[Serious] Good vs Evil

[Acrobat]

How do you define good and evil?
Do you think anything is objectively good or evil? If so what?
What do you think drives people to aim for what they believe is good and away from what they believe is evil?

I don't think we can define good or evil in a way that would capture all of which is good or evil. We do a better a job recognizing what is good or evil, than we do in articulating it, or expressing it an adequate language. 

And yes there are things that are objectively good or evil.

My go to example: It's objectively wrong to torture innocent babies just for fun. The wrongness here is as real as the yellow of my wife's dress, or 1+1 =3.

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We make up every category and every word to describe it for any distinction under the sun.  This does not demonstrate that the categories or their contents depend on people.

Every rose in the world would still be a rose if men weren't there to name them.

The thing we call natural evil is different from the thing we call moral evil.  For specificity's sake, we use two terms to refer to those disparate categories of x.  Just as you might use "cat" or "dog" instead of "animal" if you wanted me to feed one or the other.  Unless roses, cats, and dogs are equally "totally dependent on the observer" we're going to have to figure out why moral x's are the special case.  What is it that makes us cognitivists and realists when it comes to the first three, but not the other?

False equivalency.

Roses, dogs and cats are quantifiable physical things.

Good, evil, moral and natural are simply concepts - ideas - and totally dependent on an observer who can understand the concept.

"Roses, dogs and cats are quantifiable physical things."

Quantifiable things are totally dependent on an observer who can quantify them, who can understand these concepts. Any argument you use to deny objective morality, can be repurposed and used just as consistently to deny objective truth all together.

The universe doesn't .make such distinctions.

It' s totally dependent on an observer.

That could be said of truth as well, the universe doesn't make distinctions on what's true or false, that totally dependent on the observer.

Good and evil are recognized by human minds, just like roses dogs and cats are, but they don't merely exist in our minds, any more than any other true we recognize. In fact we recognize moral truths not as subjective internal states, but as transcendent and external to us. 

When I tell my children it's wrong to steal, I'm not telling them it's wrong because I simply don't like it, but rather an objective truth, independent of my personal feelings.