My Problem with the Terms “Evil” and “Free Will”

by James Wallace Harris, 11/8/23

Yesterday my friend Mike and I were talking about evil women characters in old movies. We both immediately thought of the character Ellen Berent Harland (Gene Tierney) in the 1945 film, Leave Her to Heaven. I told Mike that I had just read a review of Detour, also from 1945, that featured one mean woman, Vera, played by Ann Savage. The reviewer said she was the evilest woman in all of film noir.

This got me Googling the phase “evil women in the movies” and finding several lists: 25 Of The Best Female Villains You’ll Love To Hate, The Greatest Female Villians, 10 Awesomely Sinister Women in Movie History, Most Memorable Female Villians. Not to surprising, most of the films listed were recent. What was surprising, was most modern female villians are from fantasy, horror, or animated films. Mike and I were thinking about ordinary realistic women in films.

Mike texted me:

I make a distinction between evil and insane. For example, Kathy Bates in Misery, Jessica Walter in Play Misty for Me, and Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction play characters that I consider insane, not evil. The Barbara Stanwyck character in Double Indemnity is not insane, just evil. The same goes for Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven.

I texted back:

Evil is a slippery word for me. In the original religious term God was the source of all good and the Devil was the source of all evil. Being evil meant you were doing the work of the devil. It connotes that the person is a puppet of the devil. Or worshipping of the devil by doing the kind of things he wanted done. Being evil meant being devilish.

By the way, in the old days being insane meant being possessed by the devil. So judging someone evil or insane was close to the same thing.

In the modern sense of how we use those words it all relates to free will. An insane person has lost control of their free will. An evil person chooses to do evil.

But we have a problem. Recent research suggests no one has any free will. 

Now, our fun conversation has turned serious, but I think valid. If we don’t have free will, how do we judge people we think are doing wrong? I just bought the book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert M. Sapolsky but haven’t read it yet. However, I have been reading reviews and watching interviews with Sapolsky. What he’s saying is based on brain research that I’ve been reading about for years. We don’t have free will. The trouble is our moral and ethical structures depend on people either being sane and deciding on their own actions, or insane and out of control. What if we have no control over our actions at all?

The nightly news is full of people I’d call evil. What if we took a different approach to the problem. What if we say killing innocent children is evil no matter if you have free will or not. Does it matter if the evil person is consider sane or insane? Or has free will or not? What we’re horrified by is bad things happening to good people.

Modern films have made evil rather cartoonish by portraying the bad guy as over the top in their evilness. The films Mike and I were talking about, Leave Her to Heaven and Detour, are mundane portrayals of evil. I think the gigantic evils we see in the news, and the unrealistic portrayals of evil in modern movies, have made us forget the everyday type of evils. We no longer expect everyone to be honest and civil, and bad behavior is often claimed to be free expression and a personal right.

I don’t like what I see on the news, or in modern movies and television shows. And the behaviors I’m seeing on the freeways and while shopping is disturbing too. Maybe we don’t have free will, but we could at least act like we do. Maybe pretending to be good is all we can hope for.

I’m reminded of a science experiment I read about back in the 1960s where they put many rats in small confined cages to simulate overpopulation. The rats became violent, tearing at each other. I think that’s what’s happening to us today. Overpopulation is causing us to go mad. But that also supports the argument that there’s no free will.

Even though neuroscience is revealing there’s no free will, I wonder if free will isn’t something we could develop? Can we overcome genetics and conditioning? Is there some way we can consciously reprogram our unconscius minds. The reason why scientists say we have no free will is because they can measure brain activity happening before we’re consciousnessly aware of our choices and actions. Is there no way to condition our unconscious minds to act in the ways we consider ethical?

It’s obvious that any adult who follows the same beliefs they were taught as a child is not acting on free will. Most people believe what they are taught early in life. But if they radically change what they believe, is that a case of free will? If someone raised a Baptist grows up and spends many years trying out different religions, and ends up choosing to become a Zen Buddhist, is that free will?

When you watch movies think about whether or not the antagonist is acting on their own, or from genetics and conditioning. Do the same when you are watching the news. Does Putin have free will? The current war in the middle East is just like all the wars of history. Maybe we don’t change because we can’t.

Still, the idea of being able to change ourselves intrigues me. Science might prove we don’t have free will, but does that mean we should stop trying to change ourselves?

I’ve been paying attention to my dreams lately, so I’m getting to know my unconscious mind. I’m also working on developing good habits and breaking bad habits. And I think there are ways to reprogram how our unconscious minds function. If we could, wouldn’t that be an act of free will?

JWH