Well, no, I don’t think so. One of the tasks of a writer is to get inside people’s heads. A writer has to be fundamentally curious about what makes people tick. To say that someone is “just evil” and leave it at that is not to do justice to the complexity of who we are as human beings.
Humans are never simply “just evil”. We are moral creatures; not in the sense that we are always morally good, but that we aspire to be good. This gives us the ability to fail and be bad, and to deceive ourselves and be hypocrites. And occasionally we manage to get things right!
We continually seek to justify our own actions to ourselves. We rarely believe our actions are actually wrong at the time, even if we would normally consider them wrong. We try to convince ourselves that we are a special case, that we have special circumstances, for long enough to go through with it. Sometimes our reasons are good and valid; sometimes they are false and self-serving.
When writing, it fails to do justice to a character’s full humanity not to ask how they saw their actions, how they justified their behaviour to themselves, whether they felt any guilt or doubt, what drove them to make the choices they made, and so on.
Asking these questions sometimes makes people uncomfortable. It can seem as if the writer is excusing a character’s behaviour. And sometimes some people do diminish individual responsibility – they blame a person’s upbringing, or the society in which they grew up, and so on.
But to make people nothing more than the product of their past and environment also robs people of their humanity. We are all shaped by our background, but we are still responsible for their choices and actions. We all try and justify our actions to ourselves, but there are both true and false justifications; right and wrong decisions. Understanding the background and thinking that shaped and informed someone’s choice does not make it any less their choice; understanding does not rob them of responsibility, whether for good or bad.
The writer’s job is to both understand people as well as possible, to portray their characters with as much sensitivity and insight as they can, and also to show the reality of our responsibility for our actions, for our choices as choices. In short – to understand, but not to excuse. And this is something that all of us, not just writers, should aspire to.
