I tried to make a point about language on another SE site and it flopped. So I realized that I was focusing on an idea of having two-valued assessment: good and bad. What if we did away with this positive - zero - negative value scale and went with an "Absolute" scale: there is zero and only upwards from there?
If we choose the scale of good --> better, then all the problems of evil, right and wrong, just go away, right?
Such a system would not describe how we intuitively perceive morality. In particular, many people consider there to exist certain acts which are amoral, which means that they are without moral goodness one way or another. Intuitively, we see these acts as being a sort of default with bad going away from it in one direction and good going away from it in another direction. Therefore, "evil" would not simply be "less good", but on the opposite side of some amoral option. Otherwise, where would we put the amoral action on that scale? If we put it at the bottom and everything above it is good, then doing an immoral action would actually be more moral than acting amorally.
Consider acts which people usually hold as being evil. They are not thought about as acts such as they are a little good. Take for instance premeditated murder. We wouldn't say "Well, that was a good thing, but it would have been better if he had just stayed home." We see it as being an action in some direction opposite of good.
Regardless, this wouldn't seem to solve any problems. We still have all the same questions about what is right and what is wrong, but now we have the added complications of lacking amoral actions (meaning that we now have to consider a value for everything) and we seem to blurry the concept of what things we should not do.
Some things to take into account:
Another issue raised by attempts to subject the concept of supererogation to some version of the general schema is that of “offence” or “suberogation”: if there are non-obligatory well-doings (supererogation), are there also – as their mirror image – non-prohibited wrong-doings (“permissive ill-doings”)? ... Some philosophers (Chisholm 1963, Richards 1971, Forrester 1975, and Driver 1992) were attracted to the logically neat symmetry of supererogation and suberogation, but a critical examination of this artificially invented category demonstrates both the difficulty in filling it with content and flaws in the general schema itself (Heyd 1982, Mellema 1991).
So with respect to the deontic operators, it seems that there is a moment of asymmetry (though see here for considerations regarding "permissive suboptimality"), in line with your ideal.
Moreover:
It would be impossible, however, to do away with all negative representations in this connection. It is a priori, and mostly innocuous, that FRA = OB~A, so to get rid of FR would require getting rid of mere ~, which seems silly, and as applied is anyway "disproven" every time someone thinks through FR sincerely. Or how should we be expected to magically forget the entire history of moral language as we know it? There are those who dislike the use of the word "evil", though, for example, so that again, we might not have a fully uni-directional moral spectrum in play, here, but we do seem to have one weighted more towards the good (which is as it should be, after all).
No. There can not be a unidirectional value system in the world. The notion of good develops because there is a notion of bad. The notion of attractive develops because there is a notion of unattractive. Similarly, love exists because there is hate. In physical terms , concept of height arises if there is a concept of depth. Concept of orderliness arises because concept of disorderliness arises. Nature is dualistic. You can not have unidirectional value system.
However there are non-dualists aspects of the world as well. For example-Life is suffering. It takes proper analysis to reach the conclusion but the life is suffering because all conditioned phenomena are impermanent.
