> Hence, they are not doing evil while thinking "Ha ha ha, I'm so evil", but genuinely believe they are doing good.
This is still just as naive, in my opinion. There are plenty of people who knowingly trample others to advance their own selfish goals, who know that it's unfair, and who sincerely don't care.
In general, you can fit the motivations for evil into one of four categories: there's evil for instrumental reasons, evil for ideological reasons, evil as a result of threatened egotism, and evil as a result of pure sadism.
There are some genuinely sadistic people, but they tend to be few and far between, to the point where once we find one of them, they spawn books and movies and huge long wikipedia pages.
There are plenty of people that will trample others to advance their own selfish goals. They know that they're doing something wrong, but they feel they need to in that circumstance, or are just willing to do that.
Then there are people who are genuinely thinking that they're doing good, and that the world will be a better place after they do whatever evil thing they do. In this context it's better to think of evil as a social concept rather than a personal one, because these people don't actually think they're doing something evil in a long-term context-included sense.
I think conflation between some of the above types of evil is causing a lot of needless dispute in this thread.
(This is mostly from the Baumeister chapter in The Social Psychology of Good and Evil, which is a very well-edited collection of notable psychologists discussing this very topic, and I highly recommend it.)
Yes, but the point is they do not do evil knowingly, in the sense of comprehending how the nature of their soul came about and determining this is the best course of action under reflection over the space of all possible minds; the evolutionary process endowed them with a cognitive structure that primes them to think that way, and we should mourn the deterministic necessity of them spending time living in that mind and body, but we should never condemn them or call them evil.
I agree - it's not that they are doing good, just that they believe it. It's because of this that you can't just trust your own opinions on what's true and good. Without some kind of external moral compass, you're left with moral relativism.
This is still just as naive, in my opinion. There are plenty of people who knowingly trample others to advance their own selfish goals, who know that it's unfair, and who sincerely don't care.