constant questioning of perception, ...self-perception, perception of the world around us, etc Everything she maintained was possibly a delusion and therefore no solid assertions about reality should be considered valid. We went 'round and 'round until finally I grew weary of the whole exercise.

My view of reality is quite pragmatic and more along the lines of Philip K. Dick..."Reality is that which when you stop believing in it doesn't go away."

Philosphy in general seems never to deal with obvious attributes but prefers to veer off onto to some undefinable tangent...and stay there forever.

I concede that the concept of "evil" is much harder to define than is "reality". Nevertheless the over-all concept of evil is easily understood and the fact that it may contain aspects that are variable doesn't change it's fundamental meaning.

If I gave an example of evil behaviour, ...such as skinning a live human being... why would anyone be compelled to question the harmful and malicious nature of that act ? If anyone were to literally question whether human vivisection was not evil then at the very least I would consider them to be a sociopath and incapable of moral judgment.

"With this question, I have to hold in, so I don't laugh out loudly. I mean, the question is great and warrantable. [...] But it is [nonesense]."

Second I want to correct a tiny error. The many worlds theory states, that a set of wave functions is collapsing into a specific one that is experienced by the observer. Professor Harald Lesch also gave an example. An electron is shot onto a screen. The many world theory states, that at the beginning the electron had many wave functions and when it hits the screen, all those wave functions collapse into a specific one, because there is one specific result on the screen. So, where did those other wave functions go? The many world theory says, that when the wave functions collaps, another world is created, where a different result occured. Professor Lesch pointed out the fallacy. The fact that in physics, the electron had a set of wave functions, is purely abstract. This is just an abstract description of the electron, we don't know if the electron actually had all those wave functions and we actually can't even find out. So the only real thing happening is an electron hitting a screen. Everything else is abstract. The same with schoedingers cat. The end of the experiment, yields either a dead cat or a living cat. The result is always a specific one. A winner of a lottery wins the jackpot, he doesn't win the jackpot multiplyed with the probability for winning it.