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What’s extra comical about this claim is that if nihilism were true, as you claim, then a fortiori the death penalty would be completely permissible.
They made no such claim. They were just noting that your argument uses the word "evil" as if it were a tangible, quantifiable thing, and it absolutely isn't. This doesn't mean that they embrace moral relativism or reject the concept of morality outright, but rather that they recognize you use of "evil" as a rhetorical device in bad faith.
The idea that being against the death penalty implies endorsement of the crimes that land people on death row ("evil" as you call it) is inherently fallacious. One can condemn violent crime without supporting violence as a punishment for crime. If anything, it is consistent with a philosophy of nonviolence.
The only person using rhetoric here is you. There are morally depraved people out there whom we colloquially refer to as “evil.” I don’t know why you insist on having a semantic argument. If “[moral depravity] does not exist,” as my interlocutor claims, then nihilism would indeed be true.
I would also like to point out that the ethical arguments against the death penalty in the scholarly literature are very weak and it remains an open question whether the death penalty is advisable on practical grounds. Morally it’s unlikely that any good argument exists to make it impermissible to kill “evil” people. You can check out the latest edition of any textbook on ethics, such as Living Ethics by Schaffer Landau, which syllogizes a variety of arguments on this topic.
The issue here is that you use the arbitrary "evil" label to strip humanity from people who commit wrongs. You've decided that these people deserve the most extreme forms of punishment imaginable, and then pretend that anyone challenging you on that is somehow defending the actions of the people you are asking be killed.
This then leads to the absurd situation where someone says "violence is unacceptable under all circumstances" and you accuse them of abetting "evil" because you demand that everyone want to kill the same people you do.
You honestly don't see the issue here? I mean, you already have to be jumping through some serious mentality hoops to arrive at the conclusion "not killing people is evil", but c'mon now...
Let me again recommended this textbook on Ethics: https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/living-ethics-9780197608876
The death penalty is chapter 20.
Also,