Several weeks ago there was a discussion at Making Light on the nature of evil, and what constitutes evil. Does taking an evil action make you evil? How many evil acts do you have to commit before you are irredeemable?

Thinking about it has brought to mind several other questions: Can you be evil without committing evil actions, or is evil necessarily defined by actions? How common is evil? Is it something that is found everywhere or is it a rare thing, to be found only in the most unusual circumstances?

It seems to me that some of the stories that fascinate me the most don’t have a set line between good and evil.

Thieves’ World contains lots of characters who commit lots of actions that could easily be construed as evil, except that when viewed in a different way, you can often understand why the character acted as they did. The fact that so many of the stories were written from multiple viewpoints really emphasizes this; that is how things tend to be. Different people see things in different ways, and the same incident is going to be told different ways by different people. This makes motive all the more foggy.

Deep Space Nine is full of characters who walk the line between good and evil. Garak is definitely not a good person, yet he’s one of my favorite characters. He takes many actions that could easily be considered evil, yet I find it hard to consider him so, and in fact frequently find him admirable, if for no other reason that he always acts upon his convictions, whatever they may be. Gul Ducat is easily despisable, but I find it hard to say he’s evil. He seemed to truly believe that he was doing the right thing, even if he was going about it the wrong way. And after that, he went insane, and I find it hard to claim that someone who is insane is truly evil. Even the “good” characters commit evil acts. There is no clear line between what is good and what is evil. And it fascinates me.

I just finished rereading Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos series, and there is yet another character who should be evil, yet isn’t really. He’s an assassin. He kills people for money, and is part of a giant criminal organization. But he clearly isn’t unredeemable. I can’t say that he is evil either.

Yeah, those are all fictional examples, but it’s easier than using real people. And I think that it pans out a similar way in the real world.

I think that this is how I have changed most in recent years. When I was younger I saw things clearly as good and evil, right and wrong. But the more people I know, the more life I experience, the harder I find it to categorize people as such. There is no longer any black and white. Sometimes good people have to do bad things, and doing bad things doesn’t necessarily make one a bad person.

I no longer know where to draw that line.

Everyone has motives, and it’s very easy to allow those motives to blind us to the morality of the actions we take, or even to forget about the morality of our actions as we become caught up in the moment. That doesn’t make us bad people, and it doesn’t make us evil.

To put it another way, how many evil actions does one have to take to become evil? How many good actions must they take to redeem themselves? Can just a single action make us unredeemably evil?

I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, and I’m learning that I’m unlikely to find the answer, as the deeper I delve, the more questions I find.