"Evil" is just a label for things we dislike; there is no objective evil

Why this view appeals

Moral views have changed dramatically over history and vary across cultures. That makes it tempting to think morality is just social convention. And a scientific worldview finds it hard to say where objective moral facts would come from. Mackie, in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, argued exactly that: we talk as if moral facts exist, but they don't. Our moral language is a kind of systematic error.

The cost of the view

If evil is only a label for what we dislike, then the Holocaust wasn't really wrong; it was only disapproved of, like a food we find disgusting. The torture of children for fun would be wrong only in the sense that most of us don't like it. Hardly anyone can live with that consistently. When we see real cruelty, we don't think "I'm having a negative emotion." We think "That is wrong," and we mean it would be wrong even if everyone approved.

Moral disagreement isn't moral relativism

Cultures have disagreed about many moral details, but there's a striking core of agreement: cowardice and betrayal are bad, protecting the weak is good, fairness matters. C.S. Lewis gathered examples from many traditions in the appendix to The Abolition of Man to show this shared "Tao." Besides, disagreement doesn't prove there's no truth. People once disagreed about whether the earth goes round the sun.

The reformer problem

If morality is just what a society approves, moral reformers are always wrong by definition. Abolitionists who opposed slavery were going against their society's standards. We think they were right and their societies were wrong. That only makes sense if there is a moral standard above society. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who survived the Soviet camps, wrote in The Gulag Archipelago that "the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." He didn't think evil was a label; he had seen it.

Where does objective morality come from?

That is the real question, and it is the heart of the moral argument for God. If evil is real, we need an explanation of real moral standards. Christianity says goodness is rooted in God's own character. Others propose that moral facts exist as brute features of reality (see Moral values could just exist as brute facts).

A fair concession

Moral knowledge is messy. We can be wrong, and cultures do shape what we see. Moral realism doesn't mean every moral question is easy.

How to explain this to a friend

Abstract debates about moral realism can lose people quickly. A more natural approach is to bring up a clear case, like a historical atrocity, and ask your friend whether it was really wrong or just something most people dislike. Almost everyone says it was really wrong. From there you can ask what makes it wrong, which is a much more interesting question than whether morality is relative.

The bottom line

Few people can truly believe evil is just a word for what we dislike. Our deepest reactions to cruelty insist it's really wrong. If that's true, it's worth asking what makes it so. That question takes us straight to What is evil? and, eventually, to God.