Via Daily Nous, I came across this funny comic on "Effective Villainy", which in turn got me thinking about what we could learn from the apparent symmetry between good and evil. After all, it might be clearer what evil calls for, in which case we could -- if we accept symmetry -- then draw interesting conclusions about what's right and good.
Consider side-constraints, as in this evil transplant scenario: a car crash victim is about to bleed out, but then their healthy organs would save five transplant patients -- unless Lucifer sweeps in and "heroically" stems the bleeding, saving the car crash victim (and ensuring the other five die). What should_[subscript evil] Lucifer do? It seems clear that a side-constraint against saving lives would make no sense, from the perspective of evil: the rational pursuit of evil would lead Lucifer to do whatever ultimately proves most harmful, regardless of whether he had to get his hands "dirty" helping (ick!) various individuals along the way. Better_[sub evil] to save one than to allow five to be saved.
Or consider aggregation. Opponents of aggregation may ground their view in either axiological intuitions (e.g. in Scanlon's transmitter room case, it just seems worse for the one person to suffer from electrocution than for the billions to miss out on seeing the football game live), or in hand-waving claims that aggregation somehow fails to respect the "separateness of persons". Parfit showed the former to be incoherent, and I've argued that the latter is baseless, but suppose you're not yet convinced. Let's learn from Lucifer!
In the transmitter room case, it's natural to assume that Lucifer would want the guy to be electrocuted, which I think reveals our intuition that this is (seemingly! but we need not endorse this seeming upon reflection) the worse outcome -- not actually a case in which what's right diverges from what's consequentially best. So that seems like a problem for the anti-consequentialist's use of this thought experiment.
In other cases, where it's clearer that the many's interests really do (factually) outweigh the one's, it would seem weird for Lucifer to prioritize harming the one a lot over harming the many by more in aggregate (except insofar as this was motivated on prioritarian grounds, perhaps). It would seem especially bizarre for Lucifer to embrace a strict "numbers don't count" view, and be indifferent between drowning one or drowning five in a lifeboat case. ("Killing more people isn't worse for anyone than killing one is for the one, so in what sense is it really worse at all? Why should I bother to kill more?" - Evil Taurek. Given how poorly Evil Taurek seems to understand evil-doing, why would you consider his light-side self any less confused?)
Overall, then, it seems clear that Satan would be a consequentialist. So, shouldn't you follow suit? (Just, you know, aiming at the opposite ends...)
Or should we instead reject the apparent symmetry, and think that genuine morality should look rather different from the simple opposite of pure immorality? Perhaps one could think that morality is responsive to certain considerations -- respect for persons, or whatnot -- that evil is simply indifferent to (rather than being positively opposed to)? It'd be interesting to hear the idea spelled out in greater depth.
For those who are on board with the symmetry, what other lessons might be drawn? (I like Michael Slote's suggestion, from his 1985 Common-Sense Morality and Consequentialism, p.77, that the implausibility of the minimalist view that only the very worst option is wrong provides us with grounds to doubt maximizing accounts of the right...)
Population ethics remains tricky. Would Lucifer prefer to immiserate existing people, or bring into existence an entirely new population of even more miserable future people (who would otherwise not exist at all)? Not obvious...