"Situational truth is no truth at all."
It's repugnant to me to entertain the notion that a pedophile is not evil. Are we to now entertain "the abuse excuse" and apply it's principles to those who are "too sick or addicted?" I dare not try! The person who is addicted to alcohol, yet continues to drive and kill people due to his or her drunkeness, to me, is evil. It matters not the cause (for imo the cause of evil is the lack of sufficient good.)
Part of the problem as I see it is the new age belief system that tends to rewrite the definitions of age-old understandings such as morality (good) and evil. To me, a rose by any other name....
Is the castration of girls in a third world country acceptable because it is the societal norm, or is it evil because it's unnecessary and abusive? Are those who perform such type atrocities evil, or good societal members? Who is to say what is evil and what is good? Without a norm, people choose their own definitions. Without a foundation of what is good, there is no limit to the amount of evil a person--or society--can tout as normal.
Quote:
Newman has admirably described from the psychological point of view this weakness in our grasp of the moral law:"The sense of right and wrong . . . is so delicate, so fitful, so easily puzzled, obscured, perverted, so subtle in its argumentative methods, so impressionable by education, so biassed by pride and passion, so unsteady in its course, that in the struggle for existence amid the various exercises and triumphs of the human intellect, the sense is at once the highest of all teachers yet the least luminous" (Newman, "Letter to the Duke of Norfolk", in section on conscience).
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But alas, I daresay upon observation that the reasoning behind this thread is not for information, as most are, but to once again stir the minds and upset the psyches of members with a category already determinedly solved by the OP. 
Yet, I could be wrong. Caveat emptor?