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That just makes me think of Hippias Minor, in which Plato's Socrates proposes that the man who does evil deliberately is better than the man who does it accidentally, in that he is more capable.
Well, it's not the sort of character attestation I would want to make about myself, at least.
I think the opposite is true. The man who does evil deliberately intends evil -- wanton suffering, pain, misery -- and will continue to do it because evil is the goal. The man who does evil accidentally has a non-evil goal and may be persuaded to pursue that goal through a different, non-evil path. Believing that a person is better because they are more capable of pursuing evil successfully is itself an evil notion and Socrates should drink some hemlock for even thinking it.
I'm highly skeptical of this notion. In practice, my experience is that the man who does evil accidentally in service of a non-evil goal, will inevitably double down on that evil as not actually evil and then call out even considering following some alternative non-evil path as the ultimate evil. On the other hand, the man who does evil in service of an evil goal can often be coerced into stopping his evil actions, by forcibly preventing his evil actions from accomplishing his evil goals. This is a different point than the one about the virtue of competence, but I think it's true nonetheless, that in terms of effect to the rest of society, someone doing evil deliberately is better than someone doing so accidentally.
On top of that, I'd say they're more likely to decide they've had their fill, or that some things are too fucked up even for them.
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That's an interesting idea, could you give some examples of what you mean?
I think the reaction to Trump since his initial campaign in 2015 all the way to now is a good example. Let's just take for granted that preventing Trump from becoming POTUS is a non-evil goal - hardly a consensus opinion, but certainly one believed in the hearts of hearts of the people being discussed right now, who would likely say it's not just not-evil, it's anti-evil. In an effort to accomplish this non-evil goal, many people did many evil things, including lying about Trump, ostracizing Trump supporters, obfuscating Biden's mental incompetence, and physically assaulting people who appear as Trump supporters, among others. Some people tried to point out that these evil things were evil, and that a non-evil path to accomplish this non-evil goal was preferable (I personally also believed that a non-evil path was more viable and more likely to be successful, but that's beside the point), but those people were cast aside as evil Trump supporters who were either trying to obfuscate their Trump support or were ignorantly supporting Trump without even recognizing it. As a result, people - who in general don't want to be seen as pushing back against an anti-evil movement - were cowed into not speaking out against these evil things, and thus these evil things kept happening (and, again, beside the point, the electorate's trust of journalists has fallen heavily, and Trump looks like the current most likely person to become POTUS in 2025).
There's actually no shortage of examples in CW issues. The whole trans/gender issue in the past 5 or so years is another good one: to the supporters of "trans women are women," the goal is a very much not-evil - again, actually anti-evil - one of helping otherwise ostracized and denigrated people feel more belonging in society, and they believe in accomplishing this by opening up women's sports, prisons, and shelters to any male who genuinely believes that they are a woman, enacting legal punishments for people who choose to use pronouns that reflect their own perception of someone's gender instead of the person's claimed internally experienced one, and encouraging adolescents to hormonally/surgically/socially transitioning in secret from their family and friends if they judge them to be "eggs" (i.e. people, usually young, who are considered to be not yet aware that they are trans). Many people pointed out and continue to point out that these are all evil acts in service of an ostensibly non-evil goal, and those people have tended to be dismissed as evil transphobes who are motivated by their evil hatred of trans people to evilly oppress them. As a result, people - who in general don't want to be seen as pushing back against an anti-evil movement - were cowed into not speaking out against these evil things, and thus these evil things kept happening.
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He didn't say that evil is the goal, merely that he did it deliberately. As in, the kind of person who knowingly dumps poison in the river if it's not punished, as opposed to the person who is just running their plant so incompetently that they can't stop polluting everything even if they don't want to. As you may guess, I'd prefer the former, since he can be persuaded to change his way, while the latter is incapable of doing so.
Imo history has vindicated him; The advent of meritocracy, which often only cared about morality insofar as the person can be relied upon not to work against the interests of the employer, caused a major speed-up of progress. Greed used to be seen as a vice that needs to be reigned in, but through capitalism we managed to channel it into productivity instead.
I don't necessarily think we should entirely ignore morality, but combining competence with good incentives leads more reliably to good results.
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You're discounting the virtue of competence. Which is one of the only objective components most ethical systems recognize. It's difficult to say which path is the righteous one. But it's easy to say that whatever path we may pick, we ought to reach the end of it swiftly so we can move on.
As Land said by way of Lindsay, by way of Ostwald by way of Kant: "The only moral action is the minimization of entropy".
Better not waste all our time and ressources and get to the heart of things instead of wallowing in the miserable timidity of senility. The categorical imperative requires it.
That's fine about personal virtue. But if we're talking about candidates, I prefer the candidate who incompetently pursues the evil goal over the candidate who competently pursues it.
Understandable, but of course, Socrates, Confucius and other classical philosophers of virtue and natural law consider public virtue an extension of personal virtue.
Not to wallow in contrarianism but I think there is also a legit argument for wishing your enemies to be somewhat competent in general in that competence is predictable. Idiots can throw a wrench into the best of plans and ruin not just what they seek to ruin.
In the particular circumstance of democracy where you know power will be shared with your enemies at some point in the near future, you should want for this minimum out of mere pragmatism. It is a risk to all of us that the nominal head of the most powerful army in the world is mentally incapable.
And I understand none of this applies if you wish to see the end of the United States as we know it. In some sense the actual accelerationist argument is that it is good Biden is so obviously incapable, because it shows everyone how power actually works in the American regime and lets all decide what to do about it instead of continuing to play act at republicanism.
But they can also fail to ruin what they seek to ruin. I believe this dominates.
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