Sadly I have yet to see evidence that something can be smart without being evil.
An applicable use of 'evil' for an animal, would be if you believe the animal 'knows better', eg a dog that knows right or wrong (in its way) but does something it thinks it shouldn't.
Given that humans aren't obligate carnivores and further more, are capable of advanced chemistry so that even if they were obliged to eat other animals biologically they could just work around this without needing to kill anything - it seems much more compelling to judge us by such a metric than them. We decided that we liked steak so much we would deliberately raise cows just to eat them, the crow can't be anywhere near that "evil" if that's how we're characterising this outcome.
Great question does intelligence require selfishness / evil?
I’m gonna think about this a bit, but my knee jerk was to (violently) disagree with this but I don’t know why.
No.
E.g., a bunch of chimps who come upon food will probably become aggressive, whereas a bunch of bonobos will probably get frisky with each other.
They are closely related primates, and their level of intelligence is at least comparable. So it's quite unlikely that the chimps higher level of social aggression is a hard dependency of their level of intelligence.
But at the same time, I think it is an important construct because it prevents groups from descending into absolute chaos, which encourages the survival of the species.
As a construct, I see the concept of evil as the way that humans classify activities that cause psychological harm and those triggers are somewhat biologically and culturally shared.
And there seem to be people that don’t seem to “see” evil (e.g. serial killers), but once again I think it’s just they don’t share some biological trait with the rest of us (which doesn’t justify their actions either).
So despite having the opinion that evil may just be a construct, I still find it important because (1) I am selfish and don’t want to be psychologically harmed and (2) I am not selfish and am vaguely interested in the survival of the species.
You think 'selfishness' and 'evil' are equivalent?