I feel like “evil” and “corruption” mean something different.
Corruption is about selfish people exchanging their power within a system for favors (often outside the system) when they’re not supposed to according to the rules of the system. For example a policeman taking bribes. It’s something the creators/owners of the system should try to eliminate, but if the system itself is bad (e.g. Nazi Germany during the Holocaust), corruption might be something you sometimes ought to seek out instead of to avoid, like with Schindler saving his Jews.
“Evil” I’ve in the past tended to take to take to refer to a sort of generic expression of badness (like you might call a sadistic sexual murderer evil, and you might call Hitler evil, and you might call plantation owners evil, but this has nothing to do with each other), but that was partly due to me naively believing that everyone is “trying to be good” in some sense. Like if I had to define evil, I would have defined it as “doing bad stuff for badness’s sake, the inversion of good, though of course nobody actually is like that so it’s only really used hyperbolically or for fictional characters as hyperstimuli”.
But after learning more about morality, there seem to be multiple things that can be called “evil”:
Antinormativity (which admittedly is pretty adjacent to corruption, like if people are trying to stop corruption, then the corruption can use antinormativity to survive)
Coolness, i.e. countersignalling against goodness-hyperstimuli wielded by authorities, i.e. demonstrating an ability and desire to break the rules
People who hate great people cherry-picking unfortunate side-effects of great people’s activities to make good people think that the great people are conspiring against good people and that they must fight the great people
Leaders who commit to stopping the above by selecting for people who do bad stuff to prove their loyalty to those leaders (think e.g. the Trump administration)
I think “evil” is sufficiently much used in the generic sense that it doesn’t make sense to insist that any of the above are strictly correct. However if it’s just trying to describe someone who might unpredictably do something bad then I think I’d use words like “dangerous” or “creepy”, and if it’s just trying to describe someone who carries memes that would unpredictably do something bad then I think I’d use words like “brainworms” (rather than evil).
I feel like “evil” and “corruption” mean something different.
Corruption is about selfish people exchanging their power within a system for favors (often outside the system) when they’re not supposed to according to the rules of the system. For example a policeman taking bribes. It’s something the creators/owners of the system should try to eliminate, but if the system itself is bad (e.g. Nazi Germany during the Holocaust), corruption might be something you sometimes ought to seek out instead of to avoid, like with Schindler saving his Jews.
“Evil” I’ve in the past tended to take to take to refer to a sort of generic expression of badness (like you might call a sadistic sexual murderer evil, and you might call Hitler evil, and you might call plantation owners evil, but this has nothing to do with each other), but that was partly due to me naively believing that everyone is “trying to be good” in some sense. Like if I had to define evil, I would have defined it as “doing bad stuff for badness’s sake, the inversion of good, though of course nobody actually is like that so it’s only really used hyperbolically or for fictional characters as hyperstimuli”.
But after learning more about morality, there seem to be multiple things that can be called “evil”:
Antinormativity (which admittedly is pretty adjacent to corruption, like if people are trying to stop corruption, then the corruption can use antinormativity to survive)
Coolness, i.e. countersignalling against goodness-hyperstimuli wielded by authorities, i.e. demonstrating an ability and desire to break the rules
People who hate great people cherry-picking unfortunate side-effects of great people’s activities to make good people think that the great people are conspiring against good people and that they must fight the great people
Leaders who commit to stopping the above by selecting for people who do bad stuff to prove their loyalty to those leaders (think e.g. the Trump administration)
I think “evil” is sufficiently much used in the generic sense that it doesn’t make sense to insist that any of the above are strictly correct. However if it’s just trying to describe someone who might unpredictably do something bad then I think I’d use words like “dangerous” or “creepy”, and if it’s just trying to describe someone who carries memes that would unpredictably do something bad then I think I’d use words like “brainworms” (rather than evil).