Points to the wide divergent opinions often held by ethicists, particularly ethicists who argue all sides of an ethical position

Are you sure it shouldn't be evils instead of devils?

Thanks for Karl Pfeifer's correction, it's evil.

Ethics does not require an opposite. It is about behaviour that has a certain impact and does not then require something to compare it with.

If I give money to a deserving beggar (notice the caveat) I will have done something for his or her welfare-my act is beneficent. I am not required, nor is anyone else, to act maleficently in order to clarify the nature of my act. kindness and kindnesses are stand alone acts that have, or should have, a causative beneficent effect.

Stanley Wilkin RE: Ethics does not require an opposite. It is about behaviour that has a certain impact and does not then require something to compare it with.

That is just obfuscation. An ethical act involves a decision to do or not to do action X. There must be a choice between moral opposites, namely doing right or doing wrong.

As for your caveat, the notion of desert is itself a moral notion, so you are relying on a contrast between the deserving and the undeserving. But such cases add another dimension. Sometimes doing the right thing may require giving some people more or less than they deserve for the sake of the greater good.

Karl, yes about the caveat, but it was put there for discussion. And, it worked, at least once. Hopefully I was widening up the perspective.

Nevertheless, I do not believe choice is essential, especially with the example I gave. I have been doing work for example on early Christians and being part of the Christian community involved assuming an ethical stance for itself. The ethics was about helping those disadvantaged in some way or another through material means. There might true have been a choice prior or upon joining, but after it was an acquired habit without distinction to situation or event.

It is unlikely that intentional goodness was there but simply an assumed perspective. If these people were placed in a situation where they had to kill or not, no choices would have been involved, thereby no concept necessarily of evil.

Karl, let me explore this further.

Morality in opposing forces, dichotomies, is fairly recent in historical terms. Neither Aristotle nor Socrates mention it. The first indication I have ever found is in Ancient Mesopotamia in the early 2nd millennium BCE where it appears in a lament after the sacking of an important city. But the evil is seen as a natural event, something that causes misery. Even Mesopotamian demons were really just destructive natural forces/like death itself.

Zarathustra separates good and evil as opposing forces. This is maybe the first instance. Even this is not evil as a fixed maleficence but is simply destructiveness-war for example. Neither beneficence, lack of destructiveness, and maleficence, destructiveness, are seen as choices. It is through the Abrahamic religions that this kind of morality appears.

Another understanding is>benevolence causes pleasure feelings to occur, pain (early associated with destructiveness, bad or even evil) causes the opposite response-but neither is immediately classified as good or evil.

Okay, we can separate act evaluation from agent evaluation, as we often do when talking of someone having done the right thing for the wrong reasons, or when we excuse someone's wrongdoing by saying they meant well. The point remains that right, wrong, evil, deserve, etc. are value terms that imply a contrast with something that lacks that value. A natural evil like an earthquake is an evil not just because it is destructive but because its particular destructiveness is bad, which is not the case for all instances of destructiveness.

Even your acquired habit is not just a habit among others; you are supposing it is a good habit (ceteris paribus). Anyway, I doubt there could be such a phenomenon as morality at all (or more generally, systems of valuation), were it not for an implied contrast between the better and the worse.

We can quibble about words like "choice" and "decision". I would agree that deliberation is not a feature of much moral action, but I would not agree that moral action is involuntary.

Karl, you describe right and wrong as value systems and clearly attached permanency of attribution to these words. Within Abrahamic moral systems God, as I have described in YHWH's Morals, represents Natural Good, and yet the most evil , if you like, character, read Job for example, in the Torah is God who declares that he decides what is good and what is evil, and as every action he does must through the theory of natural goodness be good then evil and good do not have attribution only power. History for example is full of people to whom good is attributed but who performed evil, that is highly destructive acts.

Stanley, I don't find divine command theories compelling. The proper conclusion to be drawn from the Euthyphro so-called dilemma is that God must command what is right because it is right, inasmuch as the alternative, that something is made right by being commanded by God, makes rightness an arbitrary (and possibly irrational) matter.

RE: "Karl, you describe right and wrong as value systems and clearly attached permanency of attribution to these words."

I don't know what that means. The same type of physical action might be morally right in one context and morally wrong in another.

RE: "evil, that is highly destructive acts."

There you go away, treating them as of a piece (is that what permanency of attribution means?). Well, the highly destructive act of blowing up old office buildings might not be evil if it's done to make room for low-cost public housing.

Karl, does your last remark imply that you and others choose what is and what is not described as good. What if the building contains a hundred bats who subsequently die when the building is blown up. I'm not treating each act as a piece, and at this point I'm not sure what our debate is about.

At one point you said, Karl, unless I'm mistaken, that good and evil exist as distinctive opposites, which I opposed, now you seem to be saying that I have the view that they are distinctive parts and you oppose such a view. By permanency of attribution thereby a good act is always a good act, which you appeared to be claiming. Providing charity is always a good act, the word is attached to the deed in the same fashion as 'brave warrior'. I opposed that view.

Karl, I referenced a religious argument because again the dichotomy of good and evil that you originally championed seems to me an Abrahamic invention, and once subject to analysis its certainty fades away.

Virtue Ethics. Virtue ethics is a broad term for theories that emphasize the role of character and virtue in moral philosophy rather than either doing one's duty or acting in order to bring about good consequences.

Normally ethics has virtues and evils as taken as good and bad. If we want to live in society, rules should be followed. Some rules may be good to one and some may be bad to other. Ethics are given from top to bottom to mention from God to in between human. Ethics are necessary for each and everyone. If we are in a school or in college, ethics would be respect teacher, be punctual, be sincere, don't argue and be good. If we are in society, respect each other, follow the rules which is acceptable by majority, be amicable to each and every one etc.

Stanley, I don't attach permanent value status to types of acts. Good and evil are conceptual opposites, but it doesn't follow that a type of act that is good on one occasion must also be good on another. So for example, some instances of charity may be good, others not. Sometimes uncompromising toughness is morally called for rather than charity or benevolence. But particular instances of types of acts don't change their value. If it indeed was morally right to have done X at time t, then it remains so. (If I was mistaken about its having been morally right to do X at time t, that is a different matter. Beliefs can be revised but not truth.)