"If I really had the evil notions that people think I have, I would have put Burton and Buyer together," Mr. Mahern said.
That is, there is a fundamental asymmetry between moral good and moral evil – a notion very foreign to any version of utilitarian or post-utilitarian consequentialist or "proportionalist" ethics.
Ms. Berman said the themes that interested her network most were the opposition between good and evil and the notion that looks can be deceptive.
That's a "don't be evil," touchy-feely notion, but it comes from a need to set up Google's future business opportunities globally.
It explores the duality in all, the good, the evil, and the notion that somehow they can be separated.
"With dualistic conceptions of good and evil and hierarchical notions of values and worth," Mr. Sanders wrote in an essay for the Web site Religion Dispatches, "it becomes easy to know who it is O.K. to hate or bully, or, seemingly more benignly, to ignore.
Upon Kapuscinski's death, however, the young Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina attacked "the racist writer Kapuscinski" as being the author of some of his "all-time classic lines about Africa," such as "In Africa, the notion of abstract evil — evil in and of itself — does not exist".
Necessary evil is a preposterous notion.
The notion that evil can and should be redeemed, not punished, smacks of moral progress; but kids, who like their villains to be vanquished, may have other ideas.
Failing to expand on the intriguing notion that evil can find physical form online, "Smiley," like its sutured monster, is sadly more to be pitied than feared.
