It's not theological. It is moral. Atheists have a moral code. So does a society.

> Atheists have a moral code.

[Most?] atheists have moral codes. Yours is not necessarily mine. Sorry to be pedantic, but implications of atheist unity really bug me.

Evil is a personal concept, nobody thinks they themselves are evil outside of a few extremely rare exceptions that mostly involve severe mental illness. Good and evil would appear meaningless and arbitrary to a alien, a strange custom invented by a primitive people.

Why would one ever default to believing aliens are likely to be highly enlightened? It's as likely that they're just lucky with resources, location, timing. They might be savages that primarily jump forward in technology by constantly fighting wars amongst themselves.

The aliens observing our supposed primitiveness are just the ones that came out on top in their latest civil war and went out exploring using the technology that the 14,000 years of war cultivated.

Maybe they're the most obnoxious, spoiled, entitled assholes you could ever imagine. Luck rolled their way ten thousand times in a row and they act like it.

There's absolutely no good reason to default to believing aliens are likely to be far more enlightened than we are.

>> There's absolutely no good reason to default to believing aliens are likely to be far more enlightened than we are.

There's no good reason to imagine some civilisation has figured out how to cross the vast interstellar distances and then pop in to see us during their lifetime.

Since we are already in the realm of pure fantasy, it doesn't alter the argument's validity to also assume these magical creatures are enlightened.

I don't assume they are enlightened, I assume they are just as random as us. They will eat children for dinner and speak entirely in curse words, and our customs will seem just as insane to them.

If you go back a couple hundred years and talk to the people then I imagine you could achieve a similar effect. They were just as certain they were correct as we are, and they are just as wrong.

> Whether an act is "evil" is a theological question

Whether challenging an act is within the reasonable scope of a contractual obligation to report suspected evil is, however, not a theological question, and does not involve deciding the question of whether the act is, in fact, evil, whether or not that is a theological question (it is not, necessarily, it is a moral question.)

The question is not if Google committed evil. The question is if the Google fired employees for telling Google it was comitting evil. This does not require any definition of evil nor any judgement on Google doing evil.

You don't need theology to define evil, dictionary.com defines it as "morally wrong or bad".