You're posturing something crucial. I don't know if I would word it exactly the same way.
"Good" is the opposite of "evil" about as much as "90 degrees" would be opposite of "180 degrees".
You are right, there is a simplistic association that goes something like this-
---
Inductive reasoning shows me *this (a)* is problematic, and *this (b)* is problematic, and *this (c)* is problematic. And if I see a grouping of elements (a, b, c) put together. Than that must mean that all of them put together is highly problematic, or "evil". Enter the fallacy of conjunction.
And so if I look for an example where (a, b, c) are absent or sparse, then it must be "good."
---
And this fallacious block is definitely prevalent in the challenges to Farsight and also one of the forces that disintegrates the movements that I might say orbit "new age." Examples-
---
"Artificiality is becoming an attack vector. Machines are ruling our lives. Manufactured foods are poisoning us. Synthetic chemicals are polluting the planet"
And therefore
"Everything natural is good. Organic foods, living away from urban environments, staying in the forest, not wearing synthetic cloth"
And then in comes the extraterrestrial argument that basically blows the entire dichotomy out of the water.
"Guess what. Everything was invented! DNA is just an open source code system that failed to remain proprietary.
Your 'spirit' at some point may have even been manufactured by some other entities we're not as familiar with"
---
And so I would say -
Yes, there is good and evil at least conceptually. "Good" seems to converge on the general values of beings, and this becomes the virtue of its outcome. "Evil" seems to diverge on the general values of beings, and this becomes the virtue of its outcome.
BUT
When one of the values is to welcome divergence . . . then we can no longer treat them as simple opposites. And when we know that these principles could easily carry elements that are almost duplicates of one another "such as 'natural' and 'artificial' " we then must not trust our attribution of their nature to simply fit our free association of those elements.
---
Making some sort of practical basis from this . . .
----
Just because someone is prepared to fight a war does not make them bad.
Just because someone is killing people does not make them bad.
Just because someone is mean in a situation does not make them bad.
Just because someone seems nice does not make them good.
Just because someone espouses love and peace does not make them good.
Just because it seems natural doesn't make it good.
Just because it seems artificial doesn't make it bad.
Just because it's deceptive does not make it bad.
---
BUT
Here is a danger zone that I want to really highlight. Yet another fallacy that I feel people adopt . . . when they go through this list of things . . .
"There is no good or evil. Only thinking makes it so."
WRONG. I say.
It comes down to two different things that one must adopt.
*Being "good" is a hard job. But so is being evil. You can't just mesh together a bunch of elements and adopt it as one or the other. That's easy, and it's more pallateable because it's easy. It makes it easier to make a movie when the villain wears all black and commits more violence. It makes it easier to run a political campaign if you can make enough images with the candidate holding cute cats and the opponent driving giant bulldozers.
"eternal war" (I think a spotlight episode?) was a good example of how it's a bit of "hard vs harder." Even if and when we win the war for earth, we understand that the enemy is at the edge, and we'll probably be chasing them at the edge. There isn't a forseeable "end," currently.
But what would you rather fight? The order of commercial enslavement at bay on the edge of galaxies? Or the order of commercial enslavement sitting outside your house empowering the badges of your so-called state troopers?
We are faced with some hard questions. And here's what sucks even more. We don't get to sit down and scratch our heads the whole day asking if we've figured it out. We do need to allot some time to that. But we have action to take as well.
Anyways, to people who read all of this thank-you. I hope it helped. And to people who didn't find time to read this all, thank-you. You probably also have more important things to do anyway.