Several ways to look at what you mean by evil.Tingle mind wrote: ↑May 26th, 2010, 10:02 pm Is there a greater outside boundary that evil is filed in?
Could there be anything worse than evil? If so, what is it? Wouldn't it as well be considered evil?
Evil could be looked at in the scale of how bad the effects or intentions of an act/thought are. In this conception of evil, there would be nothing worse than evil, for whatever evil you could think of (say killing 100 people) you could always make it more evil by just a smaller increment.
At first glance, I'd think the most informative way to look at your question is to try to imagine things that have some sort of different basis for how they create negative effects/have negative intentions, but still create negative effects. However, as you mentioned, the great difficulty in this is that these things would probably still be classified as evil, and we're back to square one. One commenter mentioned apathy, another mediocrity. These I believe fall right into this problem. Apathy on the part of the German public lead to the holocaust, living a perfectly boring life can lead people to depression.
Another commenter said that "nothing" is worse than evil, which I think is a better starting point for this question. What do you think is worse, evil, or the absence of anything? In a sense, would a non-existent world be better than a world that only contained evil, even in an incredibly small portion? To counter this question, one could posit that such a world where only evil existed would necessarily have to contain good. Ill admit that this is an attractive proposition, for what is evil without a valuer to indicate that it is such, and where would this perception of evil come from if there were no such good?
Then the question could become if there is such thing as evil that exists on its own, or more broadly, can something exist without its opposite?
If you believe that something can exist without its opposite, you could be committing to saying that existence is all there is, and that non-existence is a logically incoherent thought. So, the idea of "nothing" being worse than evil could be disqualified on these grounds. Of course there are many different ways to argue this, but one could follow this line of reasoning.
So taking this last line of reasoning back to the previous question, if we hold that "nothing" is not logically coherent to talk about, then I can't at this time imagine something that could be worse than evil.
But suppose that "nothing" could be a state of the world that we can talk constructively about? How would we value this versus a state of the world in which the world was on its whole evil? Would you rather have a bad life, or no life at all? This makes the question seem like one of personal opinion, in which case conversation would change to why we hold these beliefs.
I have exhausted this topic on a surface level to my satisfaction, and have nothing more to add at this time.