this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
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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.
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.
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