Evil as striving for a local maximum

Let's observe first that we tend to attribute evil when there is a sufficient capacity of understanding the consequences of one's actions. A small child that produces a tragical accident is not considered evil usually, because there was no intent in doing that harm.

We then observe that we judge evil in the contrast to another, better, possible action: "he could have decided to not kill him". We don't attribute evil when someone produces harm without having the possibility of doing something better.

Moral judgement on evil is therefore a judgement of one's actions and decisions, in relation to some other actions or non-actions that would have resulted in a better world. That better is a highest "local maximum" that we can envision. The misdirected action is usually dictated by another, more narrow,  goal that is aiming at a smaller local maximum. For example, one can aim his narrow, selfish, good (local maximum) at the expense of others.

This maximum is often on a single dimension: feel good physically, or have a lot of money, or be revenged, or make out nation/race great (think Hitler). There objectives are often not bad in themselves. However, chasing them might affect other life dimensions - like having a better win-win relationship, or at least avoid the damaging effects of a personal or international war.

There are three dimensions of evil, closely related: at personal level, social level and at the level of Humanity.

Evil at personal level

Personal evil is much mundain. It diverts the energy of the individual to fast and easy rewards, so the individual becomes trapped to a local maximum, that often gets lower and lower. Lust is one of such "sins", "laziness" is another. Abuse of drugs, alcohol, all orient the energy of the individual to easy pleasures that are preventing him from achieving higher heights of achievements in the future.

What is a good personal achievement is not easily definable, however we can often identify destinies that are way under potential - think people that are chronically ill or incapacitated because of drugs or alcohol abuse. We can say these are evil for the individual.

We can identify many behaviors that compromises the long term achievements because of the urge of the moment. Most religions will identify these behaviors as "sinful". The above are mainly hurting the individual that is responsible for them. However, there are many actions that are mainly affecting others, that will be treated below.

Evil at the social level

First, do no harm

The Hippocratic oath is a good start in preventing interpersonal evil. One gratuitous harm can rarely create a higher good. Harm is often done in chasing a selfish interest, that is a local individual maximum. While we cannot directly compare the magnitude of harm versus the resulted good, it's often obvious that a lot of harm is done for achieving a very little personal gain.

Still, there are situations when some harm is necessary in achieving a higher good. A painful medical intervention can do more good than harm on the long term. Avoiding it might aim for a local maximum at the expense of of long term maximum.

We sometimes need to punish someone that did harm on others. The punish should discourage other evil actions. We just need to keep in mind the actual goal (reducing the harm in the world) and not aiming for revenge only.

Killing

Killing is so evidently evil because of all the potentiality that is irreversibly destroyed, that cannot be usually compensated by much of a good. Still, we tend to accept killing when this is the only reasonable action that prevents even more harm - like killing someone that intends to shoot at the people.

Again, we tend to judge the evil of killing in relation to a better of worse world resulted after that action. As we can rarely decide the potential good that is destroyed by one's killing, this should remain a last resort - when the prevented evil is big and obvious, and there is no other action that would prevent it.

Because abusive political systems can try to silence opposing voices, it's good for capital punishment to not be allowed as a moral rule, so any mistake can be reversible, at least in part. This also covers the possibility that an innocent is convicted by mistake.

Collaboration vs selfishness

Things gets more complex when we asses what is good or evil for a community of humans, or for Humanity as a whole. Collaboration proved to achieve most of the time a higher level of welfare for individuals compared to non-collaborating individuals. The social human is usually above the "local maximum" that an isolated individual would achieve. Even when there are frictions between a certain individual and the social rules, at least his personal security is much improved in a social organization - you don't need to fear all the time that someone will kill you to get your belongings.

But what is the highest level of good that can be achieved in collaboration? We can often find examples where a better collaboration would result in overall better welfare for all involved individuals - a higher local maximum. Reciprocal help is often a way to increase the welfare of the individuals without reducing anyone's welfare. Still, collaboration is not good in itself, people can collaborate to steal or make other suffer. The important thing is optimizing the welfare of the humans, in the long term.

Things gets more tricky when we try to optimize at a higher scale. If you ask people to be very generous, to give to anyone in need, you easily steps outside of Pareto optimality - where you can improve thing without affecting anyone. Most people might feel good when being generous, but it's hard to let social solidarity only on the feeling of each individual. Most states have laws that institualize some level of social redistribution.

Communism aims for a local maximum

Why is the some social redistribution good? Well, you could say that it improves the average welfare of the individuals. On the other hand, flat distributions of goods might get an even higher welfare score - as welfare increases logarithmically with material possessions. But this is somehow wrong. On the long term, with equal rewards, the production of goods will reduce because there is not enough motivation to do the extra mile. So doing this would sacrifice the long term maximum for a short term (local) maximum. So communism is somehow evil on the long term.

What about not redistributing at all? Even if we don't take into account the natural human compassion, not helping people on their lowest is still wrong. On the long term, the humanity needs the contribution of as many bright people that it can find. Often intelligence and creativity springs from unexpected places, so it's better, for example, to help people without possibilities to achieve the education they need to achieve their higher potential. This also results in a lower crime rate that positively affects everyone. By smart redistribution, we can achieve a higher long term maximum with minimum sacrifice for other local maximums of each individual.

Evil at Humanity level

Genocides

Even not considering their oribilious results, genocides are evil because the are likely to affect the long term maximum of the Humanity. Humanity needs diversity for creativity and even for medical resiliency. We can imagine diseases in the future where only some specific genes are adapted, and we can learn from that.

This argument seems a little weak at first. However, if we give it a thought, we can see that most genocides are attempting to establish a certain local maximum (of a collectivity, of a nation) at the expense of others. The unhealed wounds stay for centuries in the souls of the survivors and their descendants, perpetuating the evil.

I thing that optimizing for a more broader maximum/good would prevent genocides.

The banality of Evil

Banality of Evil is a term coined by Hannah Arendt, referring to the situation where someone can contribute to great harm (deportation and killing of Jews) by just "doing his job" at the highest level of professionalism. This brings a less visible face of evil, one that lies more in a system then in individuals. While we can't really punish a system, we need to rely on people to use their good judgement to prevent harm, even if it is demanded by work obligation and even by law. 

The above is another example of aiming to a local maximum: achieving the highest professionalism in doing one's job. When the job itself is aimed of doing something evil, it is the individual responsibility to resist as much as possible. Not doing so would prevent achieving the highest maximum when the affected people would be allowed to reach a higher potential and making the world a better place.

The less observed face of evil

When evil is not intentionally created, we tend to give it less importance. However, as the final result, there is not much of a difference between someone killed by a fellow individual and someone killed by a lack of food. There is still enough food to feed everyone on Earth. This evil is often neglected because the responsibility is distributed among all the people that could have acted to improve that situation.

We need to think more also to the lack of actions that have as result an obvious evil situation. We should be able to help the less fortunate to reach their higher potential without sacrificing too much from our local maximum. The only constraint is in natural resources, however this can be managed by preventing unsustainable overpopulation.

The Good

The absolute maximum for Humanity is impossible to define practically. I say that increasing the chance for Humanity to survive as long as possible is something fairly close to a long term global maximum. We can go over local minimums from time to time, the important thing is to improve the chance for Humanity to endure.

Often, but not always, the road to a higher local maximum goes through lower local maximums. Therefore we don't need to always optimize for an unforeseen time. Improving the situation for the next generation would be a good approximation for the road to an even higher maximum.

We just need to reflect, from time to time, if these targets are not trapping us in a local maximum. One simple exemple: a non-technological life might sound appealing for a while (local maximum), however it does not have the potential to protect humanity from various long term threats.

Good is hard to define, but Evil is simply the road toward Hell - that is the total destruction of Humanity.  Good is the opposite of Hell. A medium term goal for Humanity should be to have a backup for a cataclysm at Earth level - think meteorite, clime, disease... The only solution I see is for Humanity to achieve a technological level that permits to move to another planet in case of a global cataclysm on Earth.

What about local minimums?

Why I'm not talking about local minimums, that should be even worse than local maximums? 

The danger of local maximums is that they tends to motivate greatly toward that goal. Nobody will attempt to achieve a local minimum. However, when there is a high motivation in achieving a narrow local maximum, this can result in great evil.

This is why local maximums are way more dangerous than obvious local minimums, and they often result in evil.

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