Misappropriated "morality": Dehumanization is more often in the eye of the beholder of the "evil" label than the subject

The prevailing interaction with morality is more to use it as a weapon and rallying cry than a standard to be adhered to. It increasingly seems to mostly just be the vehicle by which the tribal imperatives are implemented.

Being a morally upstanding person requires that we sometimes do things that don’t feel good or abstain from things that would feel good. But there seems to be a striking and frequent convergence between what is regarded as moral action and actions that fully work within our emotional architecture (i.e. conform with the way we feel). That is, what is alleged to be a morally correct action or stance mostly also seems to feel good - which would imply that the emotion typically precedes the moral framing.

Moral action requires a degree of restraint. It emanates not mostly from emotions but from reason. Action motivated by emotion is in practice generally too cognitively simple to also be governed by moral reasoning - that is passion, not moral conviction.

Moral action is not supposed to be exciting but it seems that those who frame their actions as being moral in nature are mostly in an excited state when performing the action.

I wonder if it’s mostly only possible to call someone evil if you first dehumanize them - more specifically, to remove human qualities from your description of them within your modeling of the situation (I suppose this requires the disclaimer that this rests upon the assumption that evil most certainly does exist, but the label is more often than not misapplied). Because evil is effectively the absence of human qualities. It seems that you never really hear the perspective of the person that has been labeled as evil - at least it is not presented with the same rigor and depth as the supposedly ‘good’ perspective. And I think that’s intentional - as to actually explore that perspective would undermine the emotional momentum that labeling someone evil creates. In truth, we often gravitate to good vs evil narratives because it is the most emotionally intense, emotionally “logical”, and simplistic framework to apply to something we don’t like. Accusations of evil are almost never accompanied by nuance. And I think that’s deliberate: accusations of evil are specifically engineered to bridge the gap between the object of dislike and the strong emotions they make us feel. That is, the evil label is perhaps specifically and exclusively designed to destroy nuance in order to enable the emotional forces to storm the beaches.

I think labeling someone as evil requires a certain distance from them, as when you get up close those human qualities have a nasty tendency of revealing themselves - thus making it harder to perform the pre-requisite (depriving them of human qualities) of labeling them as evil.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that people generally don’t know anyone (not well, anyway) that is a member of the group they have labeled evil. They would likely claim the cause of this is that this group is evil and the effect is that they do not associate with them (because they do not want to associate with evil people). But I think they have the causality reversed: they label the opposing group evil because they don’t associate with them (I.e. they are too far to be able to observe that the opposing group does, in fact, possess human qualities).