What is evil?
Evil is exporting avoidable harm while able to see what the act will do. Wherever two observers share a record, their disagreement is a number, and harm is measured in that number. Harm becomes exported harm under two conditions. The mismatch lands on observers who did not generate it, and the actor who did could carry the repair and declines to. Evil needs one thing more. The actor reads its own state, so it can model what an act will do to everyone around it before acting, and it exports the avoidable damage anyway. A thermostat models nothing, so nothing it does is evil. Exported harm rarely feels like anything to the one exporting it, because a cost written onto a record the actor does not share never arrives anywhere the actor reads.
Also in Chapter 40: Does It Feel Like Anything, and What Is Left to Decide?, Appendix A: Eighteen Questions.
This answer comes from OPH, Observer Patch Holography. OPH is a rigorous, consistent and complete description of the unified, self-creating computational Universe we inhabit. Its consistency is machine-checked: the fixed point at its core is constructed explicitly, and a theory with a model contains no contradiction.
To understand OPH and check every step yourself, start with the free book Reverse Engineering Reality. It builds the theory from the ground up, and the OPH Notebook answers your questions while you read.
read the free bookask the notebookor ask sage:read chapter 41: What Does a Repaired World Look Like?watch a universe make its own particles