Your personal take on “The Problem of Evil?”

[Esquilax]

Esquilax, why would we want to divorce the concept of good and evil from actions and consequences? A good act is a loving act. We are called to love. Or at least I know I am, in the core of my being. I can only definitively speak of my own conscience, my own vocation, though that echoes the call in our scripture.

Well, in your last post you said that evolutionary models of morality don't discuss good or bad, merely different stripes of behavior. But that implies that goodness and badness are defined by something other than actions or the consequences of them; if morality is connected to behavior then evolutionary models are certainly speaking on morality when they speak on behaviors.

You define a good act as a loving act, but I think you need to be careful with that, as many actions performed with loving intent can be considered evil: the father who beats his child to get him to behave may be doing so for what he perceives to be the child's own good, and yet beating a child is evil. A stalker might kidnap someone because they love them so, but kidnapping too is evil. Evidently, determinations of morality work on more than merely intentions. We could say that loving actions are good within the context of those actions that are traditionally considered loving, but then we're forced to confront the question of how those traditional behaviors became so. The answer to that is via the popularity of the reliable consequences of those actions, and that popularity is determined by the positive impact those consequences leave on the individuals involved.

... Which is exactly how evolved moral systems determine good or bad behaviors. Positive impacts= happier, healthier individuals= tighter community=better survival. Now, those are just generalities, I'm sure you can produce exceptions, but evolution isn't a tightly focused, responsive thing that can address every contention as they arise; it takes a while to see the impact of things.