Asklemmy

Well, to quote a classic film:

"Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb."

Your question is loaded with too many assumptions. You assume international laws as they stand are good as they stand, you assume torture works to obtain information, but more than that you assume these forces exist in a vacuum. By your logic and with your assumptions obviously evil is more powerful but you've papered over so much that the answer to your question is meaningless.

There is also the materialist part of your problem which is it assumes both sides have access to the same resources (and that they work the way you think they do). How many more Good people are there than Evil? Do the Evil people have the knowledge and skills to produce the weapons to facilitate the tactics you lay out or would they rely on Good people to produce them? If they do then what happens if the Good people object to making the weapons that facilitate their winning tactics? How can the Evil people conscript the Good people into performing their duty without those weapons?

Finally it assumes states act in unified ways under central control, and that everyone in those states are state actors and act under command of the state. There is no country in the history of the world where that has ever been true, not only does it go against the concept of free will (which your name suggests you don't believe in) it also assumes that either states are conscious entities of themselves or there are conscious people controlling these states and every single person in them or acting on their behalf.

There's a reason people evolved altruistic reactions and tendencies, and that's because on some level, altruism and trust in a community is good. How could anyone trust anyone else in a society where backstabbing is essentially the norm? Building giant projects like power plants could not exist without humongous inefficiencies if everyone were to constantly be trying to insure themselves from everyone else's manipulation and making sure that they have a slice of the power pie and are not beholden to anyone else. If a society of Good people are all able to trust each other beyond any doubt (because Good people are inherently trustable), they can actually do insanely long-term plans knowing that those following them will continue to meet their obligations. Resources will be split more evenly ensuring maximisation and therefore a larger force.

Your example is also incredibly simplistic because nobody wins in a nuclear scenario, and that's why Good would be opposed to it. It doesn't mean they're against other means of stopping the issue that don't contravene international laws (which, by the way, would be 100% made by Good people because Evil people would have no reason to be a party to any of these treaties).

If nuclear war happens, everyone loses.

With conventional war, it's a wash, but I'd give it to Good, with one side having harsher tactics (but also a chance of internal conflicts and opportunistic coups) while the other side has more resources but may only fight defensive wars.

With no war, Good wins - seems like a win for Good to me overall. The only problem is in real life it's much harder to separate the Good from the Evil, and most people (myself included, probably) are somewhere in between.

Simplistically, evil wins in short term. Good wins long term. Evil lacks empathy and is selfish, it will always destroy itself. Good is selfless and empathetic. And from a utilitarian perspective, is the right choice long term. Unless evil destroys good before destroying itself.

Edit: I’m not an expert on this.

Another answer to your question is that it's fundamentally misguided due to your assumption that good and evil are absolute concepts and that there can't exist separate and consistent moral worldviews. Consider the historical crusaders joining a brotherhood of Christ to save their holy land from the infidels and secure safe pilgrimages for millions of their fellow Christians, and then consider a Muslim warrior defending his homeland and family in the name of Allah from crazed zealots of an imperfect prophet. Who is good there? If you asked them, they'd both say they're the good one and the other is the evil one. They'd both say the reason they KNOW they're the good one is ultimately due to insight into the moral fabric of the universe granted to them by God (the same god, funnily enough). Ultimately, it's impossible to say absolutely which one is right without appealing to something like divine revelation.

Another assumption I think you should reconsider is your implied stance that good people are necessarily absolutists in their principles. You say the good people wouldn't use nuclear bombs, but why? Nuclear bombs have ushered humanity into the greatest and longest period of peace in human history. You say the good people would never use torture, but why? I agree with other commenters that for practical purposes torture is nearly always useless and inhumane, but suppose a hypothetical hemophobic (and Evil!) nuclear terrorist that you'd just need to barely cut (light torture!) and then he'd tell you the secrets to his dastardly plan to bomb an orphanage. Are you sure that a good person would be obligated to stand by as the orphans explode instead of giving that guy a pinprick? Suppose the "good person" sticks to their principles and lets the orphans dies, what should they do to the terrorist? This guy's really evil, he spits on puppies and doesn't even feel bad about it. You also know with 100% certainty that he'll never reform, Doctor Strange told you so. If so, wouldn't it be more moral to just kill him? Why waste resources on his useless imprisonment when it could be spent on thousands of mosquito nets saving thousands of nonevil lives from malaria? Also, why is he evil? Suppose it's even 1% likely that evilness spreads through genes, if the good guy knew that and let him have kids wouldn't it be partially the good guy's fault if his nuclear terrorist baby bombs another orphanage? Perhaps you have satisfying answers to all these questions, but if you don't you just justified the torture, killing, and eugenics-ing of "evil" people.

Ultimately, the impression I want to leave is that ethics are hard and complicated and most certainly more nuanced than a good and evil divide. There exist counter arguments to some of the things I said in this comment, but I'm guessing exploration of those counter arguments would leave you with a more nuanced view of good and evil regardless.

In real life, there is no such thing as good or evil. In D&D or books, it's part of your own world building

Not more powerful, just more willing to do whatever to get what they want.

If good people always lose then why do we still have good people? Why do good acts still occur?

Evil tends to be self defeating. Look at all of the infighting among Nazis, and the number of assassination attempts from within Hitlers own party.

The point of evil is it defeats itself. Suppose you're evil and you want to scare your enemies into not killing your messengers you send. You might spread around the idea that "the gods punish those who kill the messengers". Then suppose, again, you're evil, but this time you want to express that by being brutal to your enemies. When they reach out to you, you might then kick the messengers down a well to show your ego. Congratulations, you now have scared your citizens into thinking you're all cursed.

In other words, evil is the name for something that runs on double standards. And yes, my example is inspired by Sparta. Would you like to know what happened next? Sparta became so afraid of the curse of the gods that they sent messengers to the Persians and asked the messengers to beg to be killed for retribution... only for the Persians to be better than their enemies and treat the messengers well. People forget Spartans and ancient Greeks in general were hypocrites.

In your black and white terms, yes "evil" beats "good".

Lets say there are 2 factions at war. One Evil and One Good.

That's a ludicrously strong assumption. Even the weaker assumption that good and evil are even well defined is still too strong for practical purposes.

There is simply no such thing as "good" or "evil" which can be canonically defined without reference to some expected value assigned to the human experience at a bare minimum. Any reasonable definitions of "good" and "evil" require at least one nontrivial, nonphysical, subjective value judgement to be fixed as part of the axioms of the ethics that define them.

Evil people can just ignore international laws and commit war crimes, Good people will have to abide by laws.

In my view, good people ignore international laws all the time, such as migrants crossing into countries illegally. Evil people often enforce international law...such as those who enforce laws banning migrants from crossing international borders. Notice that I've made the value judgement that borders are stupid [1]; there's no physical reason to indicate that migrants crossing borders have any moral relevance.

Country B: Half Good Half Evil

This requires the even stronger assumption that good and evil act like numbers, e.g. things you can add and get a predictable result, or take half of. Now I'm an engineer and math... enjoyer... so I get how convenient it would be to work with numbers. However, good and evil cannot be measured, and we have not found a mathematical model that adequately or unambiguously models the goodness or evilness of an act or person as a number or more generally a field. The law of unintended consequences suggests that approximating ethical decisions as operating on a number or number-like object doesn't yield reliable results in general.

The rest of your arguments rely on further stronger assumptions about how people "would" act. People are complicated, unpredictable, time-varying, and inconsistent. It is difficult to predict what people will do, and for this reason you need to supply additional facts to establish a cause for why people will follow your assumption. For your points to be valid, there needs to be either some historical evidence or at least a heuristic justification under much weaker assumptions when evidence is unavailable.

Said differently: your argument is fine (I think), but your premises aren't true in general, so your conclusions based on them cannot be true in general.

[1] Actually, "borders are stupid" is an unnecessarily strong assumption, because I could start with much weaker assumptions, such as "human beings are more important than the laws that govern them" and then deduce that borders are stupid from history and a minimal set of axioms. But this comment is getting long enough, and I honestly find ethics to be kinda dry.

MAD protects everyone from nukes.

Also, no country is 100% good or evil

Depends what you mean by evil.

Every creature on this earth rends other creatures asunder to survive. There is one rule in the natural world: you must kill or you will die.

Many game theoretical scenarios involve a race to the bottom like scenario. We have states because if we don't, we will, in the form of being conquered by a state. We have nuclear weapons, militaries, intelligence agencies, all for the same reason. If we don't someone else will.

So you can draw the conclusion there that evil is more powerful, that life is evil, that god is evil, but I think its more interesting than that: there are states of local stability across time (rather than a runaway effect of the more powerful force) that have evil as an element, systems are only as evil as they need to be, and ones that are more or less than that fail to ones closer to that stability level. Think of this: what's less evil, a dead world where there's no such thing as evil because it's a dead rock, or a thriving world with copious amounts of evil?

Good triumphs not due to actions but because we want it to.

'Is the Dark Side stronger?' 'No, no, no. Quicker, easier, more seductive.'

It’s easier to gain power by evil means but it’s harder to hold on to it. Moral and good societies will rise together and cooperate to overcome challenges. Evil will constantly be stabbing each other in the back.

This is kind of simplistic view but it’s pretty much a trope as old as time and is kind of like George Lucas’ vision of the “evil” Sith and the “good” Jedi.

If you are too attached to abstract ideas of "Good," to the point of standing on principle even if it means defeat, then you may get defeated and replaced by someone worse, and things may be much worse for everyone if you did whatever was necessary to win.

However, if you are too attached to the evil approach, then you may become too caught up in self-indulgent antihero fantasies and lose sight of what actually works. For example, no actionable information was acquired through the use of torture during the War on Terror. Movies and TV shows almost always depict it working because that self-indulgent antihero fantasy sells, but that doesn't mean it's true. Violating international law could also (depending on the rest of the factions in this hypothetical) cause diplomatic repercussions such as sanctions or even another faction joining the war on the other side. Evil doesn't always get away unpunished.

Every faction, (as well as every person), has a variety of different approaches that they could apply, and what determines which of these approaches work and don't work is the system in which they exist and their position in it. "It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most adaptable to change."

Good and evil are like light and darkness. Evil pervades and fills all the space. But one candle can drive out evil.

Wars tend to involve civilians getting hurt, because yeah, it’s cheaper and easier to disregard international law.

I wouldn’t generalize that to evil always winning vs good, though. Human life is complicated, and mean, but progress gets made anyway. There’s a reason most people dislike war.

In your example though, I would argue that what that actually illustrates is that the establishment, maintenance and expansion of institutionalized hierarchical authority, and particularly through military means, is fundamentally evil.

It's not that evil has an advantage broadly, but that evil essentially axiomatically has an advantage when pursuing fundamentally evil ends.

Or in simpler terms, the disadvantage good people would have in war is not an argument against good, but an argument against war.

Counterpoint: Goku always wins and he’s the good guy

You need to define an ethical framework first. Different strengths and weaknesses. Different good and evil.