What explanations do you…the royal you…seek other than your gestures at neuroscience and the bad experiences in the past that made little Johnny rotten? Surely these cannot be enough?

One bad act does not make a person bad, but enough will. If these acts have features that give rise to the property of being bad and these features are the reasons that a person gives for having committed these acts, then that person is acting on bad reasons BECAUSE they’re bad.

This is valuable information about this person’s psychology and it’s explanatory.

Stalin, as I understand, did not pursue murderous policy with good intentions. On the contrary, he effected these things precisely because they were evil.

Sadists are similar, only different in degree.

I suppose there may well be such people, but I doubt it of any of the cases you’ve suggested; if such folks do exist outside movies, they’re vanishingly rare. So rare that I think it does bear repeating that “he did it because he’s evil” is, if not never, then very nearly never an adequate or useful explanation.

I have no idea what prompted the leap to “the” alternative you’ve suggested, but I rather doubt anyone believes this weird doctrine of “opposite-day” morality either.

What surely is true is that some people (mistakenly) regard their evil acts as good—though not in some silly Bizarro-type inversion, where the evaluative poles are just reversed, and all that had been evil is now regarded as good. Stalin, for instance, may have believed that his brutal actions were necessary to the creation of some future utopia, and that they were thereby justified—both an empirical and a moral error, to be sure. Or he may just have been indifferent to moral considerations. Either way, though, none of the interesting explanatory work is done by the broad category “evil.”

The alternative view is say that what’s good for the psycho killer is bad for us. But this overlooks too much. If the psycho killer was nice to a child one day, would we say that that was a bad day by his morality? Would he? Doubt it.

And hello again, Jason!

So it does bring up a slightly interesting point: Where are the athiest douchebags? Is it just that we are so marginalized the any douchebaggery from our camp doesn’t even register?