How James Woods Helped Me Collect My Thoughts on Morality.

[David Sklansky]

Before he became my buddy, I read an interview of him where he was aked how he prepared himself for a villian's role. His reply was that he always tried to inject some righteousness into that villian no matter how dastardly he appeared. Because he realized that except possibly for the truly insane, everybody basically thinks they are a generally good person. Even career criminals, mobsters and scoundrels justify to themselves that there is a good reason for what they do. Almost no one simply says to themselves "I am bad period. So what? They make excuses in their mind which amount to a desire to conform to some sort of "moral" code, twisted as it may be. And he felt it was important to portray that aspect of their psyche.

Upon reading that I realized James was right. At least as far as the several dozen bad people I knew. And clearly he is right about suicide bombers. Else why would they give up their lives? Surely not just for the 72 virgins. They must have felt that what they were doing was morally right. And that includes the 911 hijackers. (I often think we would have a better chance in the mid east if we would acknowledge this fact rather than simply call them evil criminals. But that is for another thread.) Same goes for most, if not all, Nazis. They almost certainly convinced themselves they were not evil. Likewise slaveowners.

I think everyone agrees that a truly crazy person is not evil any more than an animal is. As for those not crazy, how can you call them evil (rather than stupid or deluded) if they take pains to explain to thmselves or others why what they are doing is "right". Now there may be a few sociopathic types that don't fit into this category but they are either non existent or rare enough to ignore. The fact is that most of those we call evil, upon closer examination really aren't. Probably including Hitler. Something that James Woods helped me see.