Come to the Dark Side, Luke

We've all read tales of good and evil. The evildoer commits atrocities and the humble hero stops them. Sauron attempts to conquer Middle Earth and is ultimately destroyed by a mere hobbit. Voldemort attempts to purify and control the magical community and is ultimately destroyed by some orphaned kid. Darth Vader attempts to bring the galaxy under the control of the Empire and is destroyed by his own son. It would almost appear that good and evil are defined by the other. Can one's actions be considered evil if a "good" person doesn't try to stop you? Can one's actions be considered good if there is no evil to overcome?

Those questions are, of course, ridiculous. Morality is all on a gray-scale. Pure evil, like that of Sauron, exists only in books. Even some of history's most infamous individuals believed they were doing the right thing: Hitler thought he was saving Germany and John Wilkes Booth thought he was saving the South. Trying to figure out who's good and who's evil all depends on who's asking.

And it's more than that. Human beings are complex; to try to sort every person and every action into two neat little boxes is impossible. Only in works of fiction can you find good and evil so clear-cut. And even then it can be difficult. Wasn't Darth Vader, a supposedly evil person, the one to destroy the Emperor, whose death brought the end of the Empire as most knew it? Saying that there is absolute good and absolute evil would imply that a person is one or the other and that people can't change. We all know that people can and do change. Bad people do good things, good people do bad things. There's so much gray.