[Serious] The Good

[Angrboda]

However, in order to draw that conclusion outside of theism one would need a conception of function which is not essentially teleological, i.e. function for some specific goal or end, and I rather doubt that can be achieved.

I think that an Aristotelian "final cause" concept is probably useful to this discussion, and not as mystical as some people seem to believe. 

You probably know, Aristotelian teleology is just: what the thing is for. If you're talking about lungs, their Final Cause is to get the oxygen into the blood, etc. A scientist might want to avoid talking about the "purpose" of things, but it would be silly to teach an anatomy class about lungs and not say what they're there for. 

This is from the Encyclopedia I linked to:

The privation of any of its powers or due perfections is an evil for it, as, for instance, blindness, the loss of the power of sight, is an evil for an animal. Hence evil is not something positive and does not exist in itself; as the axiom expresses it, malum in bono fundatur (evil has its base in good).

The full flourishing of an animal is almost certain to be more likely with sight than without it. Any normally-sighted animal deprived of sight will not have developed to its Final Cause. (The final cause of a baby animal is just a healthy adult animal, nothing mystical.) So in the sense given above, evil is just that which deprives a creature of its full potential flourishing. Murder is evil because it ends decisively the victim's potentiality. 

So we could develop complicated arguments (more like movie plots) about how it might actually be good in the long run to lose your sight or whatever -- maybe you were a jerk before and becoming handicapped made you more empathetic -- but in the philosophical sense good is what helps a being toward its Final Cause and evil is what stops that. 

So it may be that teleology is available to non-believers.

One doesn't have to go far to realize counter-examples. Ultimately what you've argued for is a definition of the good that rests on a subjective foundation, namely that which some subjectivity or another considers the goal or the good of a thing. There are no objective final causes. It's fundamental that "the good" as it's normally conceived is not subjective but objective, otherwise what you have is mere preference rather than a transcendent truth. So, no, you haven't solved the problem at all. You haven't even come close. Evil as privation of good remains out of reach for the non-theist.

And the Catholic Encyclopedia? Really? You're not likely to find anything not deeply rooted in theism there.

My two points stand. Function and privation of it is inherently teleological and therefore a subjective thing. And God could have reasons for creating evil, so the idea that evil is the privation of good is not a necessary consequence of God's nature, and so it's out of reach of the theist as well. I see no defensible objective foundation for the good in either world.